ABSTRACT
An aesthetic, in the early twenty-first century, might be characterized as a work, act, or process that offers identity and community through its (social) salience: it binds people due to its implicit capture of cultural value. The twentieth-century aesthetics, as discussed by Habermas or Marcuse, for example, shifted emphasis from formal quality to social identity as the essential aesthetic act – to social localization in modernity’s delocalized field. Even Walter Benjamin, in announcing the loss of “aura” and the de-pedestal-ing of art in a mechanical age, shifted emphasis to the increasing engagement with everyday life as the new aesthetic condition of the arts, rather than dwelling overtly on mechanically produced art. His seminal essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”1 illustrates the elusive nature of aesthetic transition occasioned by technical change, evidently a complex realignment of base social value, not simply the formal articulation of new technique.
