Making Art in the Third Critique

This chapter inquires into the fate of artistic practice in the text responsible for making form central to the theorization of aesthetics: Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. When Kant turns his attention to art, it appears as a special case, not fully within the purview of his theory of aesthetic judgment. How might Hogarth’s practitioner-centered aesthetic theory, in The Analysis of Beauty, inform an interpretation of Kant’s Third Critique? Kant, like Hogarth before him, connects the pleasure in aesthetic judgment with the cognitive activity of formal abstraction. Thinking like an artist means exercising the perceptual capacity for formal abstraction. In Kant’s theory as well as Hogarth’s, the artist can be understood as she who models free play as a practice that can be cultivated by means of this perceptual exercise.