Kant's Concept Of Beauty

The definition of beauty and our response to it has proved a challenging philosophical and aesthetic problem with both philosophers, art historians and artists addressing the issue. According to Kant, beauty is art. Yet the twentieth-century would see Marcel Duchamp exhibiting urinal and calling it art, rebelling against societal notions of beauty, igniting discussion of what art is and leaving a residue of scepticism in the art world, for if anything can be art, and art does not need to be beautiful, then what is the merit in achieving that label? Since the twentieth century the place of beauty as something to be interested in, diminished in terms of philosophical aesthetics, and even the outright rejection of championing beauty, both in

This debate managed to push reference to beauty out of any pre-defined definitions of art with art historians setting aes-thetics aside in order to talk about representation and meaning in a work. The concept of beauty became abruptly politicized by avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century. As argued by Hegel and Marx, judgements of beauty are often tied up with political and social connotations such as morality. In the twentieth century, some artists viewed beauty with a sceptical eye, with the recognition of the possibility that standards of beauty are moulded and controlled by those in power for their own gains. These people in power, were in the growing materialist, post-war world often distrusted and viewed as corrupt. Artists such as the Dada-ists openly rejected established traditional notions of good taste in art. The rejection of beauty was a political statement in its self, as for Dadaism this disconnection of beauty from art was an expression of moral revulsion against society who they saw as immoral, entrenched in greed and destruction. Speaking as a Dadaist, Max Ernst

According to Kant however, this is impossible as the judgment of beauty is not a science. Calling an object beautiful is like saying, the object makes me feel happy, uncomfort-able, nostalgic, frightened and so on. It is an announcement of a personal emotion rendered in reaction to the object. For example, an image of a child holding a gun may disturb me, due to connotations that the two things together hold (death, corruption of innocence, child sol-diers). These connotations however are deeply societal and reflect my experience of objects, imagery and their associations. As Scruton puts it, there is a growing consensus that “there is not distinction between good and bad taste, but only between your taste and mine.” There-fore, I think that the discussion of beauty is still important to art historical discourse in the twenty-first-century. Not only should we be able to find beauty in works, but we also need to understand why we see it in certain art works. If, as many have suggested, art is subjective, then perhaps in the twenty-first century we should allow ourselves to address our subjectivity. We should reveal the mechanics of art criticism, and continue to explore why we find certain works of art beautiful (personal, social, psychological reasons) even if that means the intro-duction of the dreaded “I” into art historical