ABSTRACT
This chapter produces a line of interpretation through Kant that translates his combination of aesthetics and epistemology into a way of approaching artworks in the particular as research. The aspect of Kant's philosophy that the chapter focuses upon is how it places concepts in relation to experience. It offers a very particular understanding of the notion of a concept, one that is especially suited to an artistic context in which there is interest in how a medium, technology, situation or meaning might be stretched or transformed. The chapter talks about concepts in relation to artistic research because, after Kant, they become elements which can simultaneously explain the power of art to create novelty and surprise, while locating that novelty and surprise within a conceptual, cognitive framework. An analysis of art and aesthetic experience forms a major part of Kant's theory of judgment, the theory of how concepts determine intuitions to form experience.
