Kant and the Autonomy of Art
About: This article is published in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.The article was published on 1989-01-01. It has received 26 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Autonomy.
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11 May 2007
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a taxonomy of these suggested impacts, both positive and negative, with a view to establishing an appropriate conceptual basis for the discussion and investigation of what the social impact of the arts might mean.
Abstract: This paper focuses on contemporary debates around the social impacts of the arts and the problem of their measurement and evaluation. It attempts to put forward a new framework for the understanding of the so-called 'transformative powers' of the arts, by suggesting that a historical-critical approach is needed to tackle this research topic. The paper therefore presents a detailed critical analysis of the numerous claims that have been made in the West over time, from Classical Greece (V century BC) to the present day, for the ways in which the arts can affect individuals and transform society. It offers a taxonomy of these suggested impacts, both positive and negative, with a view to establishing an appropriate conceptual basis for the discussion and investigation of what the social impact of the arts might mean. At the same time, the paper attempts to reconnect contemporary policy debates with a complex intellectual history, from which these debates have become detached. It is suggested that the impacts of the arts cannot be properly understood, measured or evaluated without reference to this history.
38 citations
Dissertation•
01 Jun 2012
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the current debates about political art or aesthetic politics do not take the politics of art into account, and propose a sustainable and uncompromised art practice.
Abstract: The current debates about political art or aesthetic politics do not take the politics of art into account. How can artists address social politics when the politics of art remain opaque? Artists situated critically within the museum self-consciously acknowledge the institutional frame and their own complicity with it. Artists’ compromised role within the institution of art obscures their radically opposed values. Institutions are conservative hierarchies that aim to augment and consolidate their authority. How can works of art be liberating when the institutional conditions within which they are exhibited are exclusive, compromised and exploitive? Despite their purported neutrality, art institutions instrumentalise art politically and ideologically. Institutional mediation defines the work of art in the terms of its own ideology, controlling the legitimate discourse on value and meaning in art. In a society where everything is instrumentalised and heteronomously defined, autonomous art performs a social critique. Yet how is it possible to make autonomous works of art when they are instantly recuperated by commercial and ideological interests? At a certain point, my own art practice could no longer sustain these contradictions. This thesis researches the possibilities for a sustainable and uncompromised art practice. If art is the critical alternative to society then it must function critically and alternatively. Artistic ambition is not just a matter of aesthetic objectives or professional anxiety; it is particularly a matter of the values that artists affirm through their practice. Art can define its own terms of production and the burden of responsibility falls on artists. The Exploding Cinema Collective has survived independently for twenty years, testifying to this principle. Autonomy is a valuable tool in the critique of heteronomy, but artists must assert it. The concept of the autonomy of art must be replaced with the concept of the autonomy of the artist.
27 citations
Book•
21 Jan 2010
TL;DR: Garratt argues that far from governing the nineteenth-century musical discourse and practice, the concept of artistic autonomy and the aesthetic categories bequeathed by Weimar classicism were persistently challenged by alternative models of music's social role as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Challenging received views of music in nineteenth-century German thought, culture and society, this 2010 book provides a radical reappraisal of its socio-political meanings and functions. Garratt argues that far from governing the nineteenth-century musical discourse and practice, the concept of artistic autonomy and the aesthetic categories bequeathed by Weimar classicism were persistently challenged by alternative models of music's social role. The book investigates these competing models and the social projects that gave rise to them. It interrogates nineteenth-century musical discourse, discussing a wide range of manifestos championing musical democratization or seeking to make music an engine for the transformation of society. In addition, it explores institutions and movements that attempted to realize these goals, and compositions - by Mendelssohn, Lortzing and Liszt as well as Wagner - in which the relation between aesthetic and social claims is programmatic.
23 citations
Dissertation•
01 Jan 2010
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated the intellectual, historical and sociological basis of intrinsic and instrumental cultural values, encompassing the times of classical Greece to the present day, and explored the role of cultural values in the emergence of UK post-war cultural policy.
Abstract: Intrinsic and instrumental cultural values have represented core rationales for public cultural policies in the UK. However, the increasing dominance of neoliberal logic in recent decades has increased the tension between these policy rationales, making the question of how to negotiate and define intrinsic cultural values a key concern for cultural practitioners.
This thesis investigates the intellectual, historical and sociological basis of intrinsic and instrumental cultural values, encompassing the times of classical Greece to the present day. The role of cultural values in the emergence of UK post-war cultural policy is explored. This aims to reconnect implicit cultural policy assumptions with their conceptual roots, and offer a theoretical perspective from which to appraise contemporary cultural policy developments. The analysis of liberal humanist ideas is complemented with an assessment of the network of discourses informing instrumental policies, in particular, social inclusion and urban regeneration.
The thesis suggests that the contemporary instrumental cultural policy approach represents a misappropriation of the liberal humanist cultural discourse. In the neoliberal policy framework cultural and social concerns are usurped by entrepreneurial, managerial and consumerist imperatives, as cultural policies become a social and economic panacea. The neoliberal instrumental framework undermines key principles of public provision, with detrimental effects on social equality, local communities and cultural programming.
The theoretical part of this project is complemented by qualitative field research, which is based on semi-structured interviews with 25 cultural managers from across the UK cultural sector. The key finding of this study suggests that cultural managers deflect the tension between intrinsic and instrumental policy rationales by proposing a synthesis between intrinsic and social instrumental cultural values. This recognition allows cultural managers to incorporate competing cultural policy assumptions into a broad cultural political framework. Cultural managers justified cultural policy making by resorting to enlightenment reasoning, public responsibility, cultural democracy and funder's demands. The critique of instrumentalism was deflected in to an opposition to impact-driven and commercial values.
21 citations
Dissertation•
12 Jul 2017
TL;DR: The collagegrids: thinking it through project as mentioned in this paper investigates the interplay between collage and grids in collage-grids practice, where the insights lie in how they function together, in the how rather than the what of art practice.
Abstract: This PhD by practice comprises a body of work accompanied by written critical commentary. A six part collage composition produced over a period of three years is the core of this project, dimensions 4900 x 1524 mm. The research project interrogates creative studio practice with the specific intention of articulating the artistic thinking of collagegrids and to present this to a wider audience. Identified as mutually exclusive or conflicting discourses in the history of art, grids and collage exist in parallel, each having its own discourse, strategy and associations. This PhD project investigates the interplay between collage and grids in collagegrids practice, interrogating the through of thinking through art, where the insights lie in how they function together, in the how rather than the what of art practice. The project methodology is hybrid, employing Active Documentation of the PhD iteration of collagegrids to record the processes, theoretical, personal and practical involved in a ‘complexity of overlap’ of practice. It utilises contextual study with which to elucidate the mode of constructive composition at the crux of collagegrids and to situate the practice and its conceptual framework in the wider field of knowledge. The project, collagegrids: thinking it through argues for a materially anchored thinking process, a non-linear logic of association, where meaning lies in the links and connections made in resolving tensions that arise in the juxtaposition of difference. This argument is made by testing theories of cognition through the new domain of collagegrids. By correlating existing research methods the project forms a new paradigm for artistic research, which recognises both empirical and embodied philosophies, and uses a connective model in the presentation of the exegesis. Finally it articulates a fundamentally constructive way of world-making, introducing to the linguistically based theory of metaphor, a materially anchored cognitive processing of artwork, which is a new contribution to thinking and telling the cognition of creative practice.
17 citations