Courbet scandalized taste in their time, yet their works prove to have lasting
formal and cognitive value.
Historically, varieties of autonomism or aestheticism, urging the practice
of“art for art’s sake,”may well have arisen, as Carroll has suggested, as“an
art world maneuver to protect artworks from censorship...in response to
Plato and his puritanical descendants”and as a defensive response against
the spread of bourgeois culture and philistine instrumentalism:“aestheti-
cism attempted to seal off art hermetically from the surrounding bourgeois
and mass cultures by declaring art to be autonomous,”^28 separating high art
by fiat from commerce, entertainment, and kitsch. Against these develop-
ments, Carroll is himself concerned to maintain connections between art and
life, among other things by endorsing the moral and cognitive interest of
mass art, including such genres as the detective story and the horror film.^29
Moral experimentalism in the styles of Schlegel, Mill, Nietzsche, Dewey,
and Rorty has even deeper roots in cultural developments than aestheticism
does. Advances in technology have made more possibilities of life, including
more material satisfactions, available to more people. While these advances
may well have significant ecological limits, and while the material satisfac-
tions they enable are, though widespread, still largely limited to the middle
and upper classes of industrialized societies, the pursuit of material satisfac-
tions of many kinds seems unlikely to lapse significantly. Modern
mathematical-physical science typically (even if not necessarily) depends on
and helps to articulate a materialist metaphysics that puts pressure on
religious understandings of human nature and its fit expression. (Schlegel,
Mill, Nietzsche, Dewey, and Rorty all knew themselves to be opponents of the
great bulk of organized religion.) As a result, a fairly free moral experimen-
talism seems likely for the foreseeable future to remain the norm in both art
and life, with the consequence that wide varieties of artistic avant-gardism
will continue to be practiced, tolerated, and largely encouraged. Making and
engaging with experimentalist art seem likely to continue to be regarded as
activities that are insulated–both in fact and for good reason–to some(^28) Carroll,“Art and Ethical Criticism,”pp. 351, 352.
(^29) See Noël Carroll,The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart(London: Routledge,
1990) and Noël Carroll,A Philosophy of Mass Art(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). Carroll
describes his motivation to connect art with life explicitly in the introduction toBeyond
Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays(Cambridge University Press, 2001).
232 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art