My Take on the One who Judged Judgment Itself

After reading this quote, I believe that Kant is making a valid argument concerning our judgment of art. Concepts, to me, refer to concrete, universal rules that we as a society have fabricated throughout our development as a civilization. This argument is quite applicable, regardless of the society or civilization that the person making the judgment may belong to. If these socially-accepted concepts are the basis for an evaluation of an artwork’s beauty, for example, then the judgment being put forth would be completely objective. On page 98 of the Art and Its Significance text, he states how this objectiveness is impossible to achieve in this particular scenario, saying that “In order to distinguish whether anything is beautiful or not, we refer… not to the understanding to the object for cognition, but… the imagination.” The representation (art) is evaluated through our imaginative process, which is anything but objective. Since, according to his terms, beauty cannot be objective, the beauty would indeed be lost “if we judge objects merely according to concepts.”
An additional applicable argument by Kant is one of the four qualities concerning the judgment of beauty (of art); the true appreciation of art requires “disinterest” in order to be valid. One of the concepts used to judge artistic objects in general is their “purposiveness,” or what we think they were intended to be used for (by the artist). One of the most urgent points that Kant makes in his argument states that if we judge an artistic creation by its function, or if its function elicits some sort of desire in us, then the quote above is proved true again, “all representation of beauty is lost,” according to his definition and guidelines of how we should go about evaluating art.
This second argument reminded me of Freeland’s discussion of Versailles and Kant’s theory. The gardens of Versailles would be a perfect example of the “purposiveness without purpose” statement. They are indeed vast and ornate, but there is no real purpose for them; they produce no food to feed the people, they merely show that the ruler of the land is powerful and wealthy enough to have such a massive gathering of plants constructed (I wonder what Chris Jordan would have to say about that; I’m sure the citizens of the kingdom during that time could have used some help from the king). In that respect, they would qualify as beautiful, as long as pleasure was elicited from observing them. They are a “representation… [where] beauty is [not] lost.”