VISCR608 GE:Aesthetic After Postmodern

This course is a critical reappraisal of aesthetic philosophy in light of the recent challenges to once-common opposition between modernity and postmodernity. We will engage in a re-reading of the figures who have shaped these grids of historical intelligibility, defined forms of visibility, and informed artistic practice, in order to chart alternative paths for the art and philosophy past this opposition. Our course will, therefore, introduce the major authors within aesthetic theory - Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Greenberg, Danto, Baudrillard, and Lyotard #NAME? historical narratives. We will develop the recent critiques of the postmodern paradigm in the work of Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou, Jacques Ranciere, Dave Hickey, and Nicolas Bourriaud in order to retrieve neglected possibilities for art, artists, and philosophical aesthetics. Our efforts will include a reconsideration of two of the major categories that have framed these oppositional paradigms, namely, beauty and the sublime. What possibilities can these words hold for art in the age of micro-managed experiences and systematic sensory overload? What is at stake in Hickey's rehabilitation of beauty, in Ranciere's notion of an "aesthetic regime," and Badiou's invocation of inaesthetics? Do these discourses point us beyond the kitsch, pastiche, and irony that have characterized the past two decades? And might art re-discover a political and social vocation by being construed as an act of dissensus? If, as Peter Schjeldahl suggests in his review of the 2008 Whitney Biennial, "Two decades of academic postmodernizing have trailed off into embarrassed silence," this course attempts to perform the archaeology of that silence.