Ebook: Aesthetics after the End of Art, interview

Article. — Arts. — 1997. — Vol. 56 — No. 1(Aesthetics and the Body Politic, Spring) — pp. 38-45.Buck-Morss's recent essays-including "Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered"; "The City as Dreamworld and Catastrophe"; and "Envisioning Capital: Political Economy on Display"'— have set out a provocative new interpretation of the status of the aesthetic within contemporary culture. Buck-Morss has returned to the term's early definition to rethink the aesthetic in relationship to somatic or bodily knowledge under the impact of modernity. In response to a recent October questionnaire on "visual culture," she writes of the "liquidation of art as we have known it" under the proliferation of techniques of reproduction, and calls for a new critical analysis of the "image as a social object" in which theory itself becomes a visual practice.2 The following interview took place through a series of telephone conversations and e-mail exchanges during July 1996. In it Buck-Morss discusses her recent work on the aesthetic and its significance for art making.