A Critique of the Power of Critique

What is the controversial seed of calamity hidden in Kant's (most conservative) aesthetic philosophy? Why is the Critique of Judgment, the least innovative, actually the most profound among the three Critiques? On the roots of the avant-garde in Kant

The arbitrariness in modern art contradicts the necessity in Aristotle's poetics and Kant's purposiveness - which create beauty - therefore it relies more and more on the incomprehensible myth of genius (Source)

Kant's Critique of Judgment is responsible for the degeneration of art - in viewing art as a repeated deviation from an existing judgmental concept. Its final results are what happened in the twentieth century, ad absurdum, out of some superficial story about avant-garde and getting accustomed to new beauty each time anew throughout generations, and sobering up from past resistance against the backdrop of the ugliness of the new.

But there's also an opposite story throughout art history, of sobering up from seeing something as kitsch or outdated and finding depth in it. Not resistance to the new but resistance to the old, or to beauty, like Caravaggio or Bach or Bouguereau etc. Because it's difficult for people to see greatness in their contemporaries, and only the future can see greatness in the past. The great in the contemporary space is the political, and the great in time is the non-political - the multi-temporal or supra-temporal or even eternal. Therefore, greatness in time is fundamentally different from greatness in space: because they are truly looking at different dimensions.

Kant's mistake was taking the power of judgment specifically in the aesthetic direction (he didn't understand art), because precisely as a philosopher in the "Critique of Judgment" he saw the future, and established the dynamism of categories, and what one can hope for, meaning learning, development, evolution, the open side of reason and experience. The dynamism of categories is also an opening to the philosophy of language, to flexible and cultural categories of words.

The story of resistance to kitsch and the rediscovery of its beauty is a central story in art history, like the resistance to Greece and its discovery in the Renaissance, or the resistance to Baroque and its rediscovery, Vermeer, etc. Because beauty is forgotten. Ugliness stands out. If Kant had died in the middle of the Critique of Judgment, we would have received a sense of the sublime of who knows what would have come out of him in the aesthetic realm, and the unfinished feeling would have created [Translator's note: "mayin nukvin", a Kabbalistic concept meaning "feminine waters", metaphorically meaning inspiration or challenge] and challenged art to elevate itself. Therefore, one should not always regret that a thinker died before completing his work.

Even Goethe's Faust might have been better without an ending. In any case, good art doesn't need to be in the category of beautiful/sublime/blah blah, but in the category of the educational. It can also be learning. It can teach aesthetics but also other things through aesthetic tools. What distinguishes good art from bad art is the difference between a good teacher and a boring teacher, and a good student and a cramming student. Learning is the basis for aesthetics, and in this Kant actually hit the mark, although he failed in the main thing - understanding the method.

Therefore, Kant created a superficial method, similar to a purposeless evolutionary algorithm without an external goal, which simply progresses through mutations. Stretching the logic of this method in a process of escalation caused the lost century of art - the twentieth century. And when the method is superficial - the wolves enter. The moment it's unclear what causes deviation from an existing judgmental concept - then one can argue that it's only power struggles and institutions that create art history. And that's really what happened, and the theory became a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom, out of a lack of separation between the descriptive and the normative - between what can be described from the outside and what should be from the inside.