Art History, Aesthetics, and the “spheres of Experience”

I am certain that many an art historian would be baffled, as I was, by Jane Forsey’s rigorous account of “The Disenfranchisement of Philosophical Aesthetics” a few years ago.¹ Her demonstration of analytical aesthetics’ grounding in turn-of-the-century “art for art’s sake” theories and formalist models of inquiry is surprising for those who know how extensively these discourses have been challenged by artists and historians alike; her call for philosophers of aesthetics to “pay more attention to what artists have to say about their art” and to the relations between art and life may sound faintly comical to art historians for whom these two statements have been long-established concerns (if not clichés) to be handled with care.