English Art and Principled Aesthetics

In this chapter, the author wants to consider what is at stake in the (re)evaluation of English art. She is interested in general in the fate of aesthetics after cultural critique, by which she means the multiple and diverse challenges in the past three decades to the notions of a "pure" aesthetic and of universal and transcendent values in art. The author looks in some detail at the critical language employed with regard to four English artists. More useful is her invocation, earlier in the essay, of Bourdieu's concept of the "field of cultural production," which brings into view the complex array and intersections of institutions, individuals, and discourses in the specific field of visual art. A principled aesthetics, explicit about the cultural context of judgments, takes English art on its own terms without absconding from the broader, more challenging, questions of the value of art. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.