ABSTRACT
If postconceptual art presents a crisis for critical judgement, does this thereby negate Bourdieu’s critique of taste? Certainly, any Greenbergian notion of the aesthetic couched in terms of medium specificity or the autonomous art object would seem redundant faced with the proliferation of trans-categorical possibilities for making art. But rather than abandon the aesthetic, I draw upon Wolfgang Iser’s notion of the ‘blank’ – as a staged suspension of connectivity – to argue for a reassignment of the aesthetic in terms of an encounter conceived as a configurational interplay that problematises the beholder’s bodily and ideological orientation toward the artwork.
