Of all the riddles of aesthetic theory, none is as puzzling as the fact that what is arguably the pivotal work in the field – Kant's third Critique – contains no sustained or systematic theory of art. As Adorno bluntly remarked, “pre-Hegelian, including Kantian, aesthetics had no emphatic conception of the work of art, relegating it to the status of some kind of sublimated means of enjoyment.”

Although Kant does offer some remarks on the subjects of “art” and “fine art” in sections 43–47 of the Critique of Judgment, he largely eschews a discussion of art as a mode of productive praxis and refuses to treat the aesthetic field as comprised of objects to be understood in terms of the circumstances of their social conditioning or material making. Although the feelings of pleasure and pain that Kant associates with the beautiful and the sublime may be incited by nature or by art, what Kant is willing to count as “art” excludes any form of handicraft or “industrial art” (section 43).