ABSTRACT
Doubtless my sense of the aesthetic comes from the experience of working in a museum of modern art and that of teaching contemporary art to curatorial studies students. Curators—that is to say, people who make professional judgments about works of art with a view to making them public—seem to speak very easily about the aesthetic traits of those works, more easily than art historians do. It is art historians (some, anyway) who have a negative view of the aesthetic, not curators or artists. But if there is an openness about aesthetics among curators, it is very much more about a feeling for the kind of everyday qualities mentioned by Arthur and Anna (I find Aleksandra Mir’s First Woman on the Moon (1999) sweet in the way that Arthur finds Guston clunky) and very little, if at all, to do with the aesthetic as we find it in Kant and in what Thierry and many of the philosophers here have been saying.
