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A work needs only to be interesting.

—Donald Judd, ‘Specific Objects’, 1965

What is the logical form of critical judgements of contemporary art?footnote¹ The question appears dry to the point of being unworldly. After all, wasn’t the attempt to legitimate art judgements as distinctive logical types abandoned long ago, in the wake of critiques of the false universality of the European aesthetic tradition? Doesn’t the generic character of contemporary art practice undermine the possibility of such judgements? More generally, given the collapse in the authority of Western art criticism over the last forty years, what claim to cultural or social legitimacy can still be made for it? And hasn’t the integration of so-called autonomous art into the culture industries destroyed its critical potential as a distinctive kind of cultural experience?

At a certain level of description: yes, all these things have taken place. And yet the opening question persists; and not just as part of the continuation of a bygone world, in the market for ‘contemporary’ versions of traditional art practices wrapped in the consoling discourses of traditional aesthetics—luxury goods with added spiritual value. The question persists by virtue of the problems posed by the consequences of its disappearance. These are problems concerning the very existence of art, in its modern Western, now globalized sense, and also of criticism, as cultural-political practices that oppose themselves to the current state of things and orient towards other futures. They concern the legitimation of public funding for art institutions and practices, and they bear upon the reflective experience of everyday life—about who ‘we’ are, who we relate to and the ways in which we live our relations to others.

One way of addressing my opening question is through interrogating what might be called the contemporaneity of contemporary art, in its full historical and geopolitical extensions.footnote² Another is to reflect on some elements of the art-critical discourses of the 1960s, written when minimalist, conceptual and performance artists in Europe and North America broke with then-dominant practices of medium-based modernism; and to track these back to their—often unconscious—intellectual sources, and forwards to their current significance and uses under different social conditions. For this is the break that came to be seen as inaugurating contemporary art in the form in which we think of it today: as an institutionally validated set of practices, extending beyond the bounds not only of established mediums but of medium-based concepts of ‘the arts’—painting, sculpture, poetry, music—as such. Two threads are of particular significance. First, and most familiar: reflections on the concept of ‘art’ as a generic singular, as opposed to historically received concepts of ‘the arts’, plural, derived from Renaissance systems. Second, and less widely recognized: the use of the concept of ‘the interesting’ to displace the categories of traditional aesthetics—‘the beautiful’ and its Romanticizing sister-concept, ‘the sublime’, in particular. It is ‘the interesting’ as a primary critical category that I will explore here.

Art judgements of ‘the interesting’, I shall argue, may be seen as the constitutive ground of modern art judgements, within which those of contemporary art comprise a distinctive type. Such judgements are formally ‘subjective’ (in Kant’s broad sense), yet they nonetheless require a discursive elaboration grounded in the social relations and geopolitical modes of existence of the historical present; that is, in the relations of both subject-formation and object-formation. In this respect, they are ultimately judgements of truth-content—artistic truth-contents as carriers of historical truth. It is thus via ‘the interesting’, I shall argue, that politics enters art judgement.

When the American artist Donald Judd wrote in 1965, ‘A work need only be interesting’, he was speaking for a generation of practitioners who rejected the formal parameters of modernism that had come to dominate critical discourse in the us in the 1950s, in favour of apparently new and uncharted critical waters, where an interest in subjectivity was combined with social concerns. Yet in opposing ‘the interesting’ to medium-based criticism, Judd was also, unknowingly, reviving a concept developed by Friedrich Schlegel, in his 1797 study of modern poetics, where he wrote that ‘In the entire realm of the science of aesthetics the deduction of the interesting is perhaps the most difficult and complicated task.’footnote³ If the Romantic concept of ‘originality’ was a clear extension of Kant’s notion of ‘genius’, Schlegel’s conception of ‘the interesting’ was equally clearly a rejection of Kantian ‘disinterest’ as the ground of aesthetic judgements.

Kant’s pure aesthetic judgements are disinterested in the sense of indifferent, not only to the distinction between art and not-art, but to the judging subject’s practical relations to the world; pure aesthetic judgements take no interest in the existence of the objects that occasion them. Art judgements, on the other hand, are necessarily ‘adherent’, in Kant’s terms, or conditioned by art concepts of various kinds.footnote⁴ In the Western tradition, they are conditioned by concepts of painting, sculpture, poetry, music, architecture and the rest of the institutionalized arts; in non-Western traditions, by a variety of different cultural practices of making and doing; in contemporary art, by the institutionalized, generic concept of ‘art’ itself. It is the Kantian understanding of pure aesthetic judgement—not confined to art, nor dependent on its concepts—that has, for over 230 years now, made using the word ‘aesthetics’ as the name for philosophical treatments of art so profoundly confusing. Kant himself recognized the problem, as later did Hegel, but each failed to resist the then newly established German usage of ‘aesthetics’.footnote⁵ Art discourse is still living with the consequences of that failure.footnote⁶ Even those whose thought protests the identification, such as Schlegel himself, acquiesced to the new usage—see his choice of the term ‘the science of aesthetics’ (der äesthetischen Wissenschaften)—albeit in tension with the metaphysics of his concept of art.footnote⁷