ART BEYOND AESTHETICS: PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM, ART HISTORY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

In 1965 the American art critic Harold Rosenberg declared: ‘Art criticism today is art history, though not necessarily the art history of the art historian.’ This raises the question of precisely what kind of art history art criticism is (or should be), and what its relations are to ‘the art history of the art historian’. This essay addresses this question through the relationship between art criticism and philosophy. More specifically, it offers an account of the critical structure of an historically reflective Romantic philosophy of art. Such a philosophical criticism, it is argued, provides the appropriate framework for grasping the distinctively post‐conceptual (and anti‐aesthetic) condition of contemporary art. Art criticism today should be the art history of an historically reflective Romantic philosophy of art.