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Aesthetics in the Age of AI: A Methodological Self-Delineation
Anne Virginia Meindl
Abstract
Current debates on AI entering aesthetic practices often take on a normative stance by evaluating the artistic status of AI art. This article seeks to develop a different perspective by referring back to the original descriptive meaning of ‘aisthesis’ and also to the origins of aesthetics as discourse on the senses and art. Introducing a Hegelian understanding of the artistic medium—as formally modeling a certain structure of consciousness rather than just as a neutral means of representation—this article provides a methodological starting point of an aesthetically engaged critique of AI’s implicit subject model. Rather than operating with abstract definitions of human intelligence or creativity, aesthetics can provide us with the means to concretely analyze how AI as a medium is redistributing our modern space of perception and action, and in doing so it is not so much replicating human intelligence but reconfiguring it. Aesthetics in its descriptive sense therefore can deliver important insights concerning the appropriate use of machines and the critical skills that are necessary for this purpose.
Key Words
aesthetics; artificial intelligence; Hegel; medium; subjectivity
1. Introduction
Current debates on AI entering aesthetic practices often take on a normative stance: Can AI-generated images legitimately claim to be art, and if so, which (established) criteria are suitable for assessing their aesthetic quality? Of crucial interest is often the question whether the computer-aided process of production can still be considered “creative” or whether AI could somehow catch up with human imagination.[1] Such considerations, indispensable as they are, regularly reiterate resentments that already accompany the establishment of older “new media” as art forms; even Hegel’s famous “end of art” was recently invoked (yet again) by worried artists and critics.[2]
This article seeks to develop a different perspective on AI’s impact on aesthetics by referring back to the original, descriptive meaning of ‘aisthesis’ (Greek: sensory perception) as well as to Baumgarten’s definition of the aesthetic discipline as discourse on the senses and on art.[3] Certainly AI as a medium for image production will change art’s appearance as did the invention of photography and cinema.[4] It may even affect, as did photography and cinema, the institutional structures of art and its reception.[5] While such consequences of AI for contemporary art production to some extent will reorder the latter’s material and conceptual structures, there are even more foundational questions, from which aesthetics originally emerged, concerning the (social) organization of human perception, which is equally subject to historical transformation through technological, economic, and cultural developments.
Drawing on its epistemological origins, a critical (in a Kantian sense) task of aesthetics shall be highlighted here of reflecting the subject’s conditions of experience rather than art’s evaluative norms; still, aesthetics’ special (and highly ambivalent) affiliation with the arts could be considered a methodological prerequisite of its capacity to critically reflect the constitution of the subject in a way that eludes traditional epistemology.[6] A Hegelian understanding of artistic media as sensibly reflecting historical forms of intelligibility may help to bridge the gap between aesthetics as a theory of the subject and aesthetics as a theory of the arts: AI as a medium not only for artistic production but of vast social mediation processes can be analyzed aesthetically, that is, regarding the way that experience is rearranged through the applications of AI in various societal fields. Such an aesthetic point of view in a way is indebted to artistic strategies because art, as Hegel points out, has a certain cognitive “surplus-value” by not only conceptually pondering the content of symbolic processes but by drawing our attention to their forms of appearance by means of art’s medial arrangements.[7] This understanding of the artistic medium changes the evaluative measures for AI implementations in art: Rather than judging the “artistry” of AI techniques through already established criteria, (good) AI art will keep a critical distance to its own structure of mediation, helping us to get a grip on contemporary conditions of experience in a highly complex and rapidly changing world.
Instead of evaluating the creativity involved in certain algorithmic processes, we can (and should) ask how AI actually restructures our own imaginative resources and cognitive capabilities. Introducing a Hegelian understanding of the artistic medium—as formally modeling a certain structure of consciousness rather than just as a neutral means of representation—this article provides a methodological starting point of an aesthetically engaged critique of AI’s implicit subject model. Rather than operating with abstract definitions of human intelligence or creativity, aesthetics can provide us with the means to concretely analyze how AI as a medium is redistributing our modern space of perception and action, and in doing so is not so much imitating human intelligence but reconfiguring it.
Section 2 will develop Hegel’s understanding of artistic media and place it in the context of the aesthetic tradition as a discourse on subjectivity and art. Then, some structural features of AI as a medium will be analyzed in order to critically reconstruct the underlying subject model in section 3. Finally, the fundamental difference between AI’s implicit subject model and a modern rationality of the arts, which renders an uncritical use of AI techniques by art and aesthetics as problematic, will be highlighted. While the arts and their medial expansions reflect social and technological changes of our experiential conditions, they also imply a critical transgression of established forms of representation. An aesthetic critique of AI then would not rely on ontological distinctions between AI and human creativity but on a historical difference that places art and aesthetics in a self-reflective distance to dominant forms of mediation, in spite of—or rather in line with—their social entanglements.[8] Such a self-reflexive point of orientation may gain importance in the face of the expansion of automatization into various fields of knowledge production. Relying on the critical capacity of the arts to dig up the limits, contradictions, and potentials behind social forms of mediation, aesthetics therefore shall embrace technological developments in the arts as a sensual map that allows for an analysis of and a (potentially emancipated) adaptation to the rapidly changing coordinates of our perception.
2. Aesthetics and the arts: A Hegelian take on the medium
Aesthetics, as Eagleton convincingly argues, was born as a discourse on the body.[9] Growing out of a rationalist tradition (Baumgarten was a student of Wolff),[10] aesthetics was introduced to fill a long-felt gap in the Cartesian conception of the subject,[11] which rendered the sensible a field inaccessible to the conceptual rigor of philosophy.[12] This initial attempt of aesthetics at expanding philosophy’s reach into the undisclosed field of heterogenous sensation seems at odds with its later self-restraint to the exclusive terrain of autonomous art. So small is the intrinsic connection of aesthetics’ initial set-up to the valorized parts of Western culture, “that one might rather place it within the field of animal instincts.”[13] What haunted the aesthetic in its childhood sleep was not so much the beautiful but the affections, desires, and aversions that escaped a rational grounding. Consequently, it primarily was not the canonization of artistic values but a whole new reconstruction of the subject on the part of philosophy that aesthetics woke up to undertake. Integrating the senses as a confused but potentially formalizable source of knowledge, aesthetics reformulates the status of material practices and their impact on the subject’s interior. Although this expansion into lived experience may seem in conflict with aesthetics’ focus on art, it is arguable that precisely the status of practice gives art its valorized position in aesthetic discourse: Art entered the aesthetic discourse not so much as a foreign intruder blurring the focus on real life matters but as a normative framework providing certain sensual standards for material conduct.
To tell the story of the aesthetic only as a compensatory displacement from real life to art [14] is to underestimate the hegemonic ambitions aestheticians harbored from the very start. The double character of Baumgarten’s definition of aesthetics as theory of the senses and of art already is based on the conviction that our affections and desires can be trained and sublimated not through their reasonable oppression but through the habitual acquaintance with (good) art.[15] Schiller was the one to explicate these aesthetic aspirations, to not only theorize the senses but provide educational standards for shaping them. Culture therefore was reconceptualized by the aesthetic discourse as a political means providing not only distinctive practices of valorization but of shaping and disciplining the senses from within by the sensual organization of our lifeworld, rather than through abstract law or coercive strategies.[16]
Hegel’s refusal of the original meaning of aesthetics in favor of a philosophy of (fine) art may therefore be less groundbreaking as it first seems.[17] In fact, Hegel’s turn to the objective realm of art implies a subtle backlash on the subject’s constitution, as Hegel systemizes the arts and their different forms as systems of appearance rather than as entities with certain objectifiable characteristics. For Hegel, the arts, by addressing our cognitive and sensual faculties in certain ways, are “representations of representations,”[18] rather than a mimicking of concrete things of reality. Their double-mediated character is for Hegel less a sign of their “untruth” or illusionary status; rather, their representational “inauthenticity” is imbued with a documentary truth-value, as art formally reflects the way a historic era shapes our cognitive and perceptive stance towards reality using cultural techniques of the latter’s mediation. The documentary character of the arts is thus not limited to their content but pertains as much to their form: Different media reflect the way in which intelligibility is produced by the material organization of space and time, implying also an organization of consciousness.[19]
What guides Hegel’s hierarchy of the arts is not a judgment of aesthetic quality but an examination of the formal features of the artistic medium,[20] modeling, in his view, not the represented thing but the perceiving subject and its contingent cognitive and sensual relations to representation. Hegel analyzes structures of appearance, or the spatial arrangements and temporal divisions that are guiding our perception of the artwork, in terms of their reflexive structures, that is in terms of the varying degree in which they are embedded in sensual, emotive, and affective processes hindering the establishment of critical awareness. The artistic medium therefore is conceptualized by Hegel in hegemonic terms as a set of cultural techniques that organizes subjective experiences by way of shaping the subject’s immediate sensual relation to reality. For example, for Hegel architecture is not only a material practice guiding social conduct; it does so through a certain formation of consciousness addressing the body in its habitual immediacy without the need for conceptual interference.[21]
Such cultural techniques of shaping human consciousness and perception, however, are subject to historical change and for Hegel are closely related to other social, technological, and economic practices of organizing people’s lifeworld. The “prosaic” style of modernity, for example, for Hegel is not only a matter of representational conventions but is part of a greater reorganization of social consciousness by the rationalization of economic and political forces through the bourgeois state. Therefore, in Hegel’s view, the artistic medium cannot be reduced to its material support or to representational conventions; a certain immanent logic ties the arts together and sets them apart as so many ways to organize subjectivity through an arrangement of our different faculties of knowledge.[22] The arts thus unconsciously undertake a transcendental function for Hegel by sensually reflecting conditions of experience and their historically varying forms. The medium can be understood as a methodological tool by which structures of experience can be concretely grasped in a way that can’t be achieved by mere conceptualization. Art’s cognitive surplus value is its form of appearance, which not only expresses dominant values but also demonstrates the way they are mediated to and interiorized by the subject.
Hegel’s aesthetic investigation into the arts thus by no means neglects the subject and its sensual capacities as the initial starting point of aesthetics; rather, through an analysis and systematization of the arts, Hegel gives us an insight into the cultural transformability of subjective experience that lies at the heart of aesthetics’ hegemonic aspirations. Hegel is not only uncommonly frank about this normative function of culture; he also assigns a critical task to aesthetics of analyzing the changing conditions of experience by reflecting their medium, or the way they manifest themselves in cultural techniques or artistic productions.
Benjamin’s debt to Hegel can be pointed out here,[23] adhering to a descriptive understanding of aesthetics as discourse on sensual experience through the analysis of modern reproductive media. Expanding the artistic canon, still valid in Hegel’s system of the arts, Benjamin considers photography and film as results of vaster social, technological, and economic developments that therefore partake in the alienated structure of modern experience. Still, these media have a cognitive (thus political) value beyond their entanglement in social forms of subjectivation that can be appropriated not only by aesthetic discourse but, for Benjamin, by artistic practice itself. Sensually reflecting their own (socially embedded) forms of mediation, the arts provide an analytic standpoint, giving the subject the possibility to critically assess its supposedly immediate forms of experience. For Benjamin, politicizing the arts implies recovering the subject’s cognitive capacity to orientate itself in a drastically changed modern environment through an emancipated use of modern technology—in contrast to a fascist manipulative use of technology, not enhancing the subject’s well-being, but aestheticizing its subjection.[24]
As the barely existing canon of the arts is about to be extended once again, it seems fruitful to welcome this extension, AI, not as a risk for the arts but as a prolongation of their critical capacity to reflect our changing structures of experience in the face of the exhaustive impact of modern technology on our lifeworld. As the implementation of AI into various societal fields is, as public discourse indicates, indeed connected to questions of our own well-being, it seems necessary to develop an aesthetic investigation into AI’s underlying subject model. The intention of this article is not to judge or prescribe artistic strategies that can potentially fulfill this urgent function; rather it will consider AI as a medium, in a sense similar to Hegel’s conception of the arts, as a structural model of a certain formation of consciousness. Certainly, this approach can’t deliver final results here in the face of the various techniques, models, and implementations currently summarized under the term ‘artificial intelligence.’ Therefore, this article primarily is interested in sketching a productive methodological approach for aesthetics that can help to clarify the multiple political questions connected to the expansion of AI techniques, not only into the arts but into our modern, everyday sensorium.
3. AI as a medium
What sets AI apart from former (artistic) media is the explicit claim underlying AI technology to model a certain aspect of human subjectivity, namely that of “autonomously” producing knowledge through an artificial form of cognition that imitates neuronal processes in the human brain. This claim of not reproducing knowledge but of generating it makes the status of AI as a medium questionable, because a form of agency seems to be involved that conflates the material and the producer.
Yet another reason for doubting the status of AI as a medium can be formulated as the alleged absence of a material support by which knowledge is transferred. This absence of course is an abstraction, as the generating process is not only in need of an immense mass of physical hardware but is based on a multitude of data derived from the material practice of human labor.[25] The material of AI could then be defined in an Adornian sense as not reducible to a physical substance but as a set of cultural techniques or conventions historically developed as a means to produce meaning.[26] Without the use of images, texts, games, or other cultural techniques, AI can barely claim to achieve anything close to human intelligence; its functioning will remain as opaque to us as the decision-making, for example, of an octopus.[27]
As to the first objection, one could argue that every medium also acts on the producing subject, as the internal structure of the medium is not totally controllable by the producer, who is forced to adapt to the structural features of the material. A painting is not just reproducing a thing, as we perceive it, but it confronts us with a set of formal transformations and internal rules that drastically change the status of the original information received by the eye. So, it is arguable that every medium involves the production and transformation of knowledge rather than only transporting it. Let’s stick with the case of painting—painting may at some points in its history have harbored a similar pretense as AI of modeling a certain function of the subject, namely the optical process involved in visual perception.[28] The techniques of linear perspective proved to be successful as they paved the way for ever more advanced techniques of visual reproduction, reducing the impact of the human beholder to a minimum.
However, what seems problematic about this idea of the medium modeling a certain trait of the subject is the ignorance of the impact the form of mediation has on the subject’s constitution as such. As Hegel already knew, the easel painting does not replicate the act of seeing, nor does it only speak to the eye,[29] but it changes the whole sensory formation of the beholder. By leaving three-dimensional space, painting for Hegel stops to address the body in its immediacy and reveals the subjective principle of appearance. Reality is shown not as a totality but as a set of spatial and temporal arrangements dependent on the beholder’s position. Painting thus fundamentally transforms how the subject relates to a perceived content.[30] The camera, based on the same optical principles, yet again changes our perceptual coordinates by the fluctuating fragmentation of space and time, which Benjamin describes so strikingly as to not reproduce visual space but as to tactically penetrate it. The artificial eye of the camera then does not only discard its auratic predecessor; it restructures our experience by an expansion or blurring of different sense perceptions, thereby redefining and rearranging our sensible and cognitive possibilities.
My argument is that something similar can be said about AI. Rather than functioning as an artificial replacement of human intelligence, AI and its diverse implementations (will) restructure our social space of experience and the subject’s sensual and cognitive stance towards reality. AI, as a medium in the Hegelian sense, must therefore be related to a historical formation of producing intelligibility, of configuring its specific form, rather than functioning as a model of intelligence as such. AI’s claim to replicate essential functions of human cognition can itself be considered symptomatic for a historical formation of consciousness: As Adorno has argued (in a time when the Turing Test was still fiction), the idea of intelligent machines rests on a much older epistemological ideal of causal-mechanical cognition dating back to the time of Descartes.[31] Such an ideal for Adorno, however, is not a mere abstraction: the rationalist subject found its way into our empirical reality by economic and technological rationalization processes based on the very same logic of abstraction. The rationalist conception of the subject for Adorno therefore “faithfully discloses the precedence of the abstract, rational relations that are abstracted from individuals and their conditions and for which exchange is the model.”[32]
AI’s ambition to autonomously produce knowledge could be read in the same light as a prolongation of Kant’s disembodied transcendental subject constructing “the objective world out of an undifferentiated material,”[33] now called ‘data.’ Thus, if we relate to AI as a tool, we should be aware of the fact that not only its content is biased but so is its form; the principle of equivalence that it functions on is based on a rationalist mode of experience assimilating the heterogenous to a controllable set of information and thereby excluding everything that cannot be pressed into this mold.
Benjamin accused modern progress of a tendency to “destruct experience,”[34]; I will try to point out some of the concrete impoverishments brought about by AI, not in order to demonize AI but to demonstrate an aesthetic take on it as a medium. In the sense of Adorno, we can ask the “question of the reality” of AI’s implicit subject model,[35] as its implementations materially restructure our conditions of experience. For example, ChatGPT, currently on everyone’s lips, is said to democratize knowledge; but one should take a closer look at the form of this democratization and its operations of inclusion or exclusion defining our cognitive reach. Besides the unequal distribution of the actual resources to use ChatGPT, this democratization-claim rests on the assumed availability of a certain intellectual heritage to everyone. But strikingly, while AI (theoretically) has the potential of revolutionizing our traditional ideas of learning by shifting the focus from a content- to a context-based approach,[36] the actual learning process of ChatGPT is not transparent to the user at all. We are, as it were, excluded from the actual procedure of gathering information, evaluating, and synthesizing it. What we get is content, not context. ChatGPT thus literally functions as an outsourcing of cognition from our own organism that deprives us of the possibility to critically assess the underlying assumptions of its result.
What Benjamin praised about film was its analytical potential to generate delicate experiences in us that our natural organs were not (yet) apt for. A similar potential is certainly present in AI, but a prevailing tendency to exclude us from certain experiences rather than to function as their extension can be observed. To give a more drastic example that can be analyzed on a more sensate level:[37] AI implementations in the weapon industry tend to separate decision-making in warfare from our physical body, excluding our experiences of pain and compassion from this domain. While most of us will be glad to have missed the experience of firing a gun, this rationalization process of warfare will not only fundamentally change the character of warfare but will also have an impact on our cognitive and imaginative relation to it. Adorno spoke of the nuclear bomb as only the culmination point of a “permanent catastrophe.”[38] For Adorno, the catastrophe is not reducible to an incidence we are suddenly confronted with; rather it relates to an insight into the reductive logic of modernity that continues to subjugate humanity. As a medium of facilitating decisions in warfare by excluding the body’s “shortcomings,” AI is a prolongation of this reductive logic, and at the same time it assures the displacement of the insight that the catastrophe still continues by distancing it further from our own experience.
Considerations on the responsible use of AI should therefore take into account an aesthetic viewpoint not only measuring moral requirements but also the “formal” conditions AI imposes on our perception. AI will not be an aid to humanity, if its aim is to exclude us from certain experiences; rather its analytical powers must be made transparent and available to generate insights that our cognitive and perceptive organs can’t yet register. AI then might function as an extension of our perceptive organism, helping us to orientate ourselves in a reality that has become too complex for our restricted minds.
However, the availability of AI’s analytical potentials is not only a matter of distribution but, as I have demonstrated, also a matter of form. When implementing AI as a medium for shaping social experience, we have to be careful how we engage in its cognitive structure. Aesthetics, in its descriptive sense, can facilitate such an awareness by critically assessing the conditions of experience that AI imposes on us. Regarding the impact of AI on everyday life (and the multiple political questions connected to it), aesthetics as a discipline should revive its original educative function, not so much defining standards of artistic value but examining the forms of how subjectivity is constituted through the social organization of experience.
According to Benjamin, there are two ways how aesthetics can relate to this task.[39] First, by aiming at a politization of art, aesthetics can highlight the analytical potentials of new technologies due to their structural entanglement in social conditions and challenges. Second, in contrast, an aesthetization of politics will use the same technology for a phantasmagoric weakening of the subject’s critical capacities, hiding the social character of its forms of mediation. This distinction bears a certain relevance for AI (not only in art), as AI technologies tend to weaken critical awareness by an exclusion from certain cognitive processes. The more we will have to rely on automated forms of knowledge in the future, the more important aesthetic strategies may become that offer sensible orientation within this transformed social space. Aesthetics should thus become an integral part of future forms of education concentrating on the appropriate use of machines and the critical skills that are necessary for this purpose.
The arts might again prove their strategic importance by sensually testing new technologies, disclosing their hidden limits and underexposed potentials. Hegel describes this modern reflexivity of the arts as their supposed end, while he de facto anticipates their modern formula. Partaking in the self-reflexive structure of modern subjectivity, the arts for Hegel became dissatisfied with their own sensual conditions, whose immediacy they are no longer willing to accept. This modern rationality of the arts to permanently contest established structures of mediation should be taken into account when aesthetic practices relate to a medium that is based on the opposite principle of replicating learned patterns of representation. As long as art stays aware of its task to not only mirror our self-confident image but also its underlying grimace, the arts won’t die for good—and society in the age of AI may benefit from their findings. “Art presents humanity with the dream of its doom so that humanity may awaken, remain in control, survive.”[40]
Anne Virginia Meindl
avmeindl@hfg-karlsruhe.de
Anne Meindl is doctoral candidate at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe. Her PhD research on Schopenhauer’s and Hegel’s hierarchies of the arts will be published this year.
Published on July 14, 2025.
Cite this article: Anne Virginia Meindl, “Aesthetics in the Age of AI: A Methodological Self-Delineation,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Special Volume 13 (2025), accessed date.
Endnotes
[1] See: Ian Bogost, “The Al-Art Gold Rush Is Here: An artificial intelligence ‘artist’ got a solo show at a Chelsea gallery: Will it reinvent art or destroy it?” The Atlantic, March 3, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/ai-created-art-invades-chelsea-gallery-scene/584134/; Sean Dorrance Kelly, “A philosopher argues that an AI can’t be an artist: Creativity is, and always will be, a human endeavor,” MIT Technology Review, February 21, 2019, https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/02/21/239489/a-philosopher-argues-that-an-ai-can-never-be-an-artist/; Jon McCormack and Mark d’Inverno, eds., Computers and Creativity (Berlin: Springer, 2012); Dieter Mersch, “Kreativität und Künstliche Intelligenz: Einige Bemerkungen zu einer Kritik algorithmischer Rationalität,” Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, no. 21 (2019): 65-74.
[2] Jason Allen, who won the Colorado State Fair’s annual art competition in 2022 with an AI-generated image, was quoted in the New York Times: “This isn’t going to stop […] Art is dead, dude. It’s over. A.I. won. Humans lost.” See: Kevin Roose, “An A.I.-Generated Picture Won an Art Prize: Artists Aren’t Happy,” New York Times, November 2, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/technology/ai-artificial-intelligence-artists.html (25 October 2024). This flirtation of art with its own destruction of course is not new but can be traced back as a modern formula for artistic renewal in avant-gardist practices ranging from Dada to Duchamp, Warhol, and others. See: Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). Hegel anticipated a modern logic of the arts as a tendency to constantly transcend its own manifestations. See: G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art I, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, first edition 1838), 602ff. Danto adopts Hegel’s thesis of a modern end of art in relation to Warhol’s Brillo Boxes. See: Arthur Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997).
[3] See: Alexander Baumgarten, Texte zur Grundlegung der Ästhetik, ed./trans. Hans Rudolf Schweizer (Hamburg: Meiner, 1983), 17.
[4] The most popular AI art generators are currently Dall-E 3 and Midjourney, both using text prompts to generate a series of matching images.
[5] Hopes for a democratization of art by AI as well as fears about art’s rationalization often underestimate the historical character of art as an institution. AI might be able to replace some functions within the so-called creative industry. As a medium based on the repetition of learned patterns, AI fundamentally differs from a modern logic of art, which permanently tries to overcome learnt patterns of representation. While film and photography contributed to a popularization and commercialization of aesthetic practices, it is not yet evident which impact AI will have on art. Their structural difference might even result in a growing gap between art and popular culture.
[6] Rancière argues that aesthetics’ affiliation with art rests on their common insight into the contingency of sensible distributions. The arts, for Rancière, model political forms of subjectivation that disrupt established structures of identification. See: Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004). This of course is only one side of the coin, considering the hegemonic implications of this insight, which will be discussed later.
[7] G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art II, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, first edition 1838), 976.
[8] Adorno has argued that the autonomy of art stands in a twofold relation to art’s status as “fait social.” While the autonomy of art is historically constituted as a function within bourgeois ideology, art can only stay true to its claim of autonomy by critically reflecting the heteronomous structures of society. See: Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone Press, 1997), 4ff.
[9] See: Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 13.
[10] Of course, this rationalist background of Baumgarten was not the only influence for aesthetics as a discipline. For a more comprehensive overview on the different traditions leaving its marks on aesthetic discourse, see: Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic; Dieter Kliche, “Ästhetik/ästhetisch,” in Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, Volume 1, ed. Karlheinz Barck (Heidelberg: Metzler, 2001), 308-400; Frederick Baiser, Diotima’s Children: German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
[11] See: Christoph Menke, Kraft: Ein Grundbegriff ästhetischer Anthropologie (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2008), 11. Menke points out that the term ’subject‘ in its modern sense was not yet established in the time of Descartes. Its modern meaning can be traced back to Baumgarten’s use of it.
[12] See: René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911, first edition 1641), 16: “As to other things such as light, colours, sounds, scents, tastes, heat, cold and the other tactile qualities, they are thought by me with so much obscurity and confusion that I do not even know if they are true or false, i.e. whether the ideas which I form of these qualities are actually the ideas of real objects or not […].”
[13] Susann Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October, no. 62 (1992): 6f.
[14] Marcuse’s famous essay from 1937 conceptualizes bourgeois culture as a compensatory displacement obstructing the realization of freedom and other bourgeois values in real life. The affirmative or hegemonic function of the aesthetic rests on the universalizing claim of absolute cultural values that can be achieved by the subject in its private realm of feeling. See: Herbert Marcuse, “The Affirmative Character of Culture,” in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (London: Mayfly, 2009), 65-98.
[15] See: Christoph Menke, “The Discipline of Aesthetics is the Aesthetics of Discipline: Baumgarten from Foucault’s Perspective,” in Baumgarten’s Aesthetics: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives, ed. J. Colin McQuillan (London: Rowmann & Littlefield, 2021), 273-282.
[16] See: Terry Eagleton, “The Ideology of the Aesthetic,” Poetic’s Today 9, no. 2 (1988): 327-338.
[17] See: Hegel, Aesthetics I, 1.
[18] See: Hegel, Aesthetics II, 635.
[19] More recently, Rancière highlighted a certain understanding of aesthetics as the distribution of the sensible shaping not only our material conduct but also our ways of perceiving and thinking. See: Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 13: “If the reader is fond of analogy, aesthetics can be understood in a Kantian sense—re-examined perhaps by Foucault—as the system of apriori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.”
[20] This article can’t share the common depiction of Hegel’s aesthetics as primarily focusing on the content of expression. See, for example: Georg Lukács, Probleme der Ästhetik (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1969), 124ff.
[21] This is a somewhat simplified depiction of Hegel’s view on architecture, especially because Hegel distinguishes among different historical forms of architecture. While symbolic architecture is marked for Hegel by a certain confusion due to the subject’s misrecognition of its own cultural achievements, architecture attains its purest form in classical art, where it is reduced to the purposive function of enclosing spirit. See: Hegel, Aesthetics II, 635ff. For a more comprehensive reading of Hegel’s hierarchy of the arts, see: Anne Meindl, Das Sensorium der Künste: Hegel, Schopenhauer und Rancière (PhD diss., Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe, 2024 unpublished).
[22] See: Hegel, Aesthetics II, 623: “Art has no other mission but to bring before sensuous contemplation the truth as it is in the spirit, reconciled in its totality with objectivity and the sphere of sense. Now since this is to come about at this stage in the medium of the external reality of artistic productions, the totality which is the Absolute in its truth falls apart here into its different moments.” Pippin has argued that “the Absolute” must be understood not as transcendent entity but in an immanent sense as “the actualization of reason.” See Robert Pippin, “The Absence of Aesthetics in Hegel’s Aesthetics,” in Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Frederick Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 395. The arts can thus be understood as different formations of reason.
[23] See: Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and other Writings on Media, eds./trans. Brigid Doherty, Michael W. Jennings and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 23: “Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception. The way in which human perception is organized—the medium in which it occurs—is conditioned not only by nature but by history.” Original Italics.
[24] See: Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics,” 3f.
[25] See, for example: Ariana Dongus, “Die lebendigen Pixel. Ein feministisch-materialistischer Beitrag zur Entwicklung künstlichen Sehens,” Art Education Research, eJournal der SFKP, no. 18 (2020), https://sfkp.ch/artikel/die-lebendigen-pixel.
[26] Such an understanding of the medium certainly may include programming languages and mathematical procedures too. Regarding Adorno’s concept of the artistic material, see: Ines Kleesattel, “Entgrenzung der Kunst,” in Handbuch Kunstphilosophie, ed. Judith Siegmund (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2022), 659.
[27] The choice of this example is not totally arbitrary, though. See: Dagny Lüdemann,“‘My Octopus Teacher’: Verliebt in einen Oktopus”, Die Zeit, September 29, 2020, https://www.zeit.de/kultur/film/2020-09/my-octopus-teacher-netflix-dokumentation-tierfilm-craig-foster.
[28] An interesting study of the impact of visual technology on conceptions of subjectivity can be found in: Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).
[29] See: Hegel, Aesthetics II, 621ff.
[30] Painting in the Hegelian sense could be called a Copernican turn in perception, as it changes the position of the subject as constitutive of reality. See: Hegel, Aesthetics II, 799ff.
[31] See: Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie, Volume 2 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1974), 145.
[32] Theodor W. Adorno, “On Subject and Object,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 248.
[33] Adorno, “On Subject and Object,” 247.
[34] See: Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (London, Pimlico, 1999), 83f: “One reason for this phenomenon is obvious: experience has fallen in value. […] With the [First] World War, a process began to become apparent which has not halted since then. Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent—not richer, but poorer in communicable experience? […] For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power.”
[35] Adorno, “On Subject and Object,” 248.
[36] See: John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas, A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change (Los Angeles: Podium, 2011).
[37] Of course, ChatGPT could also be analyzed on a more sensate level, for example, with respect to the spatial isolation or the loss of human contact that its use implies.
[38] See: Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), 192; Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (London: Continuum, 1973), 320; History and Freedom: Lectures 1964–1965, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 54.
[39] See: Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 42.
[40] Theodor W. Adorno, “Art and the Arts,” in Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 385.