Aestheticizing the World of Organization – Creating Beautiful Untrue Things

Abstract

The aesthetic has long endured an uneasy relationship with institutions of power and authority. For Plato (trans. 1955/1987), the subversive potential he detected in the practice of art, and the aesthetic it engendered, was sufficient for him to call for poets and performers to be banned from his ideal Republic, lest they should corrupt his guardians and future philosopher kings. For the great minds of the Enlightenment the aesthetic, something unwieldy and corporeal in its nature, threatened their equally idealized realm of mind and led Kant (1790/1952) to construct his elaborate philosophical system to ensure its subservience to the exercise of reason and judgement. More recently, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as modernity witnessed art and aesthetic practice emerge as a radical political and cultural force, the Janusfaced character of the age became increasingly apparent as the creations of the avant-garde rapidly became the sole preserve of the rich and powerful in society to accumulate and enjoy.