Kants Theory And The Canon In Art Essay Examples

Kant mentioned four distinguishing features of beauty in art: disinterested, universal, necessary, and purposive without a purpose. By disinterested, Kant meant that there is pleasure in an art because it is beautiful and not the other way around. It is universal and necessary because its beauty lies within and not with the beholder. Finally, it is purposive without a purpose because an art is essentially fabricated yet it can appear natural to its viewers. These works of art that are considered to be possessing beauty are often only produced by those considered to be Genius.
For Kant, Genius is what gives rule to art. They are the ones who can form together materials that appear to be aesthetically pleasing no matter who the viewer might be. They set the example of what makes a beautiful art for everybody else to follow without really setting the rules of how it can be achieved because beauty is just as inherent as being a Genius. This is also what makes them part of a canon and in this case, the canon in art. The canon is the list of people considered to be geniuses in a particular field. They set the standard of what quality should be for the public eye.
Thus, Kant believed that the concept of beauty is universal in the real world because as humans, we have the logical way of perceiving and organizing the things that surround us that is often unconsciously done. As such, Kant’s theory in relation to the canon in art is not objective and unproductive because of our differences in judgment.
The objectivist theory recognized that people are conceptual beings. We perceive the real world through our senses but much of understanding these concepts are done when we really think about it. As such, our theories and concepts of beauty in art are only as important as how close they can be to our reality. The more abstract an art is, the more difficult it will be to perceive and the less beautiful and pleasurable they become.
Therefore, objectivism would justify the presentation of an abstract concept to a concrete form. The product of such is an art with elements of worldview. The values and emotions of the artist are captured in his work. The artwork must then be capable of comprehension for the viewers and must be a representative of what is essential for the artist. This way, what makes a great art is actually dependent on the artist’s ability to engage the viewer with his worldview through his skills in the visual arts or the meaning he wants to convey.
The objectivist theory, in comparison to Kant’s theory, is more stable in establishing a canon since the concept of beauty in art is now clearly established. An artist can be selected because he has the unique ability of expressing his worldview in a way that can be understood by his viewers and not because of an unexplained, inherent beauty that everybody claims to be present in his works. However, there can still be a room of vagueness as to the emotion intended by the artist and how his viewers interpret it. Different people have different ways of accepting the artist’s worldview and there lies the middle ground as to the appropriate approach of establishing the canon – Kant’s theory or that of objectivism.