Abstract

© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] this very wide-ranging and absorbing monograph, Nicholas Wolterstorff argues that modern aestheticians ignore the varieties of engagement with art, in an exclusive focus on disinterested attention. This, he argues, is because they assume the ‘grand narrative concerning art in the modern world’. According to Wolterstorff, this narrative holds that in the Early Modern period in the West, members of the bourgeoisie increasingly engaged works of the arts as objects of disinterested attention. The narrative claims that this change represented the arts coming into their own, and that works of art, so engaged, are socially other and transcendent. The change arose through the emergence of a bourgeoisie with leisure and a secular civil society; thus ‘contemplation as a way of engaging with works of arts came...