that the artists have“taken no risk and explored nothing.”^61 In their work,
“theory has replaced the visual element in painting rather than entering into
painting in relationship with the visual,”^62 and it has done so unfruitfully,
thus suggesting the continuing importance of the expressive-aesthetic-
medium-related aspects of successful artistic making. Osborne similarly con-
cedes that successful postconceptual art must have an“ineliminable–but
radically insufficient–aesthetic dimension.”^63 In Herwitz’s apt summary,
“art today is caught between the poles of theory and of free play,”and it“lives
when its visual [or other aesthetic-presentational] aspects resist its master
theory or when its visual aspects contribute to the formation of the theory
or when they force the theory to conform to the power of the image.”^64 Theory
alone is not enough. Successful works, whether medium-specific, conceptual,
or postconceptual, remain, in Martin Seel’s formulation,“facultative and
constitutive objects of imagination”that are“made to be explored.”^65
Can artistic beauty still matter? What about fun?
But is taking sides all that is possible? Even if it does take place, does it entirely
dominate all acts of artistic making? In reaction against structuralist antihu-
manism, there has been some recent return to talk of pleasure and beauty.
Sometimesthistakestheformofinsistenceonexperiencesofaestheticvalue
and pleasure that are provided by traditional works of high art, as in Hilton
Kramer’s defense of the canon of visual art.“The more minimal the art, the
more maximum the explanation,”Kramer is supposed to have said. Why not
stop worrying about taking sides and open ourselves to the experience of
pleasure in art? Alternatively, in exhaustion and impatience with critical
theory and with politics, both artists and fans are likely often to insist that
making and paying attention to art are fun. Such insistence can sometimes
seek to turn our attentions to phenomena of“low”art and popular culture, as
(^61) Ibid., p. 296. (^62) Ibid., p. 297.
(^63) Osborne,Anywhere or Not at All, p. 48. Compare also Sianne Ngai’s interesting survey of
conceptual art in her chapter“Merely Interesting”in herOur Aesthetic Categories: Zany,
Cute, and Interesting(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), especially her
remark that successful conceptual works produce“modest flickers of affect”(p. 151)
and set up“friction between ideas and sensory experience”(p. 165.)
(^64) Herwitz,Making Theory/Constructing Art, pp. 284, 18.
(^65) Seel,Aesthetics of Appearing, pp. 83, 84.
Art and society: some contemporary practices of art 271