Művészet esztétikum és antiesztétikum között
Art between Aesthetics and AntiAesthetics

Summary/Abstract: Dealing with beauty today is primarily not an issue of arts and art theory, as the first generation of the 20th century avant-garde dislodged beauty from arts, basically due to the moral weight assigned to it. After a predominantly anti-aesthetic climate of art theory since the early 1980s, aesthetic matters have witnessed a strong return in philosophy and art theory in the last fifteen years. After reviewing the complicated connection of the aesthetic and the so-called anti-aesthetic critique of art, I examine how these two tendencies may be reconciled in today’s art and in its interpretation. The term anti-aesthetic is associated with Hal Foster’s edited volume The AntiAesthetic (1983) that labeled theoretical positions which defined themselves radically against a Greenbergian theory of art. Foster and his peers identified in a polemical way Greenberg’s medium-specifity and his insistence on taste with aesthetic approaches, and they put forward a more social and political-based critique of art instead. In the 1990s, the art practices and theories of the abject and the informe further strengthened this opposition in spite of the emergence of new theories of beauty. The return of aesthetics into the art discourse is along the line of the interpretation of modernity; the way in which „nonart” and „anti-art” tendencies have been necessarily interlocking since then, and how the intrinsic transgression of art is turned back into its own logic.

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