roachboy

you would think that this would be a philosophical matter at first--but that would entail that you understand there to be a type of essence that distinguishes "art" from other things.
and there isnt.
on this duchamp was right: art is what is presented to you as art.
what gets defined as art is a sociological matter: the space in which something is encountered, the expectations brought to the experience, the way a particular experience is framed, in short.

if you think about it, aesthetic philosophy actualy tips directly into this sociological process (should be plural i guess---this post is so vague...): because aesthetic contemplation begins with the art/object as a completed whole, encountered already enframed as art (in a museyroom, in a garden, in a concert hall), aesthetics erases the processes of making objects/events, and the actual practices of the makers of objects/events along with it---it substitutes the aesthetic philosopher, who is positioned as a kind of arch-critic, who outlines the parameters of legitimate interpretation of these objects--the artist him or herself gets replaced with a mythology of the Artist that gets wrapped around the proper name of the artist. this reworked notion of the Artist serves a whole range of dubious ideological functions (adorno is good on this). but the actual artist/maker and the actual processes that shape a particular piece, all are subsumed under a mythological double. the result is totally debilitating if you as someone interested in making things commits the error of thinking about actual art practice through this sad bourgeois mythology that purports to describe the making of things. a second result is the naturalization of the definition of art--one encounters an object already finished and already sited, so all elements that contributed to the social definition of an object as "art" are erased as well. all power reverts to the institutions that specialize in mediation.

short version: aesthetic philosophy is about the classification of objects.
making "art" is about process, an orientation that entails a very different relation to objects/events produced....for the former, objects are the necessary point of departure for thinking...for the latter, an object/event can be understood as a marker of a particular combination of processes/influences/modes of thinking or acting that obtained at a particular phase of a longer creative process. and in my experience at least, it is not obvious that one can seperate creative activity from the range of other engagements with the world. aesthetics would have you beleive that creativity was a discrete space of activity.

all aesthetic theory does, really, is integrate "art" into captialist rationality.
it says nothing of any interest about art, its nature, or the process of making stuff.
it is good to know aeshtetic philosophy, however, because for some reason it persists---despite all kinds of negative effects--think about what classical music has become--a culture of repetition--and you'll get an idea of these.

btw the cultural regime within which aesthetic philo was determinate has been blown apart. in music, you can watch its collapse in accelerated form by looking at the rise of process-oriented compositions via folk like cage--who is important mostly for symptomatic reasons---but think about it: classical music as a social institution presupposed particular types of monopoly--on the spaces of performance, the rules that obtained both for the musicians and the audience within those spaces, the training of musicians--all these have been fundamentally undermined by teh rise of recording technologies, reproduction technologies and the types of composition/organization of sonic material that have arisen in response to/interaction with these technologies.

got to go. cutting this off here for now.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite