Aesthetic Revolution, The Staging of ('Homosexual') Equality and Contemporary Art (Critical Essay‪)‬

Aesthetics and the practice of equality Marking a growing art world interest in the work of Jacques Ranciere, in March 2007, one of the world's leading contemporary art magazines devoted a number of pages to his work. One contributor speculated that one reason for this interest might be that the paradox intentionally lodged at its core reflected contemporary art's own contradictions (Funcke, 2007: 283). For some years Ranciere has been making interventions in a field he describes as a dispositif of the aesthetic regime of art (Ranciere, 2009b: 23). His most provocative and productive challenge has been his belief that the accepted teleology of avant-garde 'modernism' is unhelpful 'when it comes to thinking about contemporary forms of art and the relation between aesthetics and politics' (Ranciere, 2004a: 20). To try to clarify matters, he distinguishes three historically sequential, but presently co-existent 'regimes' of art, broadly associated with the ancient, classical and modern periods which he names: the ethical, representational and aesthetic. In the ancient world art had no autonomy; images were questioned solely for their truth: for their effect on the ideology and ethos of individuals and the community. In the representational regime works of art are no longer subject to the laws of truth or the common rules of utility but belong to the sphere of imitation, though not so much as copies of reality but ways of imposing form on matter. As such, they are subject to norms: hierarchy of genres, adequation of expression to subject matter, correspondence between the arts, etc. The aesthetic regime 'overthrows this normativity and the relationship between form and matter on which it is based. Works of art are now defined as such, by belonging to a specific sensorium that stands out as an exception from the normal regime of the sensible' (Ranciere, 2002: 135). The revolution of the aesthetic regime emerged fully during the eighteenth century with its manifesto reflected in the writings of Schiller, Winckelmann and Kant. Schiller said that aesthetic experience 'bear[s] the edifice of the art of the beautiful and of the art of living [...] aesthetic experience is effective inasmuch as it is the experience of that and. It grounds the autonomy of art, to the extent that it connects it to the hope of "changing life"' (Ranciere, 2002: 134). Understanding the politics of aesthetics involves understanding the ways that the autonomy of art is linked to the heteronomy of life: