ABSTRACT
The very architecture of aesthetics has unfolded and developed in ways that cannot be divorced from social and political assumptions, which are local and contingent rather than universal and necessary. Not only are aesthetic criteria open to challenge, and capable of undergoing redefinition, but so too what counts as political is open to challenge. Aesthetic judgments occur within cultural contexts that accord to privileged voices the authority to define the boundaries of art, and those definitions will inevitably influence both consumers of art and creators of art. Kant confronts people with a contradictory state of affairs on several levels. He makes universal communicability a requirement of aesthetic judgments in a way that is belied by his own raced and gendered denigrations of those whose inclusion in the community of rational and moral subjects Kant imagines is thereby put in doubt.
