she's venus in blue jeans

I recently started reading Wendy Steiner's Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth Century Art as part of my off and on attempt to dig into recent writing on beauty in aesthetics.  Steiner, a professor of English at UPenn and author of a highly regarded volume on contemporary art controversies, The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism, promises to demonstrate that modernist aesthetics, rooting in Kantian ideas of the sublime, shattered an old association between the feminine and beauty in a way that was profoundly misogynistic and distorting of the relations between ethics and aesthetics.  Not that premodern modes couldn't be misogynistic themselves, but the attack on beauty that she sees as characteristic of most modern art was one that was inherently tied to an attack on femininity.  Steiner's version of (for lack of a better word) postmodernity looks to restore a connection between ethics and aesthetics and rescue the idea of femininity in art from the devalued position she sees it as having occupied.

Now the above may be somewhat inaccurate, as I'm only in the second chapter.  And for that reason, I'm also not inclined to draw any conclusions regarding her book.  I will say that I've already spotted a serious misreading of Kant, and an arguably invalid assumption regarding the importance and weight given to aspects of his thought.  I'm also a little suspicious of her direction, in part because of how I feel about Steiner's work in general.  She's very smart, obviously, and an engaged and engaging writer.  But I've always found her work a little overly-earnest, in a very decent, good, moderate, liberal reformer kind of way.  Very . . . updated nineteenth century, a gut feeling her first chapter does little to change.  Not quite as sentimental, perhaps, but earnest, uplifting, bent on edification.  And, dammit, it's a little annoying.  Other people whom I greatly admire, like Gadamer and Arendt, also looked to connect aesthetics back to broader concerns and end the isolation in which Kant's schema placed it.  All I can say at the moment is, they did it differently than Steiner seems to be doing, and I'm not sure I'm going to buy what she gets out of it.  There were good reasons to insist on the autonomy of aesthetics, after all, and they have to be weighed against whatever gains she alleges to find.  We shall find out.