In section 9 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant claims that in a judgment of taste the feeling of pleasure resides in the free play of imagination and understanding. This felicitous epiphany is often seen as characterizing the modernist aesthetic experience and as having been thwarted by postmodern art. Taking my clues from minimal art, I shall examine whether postmodernism invalidates Kantian aesthetics altogether, or whether it does not offer another model of how the interplay of imagination and understanding operates, a model that forces us to displace, or amend, or update Kantian aesthetics and, in so doing, deepen our understanding of its implications.

Professor emeritus from the Université de Lille 3, Thierry de Duve is a historian and philosopher of art, and an occasional curator. He is Kirk Varnedoe Visiting Professor at the Institute of Fine Art, New York University, for the fall semester of 2013. His English publications include Pictorial Nominalism (1991), Kant after Duchamp (1996), Clement Greenberg Between the Lines (1996, 2010), Look—100 Years of Contemporary Art (2001), and Sewn In the Sweatshops of Marx: Beuys, Warhol, Klein, Duchamp (2012). He recently finished a book of essays on aesthetics, and was during academic year 2012-2013 William C. Seitz Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) in Washington, D.C.

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