Stefano Velotti

This essay engages Diarmuid Costello’s Aesthetics after Modernism while critically reasserting the case against conceptualism in art. Costello’s attempt to reconcile formalism with conceptualist aesthetics is acknowledged as rigorous and valuable, but I argue that the proposed synthesis risks diluting the distinctive power of visual forms. Conceptual and Readymade art, though often framed as extending Kantian “aesthetic ideas,” are in practice too easily exhausted by their reducible concepts, lacking the inexhaustibility of form-based aesthetic experience. Against the linguistic turn in philosophy of art, I maintain that the privileging of cognition, language, and meaning has marginalized the richness of visual and perceptual experience. Drawing on Greenberg, Pater, and Lessing, I emphasize medium-specificity, the irreducibility of form, and the depth of aesthetic judgment beyond conceptual content. Whereas Costello is willing to integrate conceptuality into aesthetics, I contend that reconciliation lies instead in reaffirming the primacy of perceptual and formal dimensions, which surpass meaning and resist linguistic reduction. In today’s visual age, saturated by screens and images, the philosophy of art must return to the autonomy and depth of visual forms, rather than apologetically absorbing conceptualism.

Through a comparison between Arthur Danto’s philosophy of art and Kantian aesthetic reflection, this article identifies the place from which Danto can underestimate the aesthetic experience and its alleged irrelevance in relation to art. I argue, first, that this position of Danto is crossed by some internal contradictions in his thought. Furthermore, based on the comparison with Kant, I examine the thesis of the “end of the history of art” advanced by Danto, considering in particular two aspects. I argue: (a) that Danto surreptitiously or parasitically uses in his critical activity a notion of aesthetic experience which his philosophical argument, and in particular his “aesthetic of meanings”, cannot legitimize; (b) that his thesis relating to the end of art history is symptomatic of a wider problem, which involves our forms of life, and which finds a particularly significant statement in Friedrich von Hayek’s neoliberal thought. The attempt at a neoliberal anthropology of homo œconomicus implies the tendency to absorb within it the very meaning of the experience that has long been at the center of aesthetic and artistic experience. This totalizing colonization of human forms of life appropriates some exemplary characteristics of aesthetic and artistic experience, perverting them, starting with the presumed generation of spontaneous orders, which we know are framed in an ideological horizon that is anything but obvious or natural. My thesis is that Danto’s idea of a post-historical art is one of the symptoms of this condition.

This essay aims to show how the transcendental aesthetic principle sought by Kant reveals itself not only as the principle of determination of aesthetic experience, both artistic and non-artistic, but also as a necessary principle for making sense of human experience in general. I begin by addressing some fundamental misunderstandings that still plague the study of Kantian disinterestedness, as well as by questioning its psychological redescription. Rejecting the thesis according to which works of art ought not to be considered examples of “free beauty” but only of “dependent beauty,” the essay reconsiders the meaning to be attributed to “nature” as the “supersensible substratum” of our faculties. What emerges from my analysis here is a vision of Kant’s transcendental as essentially in the making, at once both “natural” and “to be acquired.” And yet, notwithstanding our moral responsibility to try to make sense of experience, we cannot pursue this end merely by clinging to what we can directly control.

Although with “aura” Benjamin designates more a “family”, or a “constellation” of phenomena, than a univocal concept, the analogical traits of these phenomena are grounded in an aesthetic unity of sense. The aesthetic (as distinguished from the “artistic”) understanding of “aura” is not juxtaposed to the “anthropological, perceptual-mnemonic, and visionary” dimension of it (Bratu Hansen), but it is rather its root. As a transcendental aspect of perception and imagination, though, the aura marks our experience in different ways, according to determinate historical conditions. If, in a post-traditional society, every attempt to produce auratic experiences is doomed to produce phony auratic phenomena, the potentialities of the aura are nevertheless not exhausted: the “room-for-play” (Spielraum) of experimentation invoked by Benjamin can be maintained open only in the interplay of auratic and non-auratic polarities: attention vs. distraction, distance vs. nearness, tactile vs. optical, determined vs. undetermined.

If it is true that at the core of the Enlightenment project was an attempt to discover a new definition of human nature itself, there is no doubt that for a long time, and today more than ever, there is a similar urgency to find a different vision of humanity, since the prevailing one – heir of the Enlightenment – is perceived from many sides as in need of a profound revision, if not catastrophic. if we are living in the ruins of modernity, we should neither attempt to embalm them, nor to raze them to the ground. This article maintains that Kant’s work on the reflecting judgment can offer precious resources to reshape that image of humanity that we feel is now inadequate in the face of the complexity of our forms of life, without the need to abandon ourselves to old and new longings for the absolute.