A great deal has changed in the ten years since the first edition of this book was published; an area of rather esoteric interest has become one of the major public battlefields of political and academic debate. Rejecting both the art historian's essentialism and the sociologist's reductionism, Janet Wolff argues in this new edition that the concept of the aesthetic must be rescued as much from those who would equate artistic value with political worth as from the total aesthetic relativists who are rendered incapable of judging artistic value.