What might a new aesthetics consist of in the visual arts? What follows is something of an answer.
First though, it would be shoddy of me not to gesture briefly at what the question sets aside, that minor matter of why it is any major aesthetic of endurance—an artistic movement or style characterizing a class of artworks that speak for their own time but are not reducible to it (in the social, psychological, and technological terms that cultural products may be reduced to or explained by); and that are not confined to their time in their ability to carry meaning but speak for themselves, with voices heard differently yet nevertheless heard down through the centuries; and that have consequences for art’s history, refracting the light we see the “existing monuments” of the past in, and consequences most importantly for art’s future, opening new corridors of formal and expressive possibility—why it is such an aesthetic, the new, ever arises.
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