The wrong turn of aesthetics

Abstract

In its original use, the word art refers not to artworks but to the skill and know-how by means of which artworks are made. The phrase ‘work of art’ testifies to the primacy of this use; a work of art is a thing that has been made by art, an ‘artefact’. In contemporary usage, however, the sense of art as know-how has been thrown into the background; most of the time, in most contexts, we hear ‘art’ as referring to art’s products. This shift makes the question ‘what is art?’ (asked as one looks at a painting, or Duchamp’s urinal) an endlessly tantalizing riddle rooted in mystery. The decisive turn towards this modern mystification of art was taken by the Romantic theory of genius, according to which arthood is infused into the art product by the breath of the creator’s inspiration. Romantic thought, however, never entirely forgot about art in the traditional sense; thus Kant, who gave the Romantic theory its most influential form, tortuously reconciled the old value of art as maker’s knowledge, derived from previous models of art making, with the ascendant value of genius. But the last vestiges of regard for art as techne were erased in the modern notion, purportedly inspired by Duchamp, that art is basically conceptual – a matter of bestowing the name of art on an object, any object whatever, and framing it as such.