I think you have to account for the influence of the times. In the nineteenth century the idea of an aesthetics comparable to metaphysics (before that word garnered its present day pejorative sense) was a common-place aspiration. System, theory, all those things were the ordinary accoutrements of ideas. In our more skeptical age, of course no sooner is an aesthetics announced than it is deconstructed. Different times, different tastes in art theory.
>
> Unlike Schoenberg the dadaists
>wanted to politicize the division between "art" and "life," or rather
>make its politics plain, as the elision of such politics served the
>interests of the dominant ideology. In the various Dada manifestos
>there was a deliberate anti-theory, anti-aesthetics approach.
Well, that's fair enough, and I am a big fan of the dAdAists and of the surrealists. But truth be told, their work was parasitic upon the very theories and aesthetics that they were demolishing. Not surprisingly artists have a strong generational conflict, each seeing their own generation as at war with the previous. But in retrospect, juxtaposition, collage, dream imagery has all been incorporated into the very canon they were overthrowing.
And nor should any pseudo-leftist motifs be taken all that seriously. These are artists. They take their inspiration where they can. If that means rallying to the revolution then they will - but they can just as easily take inspiration from reaction, as Dali did, or the Italian futurists. So when they utilised some radical language about overthrowing bourgeois culture and its galleries, that should be taken with a pinch of salt.
> They
>saw theory and aesthetics, any purported "laws of art" as reproducing
>false divisions in society (which one might draw out as class and race
>divisions). The example, again, being museum culture, which appealed
>to a specific class of society (vs., say, the cabaret).
But they were just as subservient to patronage as any other clique of artists. This summer I saw the excellent effects of Edward James' surrealism collection, when it showed in Brighton.
>As for me, I think it would be a mistake tending towards the ideal to
>speak of laws of art. Then one gets into categorical exclusions as to
>what art is and isn't. And aren't such exclusions basically about the
>marketing and selling of art?
Well, of course one ought to be suspicious if galleries need theories to exclude works of art, but very few gallery owners I've met know anything about aesthetic theory. Of course things ought to be excluded, on grounds of their mediocrity. You can't really love art without having something of a sense of the virtues of excellence over the mundane.
> Determining what is fit for the art
>buyer's consumption, and even producing that art buyer based on taste,
>fashion, hype, etc.? Shouldn't a theory of art take this stuff into
>consideration?
No, I don't think so. Leave that to the market. I wrote a little pamphlet that covers some of the reasons for the art boom (Need and Desire in the Post-Material Economy, just re-published by the New Zealand journal Revolution). But I didn't pretend to argue an aesthetics on the basis of that.
>
>Or, for an example along the lines of the Eagleton you mention, what
>about Monet, who had his kind of factory of helpers (take Warhol's
>factory as a critique of this)? Here the means of production should
>be considered into the larger economy of buying and selling art, along
>with the prestige of the artist, market mytique. The dealers, the
>magazines, the showings, the universities and art schools, the
>publishing houses, marketing: the value of any piece of art as
>commodity is mediated by all this stuff. And I would go further to
>say that all this stuff mediates the aesthetic worth of the piece for
>the consumer.
I don't agree. Consider all those things and what do you have? A theory of the art market, but not of the art. Maybe it would be better not to talk of theory at all in relation to the arts (though one wouldn't want to suggest that it is a matter that does not touch the intellect).
In truth, what do artists build upon when they work - the work of other artists. Art movements probably do relate to social movements in some deep osmotic way. When inspiration is in the air that will doubtless impact on artists. But all this talk about galleries and the market just passes the real subject by. OK so Cole Porter said that his greatest inspiration was a call from his agent, but Oscar Wilde is probably closer to the truth when he said a cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
The real inspiration comes from the internal development that comes when artists start copying and then overthrowing their idols. The history of the art movements of the modern period is one of a slow gestation of styles and techniques, each building on what has gone before. So some capitalist thinks that they are it because they paid for it. More fool them. Who remembers who Holbein's Ambassadors were? What we remember is the momento mori he painted on the floor. Who remembers who Arcimboldo's patrons were, we only remember that he rendered them in fruit and fish. Or who cares that it is Edward James head that reflects its non-reverse in Magritte's mirror, we remember the wit of the piece.
To use a vulgar comparison, Watt's steam engine, or Stephenson's Rocket could be understood from two quite different angles. One the one hand it is the story of the emerging English bourgeoisie, the increasing sums of capital that they could command, to invest in new technologies. You could look at the role of competitions, and even ask the question, was Stephenson's rival really killed accidentally?
Doubtless that would be a fascinating study. But it would not tell you one thing about the development of steam power, or engineering. If you really wanted to pay homage to the creative impulse of those men, you would look at what they did, how the overcame the problems they saw, what solutions they innovated.
So too with art. (My apologies for ranting on) -- Jim heartfield