Aesthetics is for artists what ornithology is for birds

Philip Courtenay writes:

Working collaboratively, thinking collaboratively, translating and exploring, is fun! But, so far, it just seems to be me jotting stuff down on the blog. Anyone interested in adding stuff just e-mail me and I can give you details for editing this blog.

Barnett Newman (Abstract Expressionist, New York School) provides the quotation that titles this post. Interpreting this idea could, but not exclusively, include the following:

• Is this statement about the qualitative difference between the knowledge, awareness or awakeness, produced in a process of making art, as distinct from the reproduction and consumption of art?
• Has the reception of art, the experience of the audience of art, punters and experts alike, been drowned out by the accompanying noise of the "consciousness" industries (as discussed by Hans Haacke and others involved in Institutional Critique all those years ago) to an extent where it is sleepfulness that now reigns supreme?

In exhibitions of artworks, like the Biennial at the Liverpool Tate at the moment, I often experience a profound sense of emptiness, and this feeling is amplified by a sense of aloneness whilst walking through the galleries. Glimpses of the River Mersey from the few windows on this the top floor are a reminder of a beautiful world "out there". I then go "looking for the artists" , obviously as a mental quest, and even though the work is there, and the artists are not, the context that I need to find them seems to have been blown away by all this "noise" or "whiteness" (white noise?) . How to search for and find what is missing? Why am I looking and not finding?

The Wikipedia page on aesthetics includes the following questions:

• What is the value of art?
• Is art a means of gaining knowledge of some special kind?
• Does it give insight into the human condition?
• Is art perhaps a tool of education, or indoctrination, or enculturation?
• Does art make us more moral?
• Can it uplift us spiritually?
• Is art perhaps politics by other means?
• Is there some value to sharing or expressing emotions?
• Might the value of art for the artist be quite different from its value for the audience?

Considering this last question I wonder; can this difference be bridged? Is it worth bridging? Is there a way in art, a style of art that is about bridging? Bridge building is a job for engineers, but is art, the process of making art, potentially a part of a wider engineering of the communication structure that shapes our experience of the world?

When in 1973 Joseph Beuys wrote:

“Only on condition of a radical widening of definitions will it be possible for art and activities related to art [to] provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build ‘A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART’… EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who – from his state of freedom – the position of freedom that he experiences at first-hand – learns to determine the other positions of the TOTAL ART WORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER.”

Was he right? Or mistranslated?
Was he proposing rather than announcing?