Feminism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and Marxism, among\nother critical approaches, have undermined traditional notions of\naesthetics in recent decades. But questions of aesthetic judgment\nand pleasure persist, and many critics now seek a \“return to\naesthetics\” or a \“return to beauty.\”

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Janet Wolff advances a \“postcritical\” aesthetics grounded in\nshared values that are negotiated in the context of community. She\nrelates this approach to contemporary debates about a committed\npolitics similarly founded on the abandonment of certainty. Neither\nuniversalist nor relativist, the \“aesthetics of uncertainty\”\nprovides a discourse on beauty that contemporary critics can engage\nwith and offers a basis for judgment that is committed to assigning\nvalue to works of art.

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Wolff explores her position through a range of topics: the\nquestion of beauty in relation to feminist critique; the\nproblematic status of twentieth-century English art, visual\nrepresentations of the Holocaust, Jewish identity as portrayed by\nthe artist R. B. Kitaj, refugee artists and modernism in 1940s\nBritain, and the nature and appeal of imagistic thinking in\nsociology. She addresses the desire for certainty and the\ntimeliness of doubt and concludes with a meditation on the\nintersection of aesthetics and ethics, arguing that ethical issues\nare very much implicated in aesthetic discourse.

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