Abstract

For about a hundred and fifty years, it has been continuously expressed that art has been facing a deadly crisis and
this crisis roots itself from the reality that there exists no concrete answer to the question of ‘what is art’. However related with the
non-existence of consensus on what art is, it’s nothing more than a weak understanding to claim that it is impossible to talk about
about art. Thus, it can be acknowledged that the continuous repetition of the question of ‘what is art’ and non-existence of
consensus on this subject is a clear proof of existence of a sharp struggle in art; and the state of non-consensus and historical
continuity of the struggle can be acknowledged as the main source of dynamism of art. For this reason, in this study, it is
acknowledged that non-existence of a concrete definition of art is a historical incident; and this controversial state about what art
is and calling it the crisis of art itself was made the subject of a sociological analysis. In this analysis, it is concluded that; the
actual crisis is not the crisis of art but that of aesthetics’; and that this crisis roots itself from the replacement of aesthetics regime
(which dominated art for a very long time) with the non-aesthetic ‘artist regime’ in the beginning of 20th century and the
nonfunctioning of aesthetics by this new regime