Aesthetic Education and the Ubiquitous Bourgeois

Abstract

JONAH SIEGEL, distinguished professor of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, is the author of Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art (Princeton UP, 2000) and Haunted Museum: Longing, Travel, and the ArtRomance Tradition (Princeton UP, 2005), as well as the editor of The Emergence of the Modern Museum: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Sources (Oxford UP, 2008). His most recent books include Material Inspirations: The Interests of the Art Object in the Nineteenth Century and After (Oxford UP, 2020) and Overlooking Damage: Art, Display, and Loss in Times of Crisis (Stanford UP, 2022). The idea that one needs to learn what is beautiful, that what happens at the moment of aesthetic experience is not an automatic response, like squinting in bright light or sweating in the heat, is widely shared. Nevertheless, the process whereby one comes to learn what is beautiful gets surprisingly little sustained attention. Analysis is constrained by powerful critical conventions, including the sense that there is not much left to say once one has identified the interest determining the claim that something is beautiful. In fact, two contradictory and generally unstated (because so apparently self-evident) beliefs shape the modern relationship to aesthetic experience and limit the possibility of reflection: on the one hand, the conviction that true aesthetic responses are fundamentally individual and personal, and for that reason not capable of being taught, and, on the other, the certainty that relations to art are constrained by the interests of the group, and therefore absolutely determined and inevitable—making instruction unnecessary or worse. The temptation of recent critics has been to think of the project of aesthetic education as Karl Marx had it when he described culture as a kind of training, one in which the particular pleasures or interests of one social class are reinscribed as necessary and universal. From this perspective, the notion that social progress might be attendant on learning—and learning through art—gives off a suspicious smell of reactionary condescension even as it violates several widely shared principles about the intersection of education and politics. Current sensibilities, then, have made it difficult to recognize in the writings of Friedrich Schiller and Matthew Arnold anything other than reactionary formulations of very limited interest to contemporary thought. The sense that the aesthetic experience implied Bildung, or development, “culture” not in its simplest and least compelling sense—where it means the established body of knowledge of a