After the Avant-Gardes

elsewhere in life.”^28 Art that cannot offer us any aesthetic experience at

all has no value of the sort Levi found in Dante’s poetry. The work of art

that thwarts aesthetic experience is stripped of value and meaning. Such

a work may still count ontologically as a work of art, but it would not

play any role in cultivating a deeper sense of humanity, it would not have

a humanizing function.

Shusterman’s worry about the future of art centers around what he

calls “the decline of aesthetic experience from Dewey to Danto,” for

[This decline] reflects... deep confusion about this concept’s diverse forms

and theoretical function. But it also reflects a growing preoccupation with

the anaesthetic thrust of this century’s artistic avant-garde, itself sympto-

matic of much larger transformations in our basic sensibility as we move

increasingly from an experiential to an informational culture. (“The End of

Aesthetic Experience,” 29)

For Shusterman,

The union of art and experience engendered a notion of aesthetic experience

that achieved, through the turn of the century’s great aestheticist movement,

enormous cultural importance and almost religious intensity. (30)

In short, aesthetic experience became “the central concept for explain-

ing the distinctive nature and value of art.” Shusterman highlights the

goals of pleasure, affect, and meaningful coherence that are part of aes-

thetic experience. Aesthetic experience, for Shusterman, is “transfigura-

tive because of its affective power and its meaning.”^29 Aesthetic

experience is central to the meaningful existence of works of art:

Though many artworks fail to produce aesthetic experience—in the sense

of satisfyingly heightened, absorbing, meaningful, and affective experi-

ence—if such experience could never be had and never had through the pro-

duction of works, art could probably never have existed.... If artworks

universally flouted this interest (and not just on occasion to make a radical

point), art, as we know it, would disappear. (38)

With aesthetic experience we find what I take to be the concept that

defines the humanizing function of art. In flouting aesthetic experience,

we risk endangering the humanizing function of art, pushing it to extinc-

tion. Art that categorically flouts aesthetic experience is art stripped of

any “powerful experience, enjoyable affect, or coherent meaning.”^30

What is the harm posed by such art and can we do anything to stop this

86 Elizabeth Millán