Abstract
The conviction that art has an aesthetic function prevailed in the field of aesthetics and art theory until the 1960s, when it was disrupted by neo-avant-garde tendencies. Thanks to them, the aesthetic level of art began to be questioned and cited as insufficient for defining newly emerging artistic strategies.
In its first part, the text summarizes the main tendendies and approaches of the debate rejecting the aesthetic definition of contemporary art. In the current discourse, I will mainly focus on the critical revision of the terms aesthetic and antiaesthetic (or antiestheticist) in determining the conditions of production of contemporary art.
In the last section, then, using primarily the arguments of Camiel van Winkel, Martin Seel and Juliane Rebentisch, I show that even in the conceptual and post-conceptual art, the constitutive experience of art is the aesthetic experience.