How to judge works of art?

How to judge works of art? Contemporary echoes of Kantien aesthetics In the early 1990s, the Esprit and Télérama journals dedicated several issues to what was called a “crisis” in contemporary art , namely the supposed loss of normative criteria allowing one to judge and evaluate works of art. Following their publication, several French philosophers – among which Marc Jimenez, Jean-Pierre Cometti, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Gérard Genette, Yves Michaud and Rainer Rochlitz – took part in a public debate which more or less explicitly centered around the Critique of Judgment, in terms similar to those employed by Kant himself in 1790. Indeed, the art world has appeared divided since then: one side (which includes, among others, Jean-Marie Schaeffer and Gérard Genette ) argues that judgment can only be subjective (left to each individual’s appreciation), while the other side (on which Rainer Rochlitz can notably be found) contends that judgment can be objective (by resting on impartial properties or criteria). Not only do these two antagonistic positions correspond respectively to the thesis and antithesis of the Kantian antinomy relative to the judgment of taste , they also exclude what allowed Kant to resolve this apparent aporia: the notion of common sense. A detailed analysis of the aforementioned positions nevertheless calls for a complexification of this somewhat schematic description of the current debate. Other philosophical legacies deserve to be recognized and examined; a semiotic study of the main expressions used (“contemporary art”, “aesthetic judgment”, “artistic criteria”) also sheds light on linguistic differences – which can contribute to the distortion of the debate and to the caricaturing of the positions at hand; contemporary art, finally, has redefined the debate’s fundamental terms, since it has questioned several notions and definitions which seemed to be given until recently – starting with the very idea of “work of art”. If, in its general outline, the current debate therefore can be apprehended through the Kantian treatment of the issue of the aesthetic judgment, it is not limited to his framework of analysis, and those convergences and divergences will be highlighted here. This presentation will therefore reexamine the issue of the judgment of works of art, by challenging Kantian aesthetics through contemporary artistic philosophical discourses and practices