Book Review

Grant H. Kester: Beyond the sovereign self: Artistic autonomy from the avant-garde to socially engaged art. Durham and London: Duke University Press 2024

Björn Borsteinsson

2024

Resiliency in the Cultural Sector
Journal of Cultural Management and Cultural Policy 2024

P. 260–264

DOI: 10.14361/zkmm-2024-0215

Language: English

Abstract

Grant Kester, professor of art history at the University of California San Diego, has made a noteworthy contribution to the discussion about the relation between art and society with an impressive set of two interrelated monographs published in as many years. The second of these, Beyond the Sovereign Self, is the subject of this review but the first instalment, The Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Enlightenment to the Avant-garde (2023), which the author sees as an independent work, will not be left entirely unattended to. As clearly indicated by the titles (and subtitles) of the books, their pivotal point is the notion of sovereignty, primarily with regard to its application to beings possessing a self — for Kester, this means humans — but also in relation to the phenomenon referred to as art. In essence, Kester’s thesis comes down to a claim about the notion of sovereignty descended from the (primarily German) Enlightenment, having impinged rather too heavily upon artistic practice, not least in the twentieth century through conceptions of art manifested in avantgarde movements. Kester’s claim, in other words, is that the avantgarde in particular, and even modernist art in general, over-emphasizes the notion of the autonomous artist. Such an over-emphasis, for Kester, recycles romantic notions of genius, intuition and transcendence in a contemporary context where an individualistic paradigm of this mold cannot but fall prey to capitalist appropriation with its all-consuming commodification of (the products of) any type of freedom-seeking activity (KESTER 2023). A prime example is, of course, artistic creation. Thereby, art’s socio-critical edge is blunted or even obliterated.

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