Aesthetic Revolutions: the Book

Rancière's claim is expanded upon in a book of academic essays entitled Aesthetic Revolutions. Editor Ales Erjavec claims that the arts are moved by tensions between representation and transformation and between an avant-garde of "pure art" and one that is "politicized"in seeking "transformation both of life itself and of the community." This turns a couple of Rancière's concepts into a simplification that misses the subtleties of the history and tensions proposed in his co-ordinated works. Erjavec calls the transformative force the "aesthetic avant-garde, putting the focus of aisthesis on the shifts art may bring to the feeling -perception of life and community. He quotes Rancière on this being a "redistribution of the sensible" (3). All well and good, but one element is missing from these revolutions. We must measure their success in terms of revolt, in and out of the art world; their failure may be in not creating an on-going space for critical thinking. They collapse life and community into the aesthetic.

Erjavec uses Rancière's sense of representational and aesthetic regimes in a way that twists their meaning out of place by bringing them to bear on a difference within the aesthetic regime. Erjavec's use of the long-standing term"aesthetic revolution" is also bent a bit to fit his needs. He makes claims for a general cultural effect of art, and even "cultural revolution," stemming from these so-called "revolutions" that shape "new timelines in the history of art" (5). This effect is seen mostly in the way we frame things and tell their story. However, people in the streets, the offices, and the neighborhoods generally see that as an academic by-way.

How do we measure the cultural effect of art works if not by looking carefully at the intersections of change, the State, and the culture at large? Erjavec included a provocative article by Professor Tyrus Miller of UC Santa Cruz that provides us with an occasion for investigating this idea using the fairly familiar sense we have of The Sixties. Miller's piece is called "Aesthetic Revolution in the United States during the 1960s."

It is easy to say that The Sixties changed our culture indelibly; it is less easy to show it (and how it may have happened) beyond question.