POP 4 (1) pp.

113126 Intellect Limited 2013

Philosophy of Photography
Volume 4 Number 1
2013 Intellect Ltd Reviews. English language. doi: 10.1386/pop.4.1.113_5

reviewS
Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, Peter Osborne
(2013)
London: Verso, 288 pages,
ISBN 9781781680940, p/bk, 19.95.
Reviewed by Blake Stimson, University of California, Davis
Contemporary art is badly known, Peter Osborne declares boldly on the first page of his ambitious
book Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art; indeed, he asserts further on, we suffer
from a dearth of intellectually serious criticism (1, 102). The two leading critical approaches governing our current understanding, he argues, are fundamentally misguided: that which attempts to
broaden our purview via the new social history of art, feminism, semiotics, psychoanalysis and
postcolonial studies, [all reaching] toward the euphoric horizon of studies in visual culture and
that which attempts to deepen it historically an approach dominated by second-generation October
art historians have both failed to grasp contemporary art philosophically in its contemporaneity
(4, 8). The problem is that each of these now-conventional methods distances itself from the seat of
judgment, one spatially and the other temporally. The first does so by reducing art and judgment
alike to expressions of their respective cultures; the second by falling back on a reconstruction of
critical positions held by artists and critics at the time leaving us with the second-hand opinions of
criticism by historical proxy (4). Neither approach is able to grasp contemporary art philosophically
because it does not reach for the universal bases that sustain criticism. Each in its own way disavows
the project of art criticism by confusing the categories of art and aesthetic (thus muddying the
philosophical accounts of aesthetic value bequeathed to us by Kant and artistic value given to us

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byRomanticism) and forgoing the project of thinking the concept of art at once philosophically and
historically with futurity (8). Contrary to the conventional wisdom of such contextualist
approaches, Osborne writes, modernism is far from over and its foundational questions about
aesthetic and artistic value and about arts reach towards a better world remain the only viable bases
for restoring to art criticism its central role in constituting the history of art (72, 11). Put more
simply, taking such long-sidelined philosophical concerns seriously once again is the only way to
effectively approach the crucial question of how and why contemporary art matters, even if the
answer cannot be the same as it once was.
Such is the considerable challenge posed by Anywhere or Not at All, a challenge that is both farreaching in its critical analyses and immediately pressing in its aims. Its own way of taking up that
challenge, however, is in equal parts refreshing and frustrating: it is refreshing because it describes
the problem in such an illuminating way but frustrating because it remains a description a
philosophy of contemporary art, as the books subtitle promises much more than the criticism
that its philosophy demands. In this sense, the argument, as insightful as it is, often seems stuck in
the same position of disavowal that it diagnoses so well even as it enlightens us to the depth and
extent of the problem at hand.
By Osbornes own analysis, the root of the disavowal at issue is found not so much in the missing intellectual seriousness of philosophical or art-historical method as it is in contemporary art
itself. For example, drawing on Terry Smiths account of contemporary arts contemporaneity as the
pregnant present of the original meaning of modern, but without its subsequent contract with the
future, he argues that the concept of the contemporary involves a disavowal a disavowal of its
own futural, anticipatory or speculative basis, which at once obliterates historical consciousness and
projects a nonexistent unity onto the disjunctive relations between coeval times (24, 23). Collapsing
time into an eternal present and thus foregoing the foundational doctrines of our forebears or the
ensuing well-being of our descendants that have traditionally bound us socially to etiological and
teleological lines of development, we convene together, separate but equal, in the anomie and bliss
of fluid but isolated interchangeability. Nothing expresses this better, he argues, than the spectacular
photographic and post-photographic image so prevalent in contemporary art. The same formal relations can be expressed spatially as well: To each work its own spatiality, is one way, he suggests,
but even better is the titles more resolute Anywhere or not at all hence contemporary arts reliance on the series rather than the ism as its primary organizing principle (151, 86). Osborne labels
this tendency the structural libertarianism of contemporary art and attributes it to, on the one
hand, the increasingly pervasive sovereignty of the commodity form that provides the model of
freedom in capitalist societies, and, on the other, to the absence of new, unalienated social forms of
universality (85, 87). In the end, we are told, there is no turning back to the democratic freedom
ofthe waning universals from the libertarian freedom of the flourishing commodity as this would

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lead only to the false formal coherence of beauty (166). Contemporary art, the books final lines
tell us, will gain nothing from reinvesting in the idea of horizon; instead, it should look no further
than the commoditys own work of creative destruction for its model and embrace those practices
of negation that puncture horizons of expectation (211). Indeed, it is explained, something like this
was the aim of modernism all along with its rejection of received universals in the name of subjective freedom hence, contrary to the governing opinion, it being far from over (84).
The historical and philosophical ground of Osbornes analysis, much like that of the culturalist
and Octoberist schools he critiques, is built up from a repudiation of Kants account of aesthetic
experience, a refutation that he attributes to Romanticism and its legacy in modern and contemporary art. The main problem with Kants account, he writes, was its principled indifference to
works of art and thus its exclusion of art judgments (such as this is a beautiful painting) from
aesthetic judgments of taste (42). While it is fair enough to say that Kant had no ontological concept
of the artwork (and, indeed, had no interest in having one) it is a much bigger stretch to say that his
was a philosophy of indifference towards works of art or anything else (44). As Kant himself put it,
the determining ground is the feeling of the subject and not a concept of an object (Kant 2001:116).
That is, aesthetic judgments (such as this is a beautiful painting just as much as this is a beautiful
flower) are experiences of pleasure and/or displeasure and, as such, are by definition the opposite of
indifferent. Beautiful art, he wrote in one characteristic passage, for example, is a kind of representation that is purposive in itself and, though without an end, nevertheless promotes the cultivation
of the mental powers for sociable communication (Kant 2001: 185). Beautiful art, like beauty in
nature, in other words, pleases in its form, not by its conformity to a concept nor through mere
sensation. [P]ainting properly so called (which does not have the aim, say, of teaching history or
knowledge of nature), in other words, is there merely to be viewed, in order to entertain the imagination in free play with ideas and to occupy the power of aesthetic judgment without a determinate
end (Kant 2001: 201).
Such accounts of Kants principled indifference are the legacy of a doggedly persistent misreading that passed from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche to us: in Osbornes words, that Kants transcendental aesthetics established disinterest as a condition of possibility of pure aesthetic judgments of
taste (177). The problem with such readings, as Heidegger once put it, is that taste is not thought
in terms of the content that remains in aesthetic behaviour when interest in the object falls away
(Heidegger 1991: 110). What is disavowed, in other words, is the experience of beauty itself by
making the would-be aesthetic response either all body like the simple sensation of bright colour
or a cool breeze, on the one hand, or the simple desire for blind faith or unbridled freedom, on the
other or all mind where experience is reduced to its conformity to an idea. In the process, the
Kantian account of a distinctive pleasure that mediates between mind and body, between understanding and desire, between ideas and feelings, between the true and the right, is lost. This was the

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great value that beautys purposiveness without purpose, in Kants wording, or, as we might add in
our own, interestedness without interest, was to provide. The ground for this pleasure, as he put
it, is the correspondence of an object (be it a product of nature or of art) with the relationship of the
cognitive faculties among themselves (Kant 2001: 77). What is lost in accounts that lean too heavily
on the theme of disinterest in Kants philosophy, in other words, is the urgency, centrality and
purpose of the interestedness that he insisted remains.
Of course, Osborne and the others may well be right that Kants account of a reconciliation
between our conflicted ways of approaching the world found in a distinctive pleasure taken in
objects in a flower, say, or a painting, or even, we might imagine, a photograph is a false formal
coherence prompting a false horizon of expectation and is thus inadequate philosophically.
Something like this, after all, has been our common sense for a long time now. So too the old social
dream that arose from such pleasures the dream of a true and right society that integrated moral
purpose with scientific understanding rather than falling back on the false universalism of myth, on
the one hand, or the false particularism of sciences survival-of-the-fittest notion of self-interest, on
the other may be philosophically and politically obsolete. As Osborne puts it, 191789 increasingly appears as a parenthesis in a universal history of capital (135). We cant really know one way
or another whether this reconciliation actually exists, or, as we used to imagine, we cant really know
in the sense of understanding such knowledge can only be experienced as pleasure or displeasure
and not as knowledge per se, Kant had us believe, because the scientific faculty of understanding
and the moral faculty of reason are irreconcilable with one another on their own terms.
Courage was once the badge of intellectually serious criticism: as the most famous of gambits
had it, Have courage to use your own reason! that is the motto of enlightenment. For art criticism, this motto can be rephrased as Have courage to use your own taste! or Have courage to
make art judgments (such as this is a beautiful painting)! Ultimately, this is why we are no longer
modern: the current state of our criticism Osbornes as much as those he critiques disavows the
courage of conviction necessary to say this is a beautiful painting and so, as he says of the artistic
genre institutional critique, appears as a constructed mimesis of the ability of cultural institutions
within developed capitalist societies to sustain and recuperate their own critique (159). That is, the
disavowal of the critical exercise of taste in favour of Osbornes philosophical description, like the
cultural and historical contextualism he sets himself against, anticipates, enacts and commemorates
the failure of institutions like journalism, universities and governments as much as art and its institutional way in the world, to live up to the foundational Enlightenment ideal of criticism itself. Such
disavowals are always as melancholic over their lost object of beauty as they are exultant about the
freedom from the responsibility that experiences of beauty impose, but it may also be that they are
simply right: our love of the never-ending pregnancy of our contemporaneity without any contract
with the future may indeed be the only excitement available to us.

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In the end, Anywhere or Not at All is a brilliant book. It is packed full of far more thoughtful
insight and nuanced argument than can be addressed here and we will be well served if it is widely
read and seriously debated. The foundational question for art about taste, its horizons, and the courage necessary to give birth to a better world, is not one that any single book can resolve on its own
instead, it can only be a question for our age.

References
Kant, Immanuel (2001), Critique of the Power of Judgment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heidegger, Martin (1991), Nietzsche, Vol. 1: The Will to Power as Art, Vol. 2: The Eternal Recurrence of
the Same, New York: HarperOne.

On the performativization of action: Discussions around politics and

aesthetics in non-governmental activism
Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism,
Meg McLagan and Yates McKee (eds) (2012)
1st ed., New York: Zone Books, 662 pp.,
ISBN 978-1935408246, h/bk, 25.95.
Reviewed by Josefine Wikstrm, Kingston University
Arguably, with the publication of Jacques Rancires Le Partage du sensible: Esthtique et politique
(2000) and the broader reception its translation into English enabled the landscape of contemporary philosophy and aesthetics changed fundamentally. The last few years have seen increased
attention paid to his work in the fields of art theory, cultural- and performance studies. And this has
occurred in ways that seem to confirm Peter Osbornes analysis of philosophys influence on cultural
theory, namely, that the former enters the latter largely through rough elements of the modern
European or continental tradition; displaced fragments, patched together in creative bricolages to
suit the needs of the moment (2000: iiv).

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