Questioning Aesthetics

ABSTRACT When I first reflected on the title of this symposium, I thought it could be read as an invitation to critique the academic practice of aesthetics as a scholarly discipline, to identify its limitations, its subservience to fashionable academic ideologies, its alienation from much of what was (and is) being done by artists of all sorts and traditions, past as well as present. But there is another meaning, an adjectival meaning, in questioning aesthetics. It is to consider aesthetics as an inquiry that questions by its very nature, a questioning-aesthetics, aesthetics as a distinctive kind of questioning: aesthetic questioning. Here its scope is boundless, and aesthetics quickly becomes a critique of the human world, of its institutions, its practices, its justices and injustices, its sense of things on the basis of the perceptual conditions they inhabit and promote. What might such a critique reveal? Wher