1. What is the relationship between aesthetic autonomy and concepts of resistance and emancipation?
Aesthetic autonomy bears a complex and shifting relationship to concepts of resistance and emancipation across the past two centuries. While a significant part of this study will be devoted to a historical analysis of aesthetic theory and artistic subjectivity, it is also concerned with issues that remain central to artistic practice to the present day. The core evaluative tensions that define contemporary art, such as the relationship between art and adjacent areas of cultural production, the capacity of the artwork to convey some form of meaningful social or political critique, and the institutional complicity or in-dependence of the art world itself, are rooted in the discursive system of modern aesthetic autonomy. Modern art defines itself in opposition to the instrumentalizing forms of identity associated with the rise of capitalism, in which the world is reduced to a set of resources to be exploited and consumed. At the same time, in seeking to challenge the appropriative autonomy of the bourgeois self, artists claim a form of creative subjectivity that makes its own demands for absolute sovereignty. Thus, the untrammeled freedom enjoyed by the artist is necessary precisely because they possess a unique capacity to transcend the ideological constraints of the existing capitalist system and envision its utopian reinvention. Friedrich Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man provides an early diagnosis of European society in thrall to the 'economic self-interest' inculcated by the rise of the market system. Schiller's prescience is notable, as he was able to detect the tectonic shifts that would transform Europe during the coming century as society was increasingly driven by utilitarian calculations of profit and loss. Schiller's critique resonates throughout the history of modern art, as seen in Andre Breton's contention that 'wherever Western civilization is dominant, all human contact has disappeared, except contact from which money can be made.' The solution to this crisis, according to Schiller, entails a comprehensive reinvention of the human self, achieved through aesthetic education, which moves us from a predatory form of subjectivity to one in which we experience and feel our underlying kinship with other selves.
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