This paper analyzes six different ways of articulating the relationship between art and politics. It calls attention to the differences that lurk behind the seemingly simple phrase—everywhere in vogue today—the “politics of aesthetics.” Five of these models are drawn from contemporary discussions regarding the politics of art. The last model is the attempt to develop an account of the politics of aesthetics that is faithful to the difficult and ambiguous dimensions of the aesthetic experience that were hinted at by the texts of classical philosophical aesthetics. Most notably, this paper is concerned with the idea that the aesthetic experience can be understood as a form of disinterested contemplation—one that is not reducible to cognitive or moral considerations—and with some of the consequences that this entails. It explores some of the political significance that can be attributed to this idea of disinterested contemplation, arguing that the aesthetic should be understood as a withdrawal from the world’s pre-established meanings. Unlike some of the other thinkers discussed in this paper, this author doubts that a single, uniform meaning can be ascribed to the aesthetic experience. I thus argue that we need to approach the aesthetic through the networks of textual significance that have been built up around it. Throughout this paper, I attempt to explain how the efforts to link art and aesthetics to politics simultaneously give rise to ideas about the nature of the human community. In looking at the sixth and final model, what I have called the “anarchical politics of aesthetic ambiguity,” I argue that the aesthetic tradition offers a rather unique way of understanding the relationship between the individual and the community. Here, we see that the aesthetic is prone to a number of paradoxes, central among them the one that makes art the bearer of a solipsistic pleasure in which we nevertheless discover our capacity for genuinely communicating with others, outside of clichés and banalities.
