What Is Art For?: Modernism and the Prob

What is art for? Are art objects – poems or paintings, plays or prose fiction – similar in kind to everyday things like shopping lists or shopping malls? When we decide that a poem is good, is that the same sort of judgment as when we say that a tool is useful? What Oscar Wilde mean when he says a novel can never be immoral, no matter its content?

The standard philosophical line is to say that, for thousands of years, such questions would have made no sense. For generations, there was no hard line between art and life—between, for instance, making beautiful things and worshipping gods. And yet, so the story goes, at some point during the eighteenth century artists and intellectuals began to suggest that our experiences of art (and, maybe, the meaning of art itself) are separate fro, the religious, social, ethical, or economic contexts in which artworks get made. For these Enlightenment thinkers, art is autonomous—that is, as Immanuel Kant famously argued, the very purpose of an artwork is that it has no purpose beyond being itself.

This seminar picks up this story in the late 19th century, stitching together a story about European and American modernism by considering various answers to the question: What is art for?

Modernist artists are famous for fomenting revolutions in form and value. But did those revolutions attack the idea of aesthetic autonomy or entrench it? The right answers are “yes” and “neither.” Our seminar will map the split character of modernist attitudes towards aesthetic autonomy. To prepare we’ll read some classic and new works of aesthetic philosophy; survey a variety of modernist assaults on autonomous form, as well as different attempts to formalize the breach between art and life; and conclude by thinking about autonomy, contemporary writing, and the afterlives of the modernist avant-gardes. Our conversations will interest students with an interest in the philosophy of art, literary theory, British and American literature, and the history and futures of modernist culture.