The very title of § 45 in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment seems to undermine from the outset the possibility of a dialogue with contemporary art: “Beautiful art is an art to the extent that it seems at the same time to be nature”. No contemporary account of what art is, or should be, would rely on the premise that art is beautiful, if and only if, it seems at the same time to be nature. Even more radically, contemporary approaches to the art may well reject the idea that art could or should be defined in terms of beautiful art – not also to mention Kant’s exclusion of both pleasure and perfection from the most distinctive traits of artistic productions.

Attempting to establish a dialogue between Kant’s aesthetic and contemporary art means, in many regards, facing a difficult challenge. Yet it also means exploring to ultimate consequences of Kant’s systematic philosophical aims from cognition to moral agency, and finally to art, according to his theory of synthetic a priori judgments. Contemporary scientists and epistemologists use Kant’s theory of cognition as an essential premise and a fundamental source of ideas. Analogously, Kant’s moral, political and juridical theories are currently the reference terms for many of the most relevant debates concerning the structure and consistency of our societies. To take seriously Kant’s aesthetic dialogue with contemporary art means to raise and try to answer some basic questions: most significantly of all, why should we not stay true to Kant’s systematic philosophical goals? Why should we not acknowledge and discuss the fruits that Kant’s aesthetics bore in a long time span running from German Romanticism to the most provocative contemporary ways of doing art?

The essays collected in Kantian Review’s special issue on Kant and Contemporary Art, edited by Clive Cazeaux provide a number of effective reasons to address the issues raised by these questions. More importantly, they try to show that the challenge at stake can be met. The very notion of art has undertaken many definitional switches across the centuries of its life – and even before its birth, in a way – but it has never ceased to count among the most fundamental and characterizing traits of human nature. The question about human nature is a Kantian question, but its answer cannot exclusively belong to Kant’s times. It is at least misleading to try to provide a satisfying answer to this question – i. e., an answer we can rely on in our time – without a wider systematic gaze. In a way, Kant did not just leave us with a legacy of concepts, but also the coordinates to further develop his discoveries and keep them alive and fruitful. It is through these coordinates that the collected essays mentioned above succeed in meeting the challenge of a seemingly impossible dialogue. From the cognitive presuppositions of aesthetic judgments to the conceptual Auseinandersetzung between Kant’s views and their subsequent assessments, up to a more straightforward confrontation between Kant’s aesthetics and the contemporary theories of art and art criticism, all contributions (by Luigi Filieri, Sabina Vaccarino Bremner, Rachel Zuckert, João Lemos, Fiona Hughes, Diarmuid Costello, Paul Guyer, and Clive Cazeaux) sketch the outline of a new research scenario which will hopefully prove attractive to scholars in the years to come. This scenario is both textual and figurative for all authors to make use of or refer to artworks when raising their respective points. Pablo Picasso, Tracey Emin, Mark Rothko, William Kentridge, Lawrence Weiner, and Ceal Floyer dialogue with Kant’s aesthetic theory and show its relevance and richness with regard to the most prominent contemporary debates.

As the issue Editor, Clive Cazeaux, puts it at the very end of his own contribution (p. 649), “Kant’s aesthetics deserves to be acknowledged as a framework that is particularly suited to addressing the unbounded nature of contemporary art”. Since reason’s drives are unbounded according to Kant, it also makes perfect sense to explore their aesthetic orientation and interest to show that, more than two hundred years later, they still have a great deal to say to us.

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