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cellophanedeity: if you have specific questions about understanding something, I'd love to help. I'm not trying to be condescending, it's just that I'm well aware that I tend to use the usual jargon of the field, and that laypeople might not understand it. It's a bad habit, I know, but one that's difficult to break.
A very interesting article, roachboy. It's long enough (and late enough) that I'm not going to discuss the whole thing. I just want to talk about a couple quotes, and add on an appendix.
"Karl Ruhrberg, the author of the section on painting in 'Art of the 20th Century,' writes that art 'can no longer hope to proclaim indubitable truths.'"
For Kant, the purpose of art is not to proclaim indubitable truths; if this is the subject of any discipline, it would be the subject of philosophy. But, of course, for Kant this isn't even the subject of philosophy. For Kant, the purpose of art is to give rise to the free play of the imagination. A piece of 'art' which only had one possible valid response would not be art.
"while discussion of the arts deteriorated into the solipsism of individual taste, in which no opinion was worth more than any other."
This is, ironically enough, the point I was trying to make most of all in my first point. We can have valid discussions of whether or not something is art. We can disagree, and at the end of the day, we might have to agree to disagree, but we can have a rational discussion about it without talking past each other.
I've been arguing here that a Kantian isn't limited to thinking of representational art as
the only form of art. However, there are limits. The basic conception of art, according to Kant, is that of the matter of genius enclosed in the form of taste. Of course, what Kant means by Taste isn't exactly what the person on the street means by taste, but this might give you a general idea of some of the limits. He says somewhere in the 3rd Critique that while art can portray the ugly, it cannot portray the grotesque (or something like that). The idea is that there are limits to what art can portray, and this seems to me to be right.
Interestingly, this is starting to border on what I wrote my MA thesis on. Of course, I can't just post that here. But the basic idea is an argument against transgression in the arts. In the essay, this idea is applied mostly to literature, but I suspect that the same arguments apply to art as we're talking about it here. The argument goes that art, in trying to trangress bourgeois custom, ends up feeding into this custom, by giving the bourgeois something to define itself against. By contrast, art which self-consciously affirms the bourgeoisie cannot be appropriated by the bourgeosie, because the bourgeosie is by definition not self-conscious. So the art which is most transgressive is art which affirms the bourgeosie.
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"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."
"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
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