Decorative New Thinking - Pleasure and Ideology in Visual Art

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Publication Date: 2006-08-01
Features: However, this realization is not very useful for students of decorative arts, because people insist that the critique of beauty is impartial and "free of any purpose." Of course, we can examine visual displays in that way, but doing so usually misses the essence. The purpose of decoration and embellishment is very clear—to be admired. Of course, the pleasure derived from it may stem from "the free exchange of ideas," but any concrete example of decoration is a behavior rooted in a certain social space and social expectations, and it employs the schemata that constitute concepts in society. As I will explain later, decoration, embellishment, and the associated pleasure are the intersection of personal joy and social identity—an interplay of libidinization, produced and experienced in the transitional spaces between the public and private. Nothing illustrates this point better than some of the examples Kant mentioned. For instance, the refined attire adorned with earrings and snuffboxes, or a room decorated with women's clothing. However, what we will explore here is the fundamental argument.
Kant's theory consistently holds that aesthetic judgments are subjective, with the "basis for decision necessarily being subjective." Kant's focus is not on the object and its properties, whether they are primary or secondary, whether they possess aesthetic sensibility, or other characteristics, but rather on the nature of our responses to these features. If we judge something, it is a cognitive judgment. Because when we say "This is a useful teapot," it is because the teapot pours water smoothly. In this regard, usefulness becomes an attribute of the teapot. However, we might say, "This is a beautiful teapot." In this case, compared to the former, beauty is less an attribute of the teapot and more an attribute of the pleasurable experience we have when seeing it. The two sentences have the same grammatical structure, but this does not make them logically equivalent. Aesthetic judgments apply to our experience rather than to the object.
Aesthetic judgments are also concrete. It is not to say that all teapots are beautiful (that would be a cognitive judgment), but only that the teapot before me, with its spout pointed at me and the mouth appearing to pour cream, is beautiful. Aesthetic judgments are not used for comparison, like comparing different teapots, nor are they used to describe the characteristics of a perfect teapot.
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