UC Berkeley

One of the more compelling claims in the history of aesthetics is Theodore Adorno’s claim in his AestheticTheory that, “The task of aesthetics is not to comprehend artworks as hermeneutical objects; in the contemporary situation, it is their incomprehensibility that needs to be comprehended” (2015, p.118). In a few words, this sentence addresses the question that motivates this dissertation. Artworks resist understanding. Adorno sees this as a problem for aesthetics. In this dissertation I reflect on the problem Adorno’s claim illuminates for art criticism. If art criticism is an inquiry of understanding, and works of art resist comprehension, then what is it for art criticism to be appropriately and productively responsive to a work of fine art? I contend that a discourse adequate to the challenge of art criticism needs to be ‘poetic’. Not in the sense of a literary genre, but rather in the Platonic sense of poiesis as the ‘bringing-forth’ of new forms of thought. Art criticism is not principally about describing or evaluating. Instead we should see that art criticism is primarily about opening a conversation that responds to an artwork. The result of my inquiry is a radically different picture of art criticism to that offered by prevailing discourses in philosophical aesthetics.

My goal in this dissertation is twofold. My first aim is to offer a novel analysis of art criticism. Iconsider the structure of thought involved in criticism, the form of interpretation proper to criticism, the language of criticism, and the kinds of sociality that are thereby emergent. My second aim is to bring German Classicism and Idealism, the work of Friedrich Schiller and Friedrich Hölderlin in particular, into contact with contemporary philosophical thought.