Media policies and aesthetics

Abstract

The article suggests comparative analysis of the transformation of the aesthetic approach in the era of the medial turn. How does the object of aesthetics change, what are its principles and methods? How does media-analytics affect the traditional aesthetic analysis and its subject’s theming? For this purpose, the author examines two extreme positions of the apology of aesthetics and its radical criticism. The principal feature of the media analysis stands out, to which a value-neutral judgment, formality and emotional indifference are inherent. Aesthetics, however, retain the productivity of its evaluation resource. Media has its own interests and its own approaches to pursue them. In this case the media relies on the aesthetics resource. However, the role of aesthetics in obtaining the media power is explored insufficiently. The analysis of relationship between media policies and aesthetic regime will allow to define the media’s own specific policies aimed at self-determination and self-justification, as well as the new horizons of aesthetics. Aesthetics has its own policy. An acute question is raised about the sphere that is not given to aesthetics, on which it cannot draw a network of its categories, which again indicates the irrevocability of out-of-aesthetic experience. And on the contrary, what is brought under the category of aesthetic loses its modus of relevance, turning into a normative regime of art or a legitimate page in the history of culture. The regularity is noticed, the more slender is the history of aesthetics and the clearer are its foundations and criteria of self-reflection, the stronger is the will to block its true resource. In other words, the will to history, constructed on the basis of the principles of its self-description remaining in the last century, leads to the stagnation of aesthetics.

Keywords:

media, aesthetics, policies, judgment, performance, contemporary art