Anna Gregor
– Cattelan’s Comedian:
Subjectivity and the Possibility of Sharing a World In the Art-Judgment
Cattelan’s Comedian, a work of conceptual art that takes the form of a banana duct-taped to a wall, seems to claim that Kant’s Critique of Judgment, written nearly three hundred years ago, is irrelevant to contemporary art. Comedian does not occasion Kant’s paradigmatic judgment of taste “This is beautiful.” But neither does the judgment that it is not beautiful disqualify it from being a work of art because beauty no longer seems essential to a thing’s art-status. The banana reminds us that we live in a post-medium condition in which anything can be art, and it does so with a $120,000 price tag and a smirk.
Comedian created a stir in 2019, sparking strong feelings of glee, despair, and confusion expressed in writing, action (in the case of two artists who ate iterations of it), advertisements (Popeyes and Burger King launched ads in which a chicken sandwich and french fries were duct taped to a surface), and myriad memes.1 Although I know of no one who articulated their feelings about Comedian by claiming it to be beautiful, it is the degree and the variety of felt responses and claims of its art-status, or lack thereof, that, rather than showing it to be irrelevant, calls for a reconsideration of the relevance of Kant’s aesthetic theory to contemporary art.
Kant’s aesthetic philosophy is primarily concerned with what is at stake when we—say, you or I, or anyone else—make aesthetic judgments that claim universal validity, as we do when we judge whether or not Comedian is a work of art. Both Stanley Cavell and Thierry de Duve have emphasized Kant’s insights into aesthetic judgments and have articulated how they are relevant to an artworld in which beauty is inessential. In this paper, I will compare Cavell and de Duve’s respective inheritances of Kant. Then, guided by their readings, I will redefine purposive form so as to highlight what is at stake when we make aesthetic judgments of art.
Kant’s Judgment of the Beautiful in Nature and Art
Art is not Kant’s central concern in the Critique of Judgment. Rather, Kant is concerned with the transcendental ground of aesthetic judgments of the beautiful. There is something peculiar about judgments of beauty: they, like all aesthetic judgments, are based on an individual’s subjective experience of pleasure; and yet, when we make them we act as if what we judge to be beautiful ought to be judged beautiful by everyone. Kant inductively reasons that if we are justified in this claim that judgments of beauty based on our subjective feelings are indeed universal and necessary, then the faculties responsible for the feelings that underlie judgments of beauty must be common to and function similarly in all human beings. If we approach an object disinterestedly, we will all—or ought to all—agree in our judgments. Thus, we must posit that there is a shared human sense that makes possible universal accord, a sensus communis. The existence of this sensus communis cannot be empirically proven, but it must be presupposed if it is possible to communicate our subjective feelings to one another.2
For Kant, the paradigm example of such pure judgments of taste is not a judgment of art but of nature, for it is primarily in experiencing nature that we encounter purposive forms: forms that appear as if made for some purpose but to which none can be ascribed. Purposive form prompts the free play between the faculties shared by all humans: the imagination, the faculty we use to construct the objects we encounter in the world, and the understanding, the faculty by which we categorize these objects. This free play is accompanied by a special pleasure: disinterested pleasure, which arises from the feeling of harmony between the faculties.
The implications of the idea of a sensus communis that grounds aesthetic judgments of beauty are only indirectly moral. Judgments of taste, based on the presupposition that our subjective feelings are sharable experientially reassure us of the possibility of human accord. Judgments of taste display a propensity for moral judgments, in which we often are called upon to set aside our own interest for what is morally good.3 The feeling of beauty, which presupposes a sensus communis, signifies that it is possible that we humans are united by feeling; that we share a nature, a world.
It is questionable whether for Kant the moral implication of presupposing a sensus communis in judgments of natural beauty transfers to judgments of artistic beauty. While the objects belonging to the fine arts are the only human-made things that are appropriately called beautiful, the judgments of beauty made with reference to them are generally not judgments of free beauty, like those made regarding nature, but judgments of adherent beauty, in which the free play of the faculties is less free, hampered by the fact that all fine art objects fall under a medium-specific class and are therefore judged by virtue of the perfection of the concept of that class: specifically, either poetry, oratory, architecture, sculpture, painting, horticulture, or music. Further, because they are judged according to these concepts—concepts that seem to Kant dangerously close to the concepts of things made for the end of mere gratification—the purposive form in works of art must be connected with moral ideas lest they become objects of mere vanity.4
But art has changed significantly since Kant wrote the Critique of Judgment. With these changes controversies have arisen regarding what counts as art, how it ought to be evaluated, and by whom. Over the course of the twentieth century, the determinate concepts of the different classes of the fine arts, with reference to which Kant believed judgments of beauty were rendered adherent, have become indeterminate. Coincidently, beauty has ceased to be the primary standard for evaluation. Since the 1960s, much of what has been called art can no longer be subsumed under the neat classification of the fine arts at all, with the consequence that the concept of art has become so indeterminate as to almost be indiscernible from other types of things—not only from human-made objects, but also, with the advent of environmental art and socially engaged practice, difficult to distinguish from natural things and moral actions in some cases. Anything, it seems, can be art, and it needn’t be beautiful. Faced with these new problems, Kant’s aesthetic theory, with its emphasis on beauty and the medium-specific classes of art, seems irrelevant.
Kant Updated: Danto, Cavell and de Duve
Despite its apparent irrelevance to our experience of contemporary art, some thinkers have grappled with how Kantian aesthetics might deal with the ontological and evaluative problems that have accompanied the changes in art since the 1960s.
A major strategy for thinkers faced with art’s recently unclear ontological status and evaluative standard has been to pursue a new definition with determinate criteria by which to decide the status of a thing that claims to be art. For such thinkers, it is only after the ontological problem is solved that the problem of evaluation can be broached. One such thinker, Arthur Danto, interprets Kant’s conception of a work of art as an aesthetic idea, an idea made sensible; or, in Danto’s terms, an embodied meaning.5 After something is identified as an artwork by properly tracing its causal history, it can then be evaluated in light of how well the idea is embodied; or, in Kant’s terms, in light of the degree of genius present in a work and how it is informed by taste. Danto, claiming that Kant’s conception of judgments of beauty in the fine arts laid out in §43-54 is incompatible with his conception of judgments of beauty in nature, abandons Kant’s transcendental grounding of aesthetic judgments of taste in the sensus communis. For Danto, the judgments of taste regarding art do not depend on the faculties common to all humans. Art is essentially art-historical and so can only be properly identified and subsequently evaluated by someone who possesses a knowledge of art theory and history. Someone who doesn’t have that knowledge—who isn’t a part of the art world—can neither correctly identify nor evaluate art. Their subjective experience is irrelevant to the work of art.
In contrast to Danto’s re-determination of the newly indeterminate concept of art, Stanley Cavell and Thierry de Duve take the indeterminacy of art, and the consequent controversies regarding what art is, what we value in art and who art is for, to be central to the experience of art from the 1960s onward. For both thinkers, art remains an indeterminate concept, so that, lacking criteria to appeal to, the classification of something as art can’t come prior to its evaluation.6 7 We can’t empirically prove that something is a work of art. We can only, based on a subjective feeling or conviction, judge something to be art by claiming it to be so. This art-judgment is an aesthetic judgment similar in structure to Kant’s judgment of taste: a judgment based on a subjective feeling that claims universality on non-conceptual grounds.8 9 Both emphasize the claim involved in the art-judgment’s appeal to universality and posit a transcendental grounding of such judgments: if we can validly claim universality for our subjective feeling that something is art, then we must have basic human faculties in common that make possible the communication of subjective feelings that underlie this universally valid judgment.[10]11
De Duve calls the present condition of art, in which a banana duct-taped to a wall can be considered an artwork, the Art-in-General system. In contrast to the Beaux-Arts system, wherein “social consensus reigns that specifies the conventions of a given medium,” the Art-in-General system is defined by the fact that “art can be made from anything whatsoever…: any material, any medium, any style, any technique, and subject-matter, any form, any object.”12 In short, anything goes. For de Duve, the art-judgment is based on a subjective feeling that something is art that we feel to be, and therefore claim to be, universally valid.13 De Duve updates Kant’s Critique of Judgment for the Art-in-General system by mechanically replacing every instance of the word “beauty” with the word “art,” thereby translating Kant’s paradigmatic judgment of taste “This is beautiful” to “This is art.”14 De Duve includes negative aesthetic judgments, so that the judgment “This cannot be art,” too, is an aesthetic judgment claiming universal validity.15 The art-judgment, based on the sense that one’s subjective experience has universal validity, signals a sensus communis. The presupposition of a sensus communis requires that we understand everyone else’s claims to signal the same—despite the empirical fact that our claims often do not agree.16 We must presuppose a sensus communis, the “faculty of living in peace with our fellow men,” and the corollary disinterestedness, precisely because the judgments we make often do not agree. However, the fact that anything goes in the Art-in-General system means that the possibility of fraudulence is definitional to art and that each work of art must be experienced singularly and judged by an individual by dint of feeling.
In contrast to de Duve, who has devoted his career to bringing to light the historical transition from the Beaux Arts System to the anything-goes, Art-in-General system, Cavell, writing in the mid-sixties at the height of modernism, is still concerned with medium specificity. However, his concern about fraudulence in art suggests that he is responding to the same situation that de Duve is: an art condition in which no a priori criteria can guarantee something the status of art.17 The art-judgment for Cavell takes the form of a medium-judgment, i.e., “This is sculpture” (or any of the traditional Western classifications of fine art with which Kant would have been familiar), despite—or because—those very classifications have become indeterminate with Modernism. It is not the empirical medium or technique that determines whether something is sculpture or painting, and therefore art in general, but rather the feeling of making meaning from material in relation to the tradition of the different arts and their respective concepts that underlies Cavell’s art-judgment.18 For Cavell, like de Duve, the art-judgment is a subjective feeling that “must be felt, not merely known—or…must be known for oneself.”19 At the same time, this aesthetic judgment is of the type for which we “[claim] this agreement even though we know from experience that [we] will not receive it.”20 The claim to universality is a claim to share a world; disagreement is our failure to do so: “I want to tell you something I’ve seen, or heard, or realized, or come to understand, for the reasons for which such things are communicated (because it is news, about a world we share, or could).”21
Despite these similarities, there are differences—perhaps fundamental—between de Duve and Cavell. However, they will have to be analyzed in another essay as I have neither the breadth of knowledge nor the space to do so here. A list of differences will have to suffice, though it is yet to be seen how fundamental these differences are.
- On the different kinds of aesthetic judgments and their special pleasures: De Duve dismisses Kant’s differentiation between the pleasure specific to judgments of agreeableness (gratification) and judgments of beauty (disinterested pleasure).22 Cavell, in contrast, retains this distinction, indicating that Kant’s appeal to ordinary language (“this is pleasing to me” in contrast to “this is beautiful”) points to a logical difference between the two aesthetic judgments.23
- On the nature of aesthetic judgments: De Duve believes aesthetic judgments are not logical.24 In contrast, Cavell argues that aesthetic judgments that claim transcendental grounds are logical and conclusive, although “not conclusive the way arguments in logic are, nor rational the way arguments in science are.”25 Rather, they are logical in the sense that they appeal to a “constant pattern of support or justification whose peculiarity is that it leads those competent at it to this kind of agreement.”26 It is my sense that the appeal to “logic” proper to aesthetic judgments for Cavell is his correlate to Kant’s positing of the existence of a sensus communis that grounds aesthetic judgments.
- On Kant's relevance and the relation of nature and art: De Duve ‘updates’ Kant by advocating for a reading of the third critique that replaces every instance of the word “beauty” with “art.” The need to do so, according to de Duve, is because there has been a historical transfer of significance from beauty to art, which, according to him, occurred with the transition from the Beaux Arts system to the Art-in-General system. When Kant was writing, beauty in nature seemed to be a promise of the possibility of human accord, but now art has assumed that role. For de Duve, the connection between art and nature has been severed irreversibly, just as the Art-in-General system has replaced the Beaux Arts system. In contrast, Cavell doesn't seem to feel the need to explicitly update Kant. Cavell claims that modernism “only makes explicit and bare what has always been true of art.”27 I imagine he would make similar claims about Kant: modernism, and what follows, has simply revealed what has always been true of Kant, namely, that we feel we are united by feeling in a deep way. My sense is that Cavell translates Kant’s sensus communis, the sense shared by humans due to the formal relation between their cognitive faculties, into human convention, which is “not arbitrary but constitutive of significant speech and activity; in which mutual understanding, and hence language, depends on nothing more and nothing less than shared forms of life, call it our mutual attunement or agreement in our criteria.”28 That is, the cognitive faculties aren't merely given us by nature, but informed by the conventions of a form of life. Conventions for Cavell are not something one can remove like a pair of glasses, nor are they something we consciously agree to, as in the idea of a social contract: they are the forms through which we experience reality. In fact, one might say that they are not even human-made: we are born into them, must learn how to navigate them and survive within them in a similar way that we are born into what we consider nature. If nature is convention in this sense for Cavell, as his affinity for Thomas Kuhn’s picture of scientific paradigms suggests, then the relation of nature to art need not be severed. In fact, just as it does for Kant, it may still hold the privileged position of being the one human-made thing for which we can claim universality for our subjective experiences.
Despite these differences, Cavell and de Duve both succeed in reminding us that Kant’s aesthetic judgment of beauty is structurally similar to judgments of art. With their guidance, I will now reformulate some key Kantian terms for use in the contemporary art world.
De Duve likens the feeling that something is art to love.29 Similarly, Cavell acknowledges that we are concerned with artworks, so much so that we treat them the same way we treat people.30 According to Kant’s criteria for disinterestedness—indifference toward the existence of the object—these characterizations of our feelings that accompany the experiences of artworks seem far from disinterested. We feel artworks to be intended because they are made by someone for, we feel, some purpose. However, as Cavell puts it, the intention specific to works of art doesn’t intend to express something specific or achieve some end. Rather, it is an intention that “celebrates the fact that men can intend their lives at all… in the scene of indifferent nature and determined society.”31 It is this special intention that Cavell understands Kant to mean by “purposiveness without purpose” in works of art.
In light of Cavell’s reformulation of purposiveness without purpose as a kind of intention that celebrates humankind’s ability to intend at all, it doesn’t seem to me too far of a step to similarly reformulate disinterestedness as an interest in the fact that humans have differing interests; that is, that the convictions underlying our judgments are not wholly reliable, and, consequently, that our claims to their universal validity may be mistaken. Following from my proposed definition of disinterestedness, I propose a reformulation of “purposive form,” that which prompts the disinterested free play of the faculties, as an individual’s claim that something is art. Purposive form is an art-claim that sets in motion the free play of imagination and understanding and ultimately produces, or fails to produce, the disinterested pleasure attendant to the art-judgment.
In the case of an art-claim of a thing that we already expect to be art, say, Paul Cezanne’s painting The Basket of Apples, the pleasure that results from the free play may not be distinguishable from our expectation that this painting by a famous painter is art, so the art-claim goes unnoticed. In contrast, faced with a claim that something we initially feel not to be art is indeed art—say, an iteration of Comedian in the form of a banana duct-taped to a wall—we must nonetheless acknowledge that such a claim indicates that someone—at the very least, the artist—feels differently than we do—or at least claims to feel that way. Should the recognition of the art-claim prompt free play, oscillating between tracking patterns in our phenomenal experience of it and relating our experience to concepts, we may find, despite ourselves, that we can begin to follow a material logic, and the pleasure attendant to this discovery may act on our initial feelings, modifying our conviction and consequently changing our judgment.
At this point, it may seem that anything that claims to be art is indeed art. But a Kantian aesthetic theory of art requires that an individual’s subjective feeling underlie the art-judgment. It is noteworthy that this approach to art allows the opposite outcome as well. Returning to Cezanne’s The Basket of Apples, I may assume that the painting is a work of art, defaulting to my socialized expectation that paintings by Cezanne are art. But if the painting’s art-claim fails to get the free play going, or if I fail to find pleasure in it, I may find myself feeling that this thing that I, and so many others, had assumed to be art is not art at all.
Danto would scoff at this claim: I am free to say that The Basket of Apples is not good art, but it is incorrect to claim that it is not art, just as poor Testadura is simply wrong to claim that Rauchenberg’s bed is just a bed. But this misses what is special about art: that, whether faced with a famous painting of fruit or a 25¢ banana duct-taped to a wall, we can each validly claim universality for our art or not-art judgments. That, as de Duve says, “ there exists a line, for each of us to draw, that separates true from fake art, a line that depends exclusively on one individual’s judgment exerted on singular cases.”32 Or, as Cavell puts it, “it is up to me (and, of course, up to you).”33—And since it is up to me, I take the last sentence of this essay to claim that Comedian is not a work of art—not because a readymade can’t be art, but because this readymade reeks too strongly of money for me to trust its claim to art.
[1]
“Popeyes and Burger King Taped Fast Food to the Wall to Troll Maurizio Cattelan’s $120,000 Duct-Taped Banana,”
Business Insider, December 10, 2019.
[2] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1987), 156.
[3] Kant, Critique of Judgment, 127.
[4] “Unless we connect the fine arts, closely or remotely, with moral ideas, which alone carry with them an independent liking, [mere enjoyment] is their ultimate fate.” Kant, Critique of Judgment, 195–196.
[5] Arthur Danto, “Kant and the Work of Art,” in What Art Is (Yale University Press, 2013), 116–34.
[6] For Cavell, “Now I might define the problem of modernism as one in which the question of value comes first as well as last: to classify a modern work as art is already to have staked value, more starkly than the (later) decision concerning its goodness or badness.” Stanley Cavell, “A Matter of Meaning It,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 200.
[7] For de Duve, “When faced with a borderline case such as that of the readymades, it is no longer possible to make the distinction between art in the classificatory sense and art in the evaluative sense.” Thierry de Duve, Aesthetics at Large (The University of Chicago Press, 2018), 42.
[8] For Cavell, “The problem is that I no longer know what sculpture is, why I call any object, the most central or traditional, a piece of sculpture… [It is] a reaffirmation of the first fact about art, that it must be felt, not merely known—or, as I would rather put it, that it must be known for oneself." Cavell, “A Matter of Meaning It,” 202.
[9] For de Duve, “... the word art expresses an aesthetic appreciation, that is, the feeling that the painting in question really deserves to be called a work of art beyond its merely nominal belonging to the art of painting. By “feeling,” I mean something more complex than simply a sentiment, affect, or emotion; I mean an intuition, a “sense,” or, precisely, a “feel” resulting from a consultation with oneself that does not follow a path of logical, intellectual reasoning.” Duve, Aesthetics at Large, 41.
[10] For Cavell, “it is news, about a world we share, or could.” Cavell, “Music Discomposed,” 178.
[11] For de Duve, “democracy’s transcendental foundation.” Duve, Aesthetics at Large, 104.
[12] Thierry de Duve, “By Way of Conclusion,” in Duchamp’s Telegram (Reaktion Books Ltd, 2023), 377.
[13] Thierry de Duve, Aesthetics at Large, 41.
[14] Thierry de Duve, “A Most Remarkable Thought Experiment,” in Duchamp’s Telegram (Reaktion Books Ltd, 2023), 193.
[15] Ibid., 192.
[16] “Kant knows as well as anyone that like everything that depends on socioeconomic factors, education, and ideology, taste—practiced taste, that is—follows the various fault lines that determine every other social divide… If I am justified to claim universal assent for my judgment of taste… it is not empirically but transcendentally, at the level of the a priori conditions founding my aesthetic experience as well as anyone else’s, and regarding any object as well as the one in front of me. What my claim means is that I cannot fail to suppose that my neighbor is endowed with the same faculty of judging as the one whose presence in me my own pleasure signals. Even and especially if she uses her taste differently, she uses it freely, a fact I cannot fail to read as signaling the possibility for her feeling to agree with mine without being constrained to it… denying her taste would be denying her sensus communis, which in turn is tantamount to denying her humanity.” Duve, Aesthetics at Large, 95–96.
[17] “The problem is that I am, so to speak, stuck with the knowledge that this is sculpture, in the same sense that any object is. The problem is that I no longer know what sculpture is, why I call any object, the most central or traditional, a piece of sculpture.” Cavell, “A Matter of Meaning It,” 201.
[18] “The medium is to be discovered, or invented out of itself.” Cavell, “A Matter of Meaning It,” 205.
[19] Ibid., 202.
[20] Stanley Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 89.
[21] Cavell, “Music Discomposed,” 178.
[22] I’m unable to find this in an essay, though Thierry has mentioned it in class numerous times.
[23] Stanley Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 89.
[24] Thierry de Duve, “Overture: Why Kant Got It Right,” in Aesthetics at Large (The University of Chicago Press, 2018), 15.
[25] Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” in Must We Mean What We Say?, 88.
[26] Ibid., 88.
[27] Cavell, “Music Discomposed,” 175.
[28] Stanley Cavell, “Excursus on Wittgenstein’s Vision of Language,” in The New Wittgenstein (Routledge, 2000), 68.
[29] Thierry de Duve, “Le Sens de La Famille: Aesthetics as the Transcendental Ground,” in Aesthetics at Large (The University of Chicago Press, 2018), 91–106.
[30] Cavell, “Music Discomposed,” 178.
[31] Ibid., 175.
[32] de Duve, “By Way of Conclusion,” 381.
[33] Cavell, “A Matter of Meaning It,” 199.
