How to judge a work of art today (original) (raw)

How to judge a work of art? This question, already present in the Critique of the Power of Judgment by Immanuel Kant, was updated in France in the early 1990s (thus more or less two centuries later), when the Esprit and Télérama journals dedicated some issues to what was called a "crisis" in contemporary art, namely the supposed loss of normative criteria allowing one to evaluate artworks. Following their publication, several French philosophers-among which Marc Jimenez, Yves Michaud, Gérard Genette, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, and Rainer Rochlitztook part in a public debate on judgment, which more or less explicitly centered on the third Critique, in terms similar to those employed by Kant himself in 1790. Underlining the specificity of this debate, the present paper intends to (re)examine the issue of the judgment on works of art, by presenting and responding to two types of relativism and establishing a dialogue between Kantian aesthetics and contemporary philosophical discourses.