Contemporary art is a dark spot of aesthetics

Аннотация

This article addresses an important question for both aesthetics and art: can aesthetics critique contemporary art? The answer is provided from two perspectives: Russian and Chinese. The overall diagnosis is as follows:
on the one hand, contemporary art is not the subject of aesthetic critique.
On the other, aesthetics that ignores contemporary art's assessments loses artists' interest. The authors recognize that dissatisfaction with aesthetics is as old as aesthetics itself. Nevertheless, this dissatisfaction has had its own unique roots in every era. The authors examine the current state of aesthetics in terms of its relationship to art. The specificity of this era is determined by
the fact that today, art critiques aesthetics more than aesthetics critiques art. In the previous era, aesthetics, if it addressed contemporary art at all, never examined a specific work, but addressed art as a whole. Contemporary art evoked not only the figure of the curator, but also his invariable attribute – a clearly formulated concept of art – which brought the curator's position closer to the philosophy of art. The research methodology utilizes topological reflection – a concept developed by
V. Savchuk. In the spirit of A. Schlegel’s diagnosis of the obscure word “aesthetics”, the article analyzes the concept of “practical aesthetics”, designed to address the emerging problems of aesthetics. The inherent contradiction of this concept is explicated as follows: when aesthetics criticizes a specific work, it either forgets itself, losing touch with the categories of “beautiful” and “ugly” that define its discipline, or, remaining at the level of the universal, fails to come any closer to understanding the specific work. This, once again, leads it to self-annihilation. Practical aesthetics, in turn, is a form of self-deception, for contemporary art defines itself through the destruction of the boundaries and norms established by dominant aesthetics. The authors demonstrate how similar tendencies are refracted in the very different contexts of Russia and China. Important here are the concepts of hybrid identity, postcolonial trauma, and self-destructive gestures in contemporary art. The final conclusion is that the concept of “practical aesthetics” is false not in itself, but rather the method, methodology, and attitude that holds the researcher captive to the old aesthetic paradigm. The critical potential of aesthetics has yet to be fully realized, and its movement toward concrete criticism and evaluation will be realized if it is capable, freed from paternalism and arrogance, of conveying to viewers what no critic, curator, or art theorist can convey about a specific artist’s work. In this way, it will be able to transform the obscurity of contemporary art into a platform for profound and precise understanding, undeniable by any known discourse.