Event Detail

It’s often assumed that Kant’s aesthetics—focused on beauty, pleasure, and taste—has little to say about modern and contemporary art. Arthur Danto gives this view its clearest expression in his “end of art” thesis. He casts Kant as the emblem of an outdated aesthetic tradition that was never adequate to art’s nature and, in fact, only obscures it. For Danto, the historical narrative of art ended with works like Duchamp’s Fountain and Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, whose status as art depends not on how they look but on how they reflect on the very concept of art.

This approach gets not just Kant, but the nature of aesthetics, wrong. Kant’s theory offers a surprisingly powerful ontology of art—one centered on reflection, not perception—and it is none other than Danto who helps bring this into sharp focus.

In this talk, I read Danto against himself: his ontology of art, far from breaking with aesthetics, inadvertently reenacts, point-for-point, the Kantian framework it rejects. What Danto reveals is not art’s distinction from aesthetics, but its essential reliance on it. This reframing of Danto both remains true to his own terms and offers a renewed account of Kant’s aesthetics. Modern and contemporary art, on this view, don’t mark a break from aesthetics but clarify the aesthetic condition of art. More broadly, aesthetic judgment isn’t merely a matter of taste, but a way of orienting ourselves in a world where meaning emerges through attention and judgment, rather than being found or given.