ABSTRACT
In terms of the possible ways of conceiving the relation between art history and aesthetics that Jim Elkins suggested during the roundtable, my own view is that one can run this relation both ways: appealing to philosophy to defuse some of the more prejudicial presentations of the aesthetic tradition that have gained currency in art theory, while also appealing to art theory to culturally and historically contextualize the significance of the aesthetic in terms of recent debates. In doing so, the goal would be to outflank some of the tired, yet still ingrained, oppositions that are the afterlife of debates around “modernism” and “postmodernism” in art theory, on the one hand, and to illuminate why the aesthetic has become such a culturally contested term, on the other.
