Abstract

For the properly “cultivated,” proclaimed Oscar Wilde in 1890, “beautiful things mean only Beauty.”1 The idea that artworks possess a discrete and autonomous type of value, by virtue of their capacity to provoke a distinctively aesthetic type of response, is most often associated with artists and critics belonging to the modernist tradition of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Certainly, many influential writers of the period who expressed more instrumentalist attitudes toward the value of their own work, such as Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, have also without manifest perversity been classified as modernists. But latter-day, self-described defenders of modernism (e.g., Susan Sontag, Gabriel...