Art Unalienated

[ Noel thought he might like to call his own manifesto "Art" in recognition of Clive Bell's famous manifesto of that name 90 years ago. But I'm sure he would be amenable to suggestions for alternatives]. In 1913, Clive Bell issued his highly influential manifesto Art. It was, in effect, a riveting summary of major emerging and converging tendencies in both art theory and art practice of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which in turn caset a long shadow over the twentieth century. These tendencies can be variously described as formalism, aestheticism, autonomism, or in terms of a commitment to "art for art's sake". The aesthetic theory of art -- or in the practice of art, high modernism -- join arms in their conviction that art is separate from all other realms of social practice including those involved in the formation of belief (moral, political or otherwise), the exploration of other-than-artistic value, and the arousal of garden-variety emotions. Exhibiting the kind of specialization Weber regarded as the hallmark of modernization, the artworld in theory and practice insulated itself form other social practices as an autonomous domain--a sentiment Bell heartily endorsed and advanced in Art. The purpose of the present manifesto is to reject the alienation of art from everything else. If Bell and his successors advanced arguments in favor of aesthetic autonomism, this book aims to undermine that position and to reverse its implications for the dissociation of art from the claims of knowledge, morality, social utility, the arousal of ordinary emotions, and other features of art banished by the aesthetic theory. The bottom line is a call for reconnecting art with the concerns of everyday life, something that is intimately related to the origins of art and that remains one of its major functions, despite the preoccurpations of the highly specialized artworld and its philosophical representatives