ABSTRACT
The conversation came into sharp focus for me when it turned to the question of the anti-aesthetic. What greater testimony could there be, I thought, of the continuing pertinence of philosophical aesthetics for art theory and practice than this negative self-understanding in relation to the aesthetic? I would have liked the discussion to dwell on this subject at greater length, so I will take up the topic here. Some time in the 1950s or 1960s, Duchamp’s example, which had been suppressed by the Greenbergian paradigm, began to resurface—first in the work of Jasper Johns and Rauschenberg and later in the work of Robert Morris and others. This increasingly radical anti-aesthetic position, culminating in conceptual and postconceptual art, was bound to precipitate conservative reactions, including the recent revival of talk about the beautiful. Yet, as Elkins notes, there have always been artists and critics who, unhappy with either position, have tried to negotiate a path beyond them—to “think outside the opposition,” as Elkins puts it.100
