The modern aesthetic question shifted from beauty to the definition of art

Evidence

Duchamp’s “ready made” does nothing but actively and parodistically signify this constant process of dispossession of the craft of painting or even of being an artist. As Thierry de Duve penetratingly observes, the modern aesthetic question is not “What is beautiful?” but “What can be said to be art (and literature)?” — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 480

Categorization

• DEFINE: A compact statement of the post-Kantian aesthetic shift that defines modernism; key concept for a theory reader.
• XREF: This question of defining art parallels Jameson’s focus on the waning of affect and the aesthetic as category. — connects to: Western elites long defined taste as the faculty of identifying beauty — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 241