A Critique On The End Of Art Autonomy

This thesis studies the end of the autonomy of art from the viewpoint of history of civil society. As the direct token of aesthetic modernity, the formation of "art autonomy" relies on the development of capitalistic civil society. The so-called "civil society" means the social field which exists between the "state" and the "citizen", it consists all kinds of relatively self-relied organizations and groups, and it is an autonomic space that comes into being spontaneously side by side with the state mechanism. The civil society means that the state is separated from the society. The emancipation function of this separation is that it makes absolute monarchy turn into democratic country, modern society come into being, and the freedom of individual citizen becomes a reality. Put together civil society and artistic autonomy, we can find out that:First, the autonomy of art represents the free will of civil society which put up in the art field, it makes art get rid of the chain of religion and politics, obtain freedom of self-development. Secondly, art autonomy is a kind of oppositional discourse and an important arm, with which civil society strives for culture autonomy that goes against the ruling of the state politics. For art autonomy takes universal humanity as the legal supportive force, the universal value which represents universal humanity is the important weapon that is used to fight against seignior age and legal status of its own.The oppositional situation between civil society and the state underwent a great transformation in the twentieth century. With the further development of capitalism, civil society obtained consolidation and expansion; in the end it overwhelmed the traditional politic state. From then on the political entity becomes an institution that serves the civil society and not an entity that oppressed the society. In this situation the crisis of art autonomy occurred and it caused the dying out of artistic autonomy, after all the tensile space between civil society and country had disappeared with the victory of civil society. The new aesthetic culture which takes the place of artistic autonomy is popular culture, which is a more direct token of requirement for freedom in a civil society.The rise of popular culture means the end of artistic autonomy. The causes for this phenomenon can be analyzed in three ways. First, the industrialization of aesthetics caused the collapse of autonomic art system. The result of autonomic art is pure art and it shows itself by an integrated configuration which consist of formal experiment and transcendental experience. However, the integrated configuration broke down when popular culture appeared by a way of aesthetic industry:Autonomic art was an individual creation by talented people, but the socialized means of production of aesthetics industry brought direct damage to it; the transcendental experience of autonomic art was independent of exterior world, but what aesthetic industry wanted to inspire was the satisfaction for the exterior world; The formal experiment and transcendental experience that autonomic art pursued was a kind of "deep" culture which was exclusive from the mass, but what aesthetic industry pursued was a kind of "extensive" culture to meet popular needs. However, the collapse does not mean total disappearance; the pure art still exists in manner of collective fragments although the integrated configuration has been destroyed. The fragments construct the cyberspace of meaning; the new meaning starts to produce in an intertextual manner. Secondly, the aestheticalization of Everyday Life dissolved the default independence of autonomic art. There are three theories to prove the autonomy of art:Art is autonomous because it is independent of human happiness and kindness, the premise is that art is a formal game; Art is legal because of its universality, the headwaters of universality is to test humanity in advance; Art is a way to experience metaphysics, so it is transcendental. The premise is that the logos of practice is valuable. These theoretical testifications made a premise in advance in an essentialism way. However, popular culture has brought up the phenomenon of "Aestheticization of Everyday Life", people begin to treat aesthetic in a constructivism way, goodliness is no longer the infiltration and cast of transcendental existences. Goodliness becomes the historical, social and political production that comes from people's daily life. Guided by this idea, it is not hard for us to find out that popular culture is a kind of aesthetic culture and pleasure culture, and the class ethic exists in it. So the self-sufficient form, transcendence of ideality, prevalent cognition of autonomic art collapsed, and the independence of autonomic art did not exist any longer. Thirdly, the privilege of aesthetics disappeared and the culture research against the privilege of aesthetics sprang up. Art autonomy promoted the alliance between aesthetics and art, aesthetics became the only way to prove art, and from then on aesthetics got the privilege. Along with the aesthetics was elucidated as a kind of survival ethic, the idea of aesthetic salvation appeared, art was regarded as the tool to perfect humanity and antagonize dissimilation. However, the rise of popular culture meant that goodliness was no longer the only defaulted meaning. In the practical degree the spread of civil society promoted the rise of new middle class and new clerisy, those people broken through the chains of traditional artist and brought the explosion of diverse meanings. In the academic dimension a mass of topics of post-subject emerged, the whole mixed effect show up as doubt about the belief that art was beauty. Then the privilege of aesthetics went into death and the research of culture came into being as the elucidatory topic against the privilege of aesthetics.