Feminism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and Marxism, among
other critical approaches, have undermined traditional notions of
aesthetics in recent decades. But questions of aesthetic judgment
and pleasure persist, and many critics now seek a "return to
aesthetics" or a "return to beauty."
Janet Wolff advances a "postcritical" aesthetics grounded in
shared values that are negotiated in the context of community. She
relates this approach to contemporary debates about a committed
politics similarly founded on the abandonment of certainty. Neither
universalist nor relativist, the "aesthetics of uncertainty"
provides a discourse on beauty that contemporary critics can engage
with and offers a basis for judgment that is committed to assigning
value to works of art.
Wolff explores her position through a range of topics: the
question of beauty in relation to feminist critique; the
problematic status of twentieth-century English art, visual
representations of the Holocaust, Jewish identity as portrayed by
the artist R. B. Kitaj, refugee artists and modernism in 1940s
Britain, and the nature and appeal of imagistic thinking in
sociology. She addresses the desire for certainty and the
timeliness of doubt and concludes with a meditation on the
intersection of aesthetics and ethics, arguing that ethical issues
are very much implicated in aesthetic discourse.
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