Aesthetic Value vs. Catharsis
Robert Rauschenberg was a young, abstract expressionist, artist in his twenties, who wanted to experiment with creating emptiness with drawling. He approached Willem De Kooning, a famous Dutch American artist, for one of his drawling’s. Rauschenberg then took the drawling and eraded most of it only leaving a ghost of the drawling that was previously there. He titled it “Erased de Kooning”. A Kantian viewer’s would judge the “Erased de Kooning” as a loss of aesthetic value compared to the drawling because the “Erased de Kooning” is content based. The “Erased de Kooning” was a drawling that provoked a lot of controversy about if the work of art should be considered a drawling or not and who the artist of the work is. Aesthetics and aesthetic judgment is a …show more content…
Kant created a basis for judging the aesthetic value of a work of art. Aesthetic value is the value that an object or work possesses in relation to its capacity to provoke pleasure (beauty) or displeasure (agreed upon) when judged aesthetically. In order for a critique to judge the “Erased de Kooning” in Kantian ideals they must, “wish to discern whether anything is beautiful or not, we do not refer the representation of it to the object by means of understanding with a view to cognition, but by means of the imagination” (Kant 12). In Kant’s eyes this makes it impossible for a person of taste to judge the “Erased de Kooning” aesthetically because the drawling is solely based on content. There is little to significant form to judge in the piece because Rauschenberg erased all the form