Modernism As Aesthetics and Art History

When Adorno opened Aesthetic Theory with his melancholic diagnosis of the disposition of contemporary art—“It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist”¹—he intended that dramatic bracketing of the meaning of art, a bracketing that was nothing other than an acknowledgment of art’s own troubled self-consciousness, to form the address to which any aesthetics worthy of the name would need to be a response. Aesthetics is the reflexive construction of the concepts necessary for the comprehension of the stakes and meaning of art in the light of the history of the dominant art of the second half of the 19^th century and the first half of the 20^th century: modernism. The task of aesthetics is to vindicate modernist art’s own claim to mattering, to being significant, indeed unavoidable, for our collective self-understanding of ourselves as denizens of modernity. To imagine art history without aesthetics, on this accounting, would be to imagine art’s own implicit self-consciousness, its running commentary on its presumptive necessity and threatened impossibility, being blocked from becoming explicit. By making the implicit explicit, aesthetics gives back to works, the history they inscribe and project, a cultural claim that they cannot discursively procure for themselves.