To the question of the aestheticization of modern culture

In the process of retrospective analysis of cultural epochs, one can observe the movement of the pendulum of culture from aestheticism to moralizing, and vice versa. One of the first critics of aestheticization was S. Kierkegaard, who, without denying the significance of the aesthetic, placed the latter below the ethical in the spiritual hierarchy. Domestic philosophers defended the need for a synthesis of ethics and aesthetics. Researchers of the twentieth century point to the trend of total aestheticization, the transformation and deformation of basic moral ideals. In modern times, the phenomenon of aestheticization of all social spheres, including politics and economics, is being updated, which is largely due to the formation of a «consumer society», visual and digital turns in culture. The article analyzes the main features of postmodernism that contribute to aestheticization: fragmentation, massification, clip consciousness, visual turn, loss of sacredness of traditional meanings and symbols. All of the above contributes to the strengthening of the aesthetic component and the violation of the ethical and aesthetic balance. The authors reveal that the absolutization of beauty in art leads to the degradation of tragic genres based on ethical conflicts. Art is able to educate, form a value hierarchy. Thus, art has possibilities that transform a person, which are contained in the synthetic integrity of the ethical and aesthetic, therefore, it already acquires cosmological parameters. In turn, aestheticization as the dominant of culture leads to moral limitations and the destruction of the spiritual integrity of man and society.