ABSTRACT
The dual purpose of this book has been to insist on the relevance of sociology for aesthetics, and to defend aesthetics from sociological reductionism. I have argued that aesthetics itself has to be understood as a discipline with a social history. I have also sought to show that the terms, assumptions and judgements which operate in traditional aesthetics are socially located and, in an important sense, ideological. The very products which aesthetics and art history posit as ‘works of art’ cannot be uncritically taken as somehow distinguished by certain intrinsic features, but must be seen as produced in that history by specific practices in given conditions. The evaluations of works which form the artistic tradition are performed by people who are themselves institutionally and structurally located, with the consequent ideological and partial perspective which this gives them. The experience and appreciation of works of art, which is logically prior to their evaluation, is unavoidably implicated in the wider structures of consciousness, even though the aesthetic attitude involves a certain kind of distancing, or ‘disinterestedness’, of that experience from the practical attitude of everyday life. Thus, as I hope I have shown in Chapter 4, accounts of the aesthetic and of aesthetic experience move closer to the sociological as they provide more adequate descriptions of what is involved in the confrontation with art.
