5/ The Consequences of This Critique of Aesthetics

We must clearly distinguish between art, understood as the body of works, techniques, and institutions such as museums, and aesthetics, as the discipline that claims to study the pleasure experienced when viewing a work of art—that is, aesthetic feeling.

Aesthetics can only hold a legitimate place as an independent and coherent discipline if it has a unique object of study exclusive to it, thereby establishing its necessity. Otherwise, it would be superfluous, its object overlapping in substance with those of other disciplines.
Aesthetics lays claim to two unique objects that no other discipline addresses: the concept of beauty and the pleasure derived not from the matter, but from the form, of an object.

Disciplines such as physiology or psychoanalysis can study the causes or nature of the pleasure derived from an object's matter—pleasure that falls under the category of the agreeable. However, since an entirely different kind of pleasure is held to arise from an object's form, aesthetics, as a distinct discipline, is deemed necessary to study this specific pleasure.

Moreover, because beauty is a concept with a particular, irreducible meaning, distinct from related concepts such as pleasantness or value, it is taken to warrant study by a specific discipline: aesthetics.

If we have succeeded in showing that the concept of beauty and the pleasure derived from form are not genuinely distinct—in that they can be reduced to already familiar, clearer concepts—then aesthetics loses both its coherence and its necessity. Its legitimacy rested entirely upon these two concepts. Art itself, however, remains; only the discourse surrounding it must now be re-situated within another discipline. Axiology takes the place of aesthetics as the field in which questions about art are properly examined.

Rather than diminishing art, the dissolution of aesthetics may in fact enable it to reach its fullest expression by uncovering its true foundation.

A work of art can now be understood as an object capable of conveying 'contents of meaning of great value', whether that value speaks to the general public or to unique, individual sensibilities, depending on the artist's intent.

Museums thus become 'places where encounters with value can occur'—something often absent from the 'real' world—thereby granting art its distinctive legitimacy as a space capable of producing an experience available nowhere else.
Such encounters with value may be unprecedented and even unsettling. Contemporary art, in which the 'unsettling' is most prominently foregrounded, may indeed benefit from the disappearance of aesthetics. Aesthetics would no longer be able to confer legitimacy on an art form unconcerned with beauty and no longer reliant on the traditional Aristotelian pairing of matter and form.

Finally, if the disappearance of aesthetics were established as necessary, it might paradoxically allow us to answer the traditional question it has posed since its inception: 'I find this work beautiful. But is it really beautiful?'

So long as this question is framed in terms of beauty, it remains unanswerable. How can one respond to a question built upon an empty concept? If beauty is some mysterious quality that magically appears or vanishes in a work depending on the viewer, we will never be in a position to determine whether the work is truly beautiful.
If, however, we reformulate the question as: 'Do the contents of meaning we encounter in this work (such as joy, the colour red, and so on) hold any real value?', we arrive at least at a meaningful question. We ask, for instance, whether joy occupies a high place in the real and universal hierarchy of things.
At this point, it falls to axiology—the discipline devoted to determining the value of things—to provide an answer. Should axiology succeed in achieving its objective, the question of the true 'beauty' of things would be resolved. But is this not merely a vain hope?
This lingering doubt remains at the very heart of our inquiry.

There is, in sum, a certain irony of fate: it may only be by disappearing that aesthetics ultimately resolves the aesthetic problem—revealing that, at its core, there is nothing truly aesthetic about it.