At the beginning of the twenty-first century it seems that history might be repeating itself with a call to a return to aesthetics. Not so much the aesthetics of the philosophers as the domain of the aesthetic itself. At the beginning of the twentieth century philosophical aesthetics had run out of steam: the German idealists had made themselves too remote from the practice of art to be of any use to art history. Alois Riegl felt that aesthetics had to be done again, this time from art. Max Dessoir felt that a united effort had to be made by psychologists, anthropologists, and theorists of the humanities—the practitioners of Kunstwissenschaften—to create a new aesthetics out of the domain of art. The major change between then and now, apart from changes in the social sciences and humanities themselves, was a revolution in artistic practice itself. The twentieth century saw the emergence of what Arthur Danto calls “the Intractable Avant-Garde”: artists who self-consciously set out to reject Beauty and even the Aesthetic itself. As Danto argues in The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 2003), it is a mistake to confuse artistic values...