INTRODUCTION

For almost three decades, public discourse about art has become increasingly preoccupied with moral issues. Indeed, the discussion of literature in some precincts of the humanities nowadays is nearly always in terms of morals, or, as its proponents might prefer to say, in terms of politics (though here I must hasten to add that the politics in question are generally of the sort that is underwritten by a moral agenda). Moreover, the artworld itself has begun to reflect this preoccupation to the extent that disgruntled critics have started to wonder aloud when artists are going to become interested in making art again and are going to give up preaching. Remember the fracas over the 1993 Whitney Biennial? Or, look at virtually any issue of the New Criterion.

Of course, by remarking that this is a tendency recently come to the fore, I mean to signal that things have not always been this way. Within living memory, or, at least, within my memory, I still recall being admonished as an undergraduate not to allow my attention to wander “outside the text” – where such things as moral questions lurked, as if, so to speak, on “the wrong side of the tracks.” My own initiation into the artworld occurred during the heyday of minimalism, which was understood alternatively as a project of aesthetic research into the essential conditions of painting or as an exercise in the phenomenology of aesthetic perception.