Lucid Dreaming: Aesthetic Dis(interest)

by Beth E. Wilson, September 29, 2008

Should art attempt to engage politics? Ever?

This sort of question is only possible in a world in which the very idea of beauty has been shorn of all connection to the world, to the complex of human interaction and the web of knowledge and language that we live in every day. How could such a radical separation be possible?

The wrenching of beauty away from everything else is actually a fundamental tenet of much thought since the Enlightenment. Philosopher Immanuel Kant notably rendered the essential components of the judgment of beauty as disinterested, universal, and necessary—the beautiful manifests as “purposiveness without purpose,” that is, as something that seems important, as though it has to be in the way that it is, but without direct, utilitarian function.

Kant wasn’t just being arbitrary when he organized his aesthetics in this way—like any great philosopher, his thought is a kind of tuning fork that vibrates sympathetically with the larger social and cultural forces of its context, which for him was Europe on the brink of the Industrial Revolution, and the birth of modernity as we still very much experience it today (even if with a postmodern twist here and there). Out of this cauldron of ideas emerged the notion of “high art,” the separation of such high art from lowly manifestations such as craft (which is, after all, utilitarian), and the reification of the artist as the genius-demiurge, the embodiment of creativity itself.

Such division of cultural labor has had more than just a theoretical impact on all of us. With the rise of industrial society, the important work of asking why, of radically rethinking the frameworks for thinking and living, for working and engaging with one another, has been pushed aside, allowed the bohemian ghetto here and there, but never admittance to the mainstream. Artists are weird, you know? It’s so much easier just to shut up and do your job, get that paycheck.

But a creative double-standard has evolved over time. Public relations emerged as a new art form in the 20th century, alongside its older sibling, advertising. There is creative thought involved in both of these undertakings, but always of an indelibly utilitarian nature—“buy this,” “believe that,” they always say, and always in support of the specific needs of wealth (corporations) and power (the government).