Old Masters and New Lessons - Grant Kester

22. Ibid., 60/Ak216.
23. Kant describes judgments of beauty as being "public"; ibid., 57/Ak214. David Wellbery links
this "public" status to the concept of an "ideal speech situation" in the work of Jürgen Habermas
and others: "The ideal of transparency, which in the Enlightenment was conceived in semantic
terms, reappears in the work of Habermas and Apel as a pragmatic ideal: a communicational
exchange in which subjects are transparent to themselves and others. . . . As was the case in
Enlightenment theory, aesthetic representations point forward to a state of freedom in which the
compulsions and opacities of speech are finally overcome"; Wellbery, Lessing's Laocoon, 242.
24. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 164, 229, 228. Kant speaks of the sense of beauty as providing
"a mental attunement [gunstige Gemutsstimmung] favorable to moral feeling" (165/Ak299). And
he argues that someone who displays an interest in the beauty of nature must also have a
"predisposition" (Anlage) to a good moral attitude (167/Ak301). Later he describes the way in
which taste allows us to "make the transition" (macht gleichsam) between the realm of the
senses ("sensible charm") and "habitual moral interest" "without making too violent a leap"
(ohne einen zu gewaltsamen Sprung [229/Ak354]).
25. Cascardi defines aesthetic liberalism in the following way: "The aesthetic moment in Kant
replicates rather than resolves the tensions between the individual and the community that Kant
elsewhere formulates as central to the position of the subject in the modern world. Whereas the
Enlightenment reading of Kant [exemplified by Habermas] sees the third Critique as reflecting a
development of the 'inner logic' of a self-contained aesthetic sphere, and tends to privilege the
public discourse of taste over the experience of art itself, and whereas the Romantic response to
Kant tends to see the Critique of Judgment as a reintegrative and redemptive attempt to restore
unity through the formation of what Schiller called an 'aesthetic state,' to a social totality that had
been shattered by the disintegrative forces of capital, I would suggest that . . . Kant leads us to
conclude that the foundations of the liberal ethic reside not in the cognitive powers of mason or
understanding, but in the (transcendental) imagination which regrounds the liberal state as the
unity of wills under the concept of an end which has subjective claim to universality"; Anthony J.
Cascardi, "Aesthetic Liberalism: Kant and the Ethics of Modernity," Revue Internationale de
Philosophie 45, no. 176 (1991): 12-13.
26. "Gorgeous Politics, Dangerous Pleasures," 15.
27. I don't consider the nonprofit sector to be necessarily "purer" than the gallery world. Rather,
the conditions of the market, economic exchange, and symbolic capital simply operate there in a
different way. However, this difference is of considerable importance in terms of understanding
the function of artists and institutions in each site. See Grant Kester, "Rhetorical Questions: The
Alternative Arts Sector and the Imaginary Public," Afterimage 20, no. 6 (January 1993): 10-16.
28. Aesthetic Education of Man, 43. Schiller writes: "Everlastingly chained to a single little
fragment of the Whole, man himself develops into nothing but a fragment; everlastingly in his ear
the monotonous sound of the wheel that he turns, he never develops the harmony of his being,
and instead of putting the stamp of humanity upon his own nature, he becomes nothing more
than the imprint of his occupation of his specialized knowledge"; ibid., 35.
29. Hegel's Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), 189.
30. Schiller, Aesthetic Education of Man, 197.