Discourse of "anti-" review

Here is a great article by Ralph Shain that presents two rival models (or even better, traditions) of art theory, one called the Aesthetic or High, the other the Popular or Low. Both the Aesthetic and the Popular are active contenders today with their own histories and advocates.

Reproduced below is a table from the article (¶55) describing Popular and Aesthetic in a list of words, with a third column in the center. Surrealism is proposed here as a model that sought to transcend the standoff between Popular and Aesthetic. Surrealism failed and is relegated to art history and we can say this because “its works are judged by aesthetic or popular concepts; Rembrandt and Titian are not judged according to Surrealist concepts.”(¶61). In other words, Surrealism is not an independent tradition.

Aesthetic	Surrealism	Popular
Beauty	Marvelous	Entertainment
Individual	Collaboration	Popularity
Creation	Investigation	Consumption
Original	Unconscious	Recognizable
Form (al unity)	Juxtaposition	Content
Harmony	Turmoil	Ease
Genius	Chance	Talent
Enduring	Anachrony	Ephemeral
Contemplation	Revolution	Enjoyment

The two models are incommensurate in the way they approach judgements of quality and this is crucial. Popular will deny there are any inter-personal standards of quality, in short, to each his own. Popular places the judgement of the receiver (viewer) higher than the artist. (¶19) This suggests that the viewer is not called upon to defer to the informed judgement of the artist or to learn the history of the tradition the artwork is part of. Aesthetic on the other hand places art and the artist above the viewer (¶5) which in turn places certain demands on the viewer to acquire the requisite skill to recognize quality.

The way these two models handle this question is so important that I suspect it may be the best way to determine which one is in play during any given discussion, and how in the long run one may come to choose one over the other.

How each model judges quality will impact other issues as well. In the case of Popular, if there are no inter-personal standards of quality, then the only distinguishing characteristic between any given two works of art will be exchange value.

Aesthetic on the other hand has greater resources to draw upon to judge quality. There are numerous aesthetic theories past and present that have played a role in the history of Aesthetic, and to discuss them here is not necessary. It is enough to acknowledge that to operate in some kind of tradition, (or system if you prefer) that sets out to articulate inter-personal standards of quality is a hallmark of this model.

The discourse of “anti-” has clearly regressed to an academic style. (¶19) This fate may have been unavoidable. Dada remains the standard by which all “anti-” art discourse is measured by, but was it from the beginning under the jurisdiction of Aesthetic? (¶101) It is difficult to say if the subsequent absorption of Dada in to the museums shows this to be the case, or if in fact it was outside Aesthetic at the beginning. In any case, the article shows the discourse of “anti-” is becoming less effective. I suspect the reasons are very complicated and I don’t think the article offers a complete diagnosis. This article is good for pointing out that there is such a thing as the Aesthetic model, and I think future productivity lays in a complete re-examination of what the Aesthetic model can be today.