ABSTRACT
This book is concerned with the question of aesthetic value. It considers in particular the implications for aesthetics of developments in the sociology of art, a discipline which, on the face of it, might appear to subsume or abolish altogether the philosophy of art. I should make it plain from the outset that in referring to ‘art’ and ‘the arts’ I mean to include paintings, novels, music, film and all cultural products. In this chapter I shall discuss some of these developments and present the sociological critique of some aspects of traditional aesthetic theories – that is, theories about the nature of art. I shall argue that the sociology of art and the social history of art convincingly show the historical, ideological and contingent nature of a good deal of ‘aesthetics’ and of many, if not all, ‘aesthetic judgements’. They also render problematic the unquestioned categories of criticism and aesthetics, forcing us to recognise the impossibility of counter-posing ‘great art’ to popular culturé or mass culture in any simplistic manner. (The question of the essentially social nature of any aesthetic experience or aesthetic judgement will be taken up again in more detail in Chapter 4.) I shall then suggest that the sociology of art has in some ways exceeded its own brief, in so far as it fails to account for the ‘aesthetic’. Indeed, the central theme of this book is the irreducibility of ‘aesthetic value’ to social, political, or ideological co-ordinates. This has become an increasingly worrying problem among sociologists of art and Marxist aestheticians, who, while rightly refusing to reinstate any essentialist notion of ‘the aesthetic’, have begun to see the need to 12accord recognition to the specificity of art. (Some of their deliberations and tentative suggestions are considered later in this book, particularly in Chapters 3 and 5.) This chapter concludes by outlining the arguments and organisation of the rest of the book.
