Thierry de Duve and Herman Parret on 'Aesthetics at Large' at MoMA PS1 Book Space

Saturday, April 6 from 3–5PM, the MoMA PS1 Book Space presents a conversation between Thierry de Duve and Herman Parret in celebration of Aesthetics at Large: Vol I: Art, Ethics, Politics, published by University of Chicago Press. Book signing to follow!

Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Thierry de Duve argues in the first volume of Aesthetics at Large, is as relevant to the appreciation of art today as it was to the enjoyment of beautiful nature in 1790. Going against the grain of all aesthetic theories situated in the Hegelian tradition, this provocative thesis, which already guided de Duve’s groundbreaking book Kant After Duchamp (1996), is here pursued in order to demonstrate that far from confining aesthetics to a stifling formalism isolated from all worldly concerns, Kant’s guidance urgently opens the understanding of art onto ethics and politics.

Central to de Duve’s re-reading of the Critique of Judgment is Kant’s idea of sensus communis, ultimately interpreted as the mere yet necessary idea that human beings are capable of living in peace with one another. De Duve pushes Kant’s skepticism to its limits by submitting the idea of sensus communis to various tests leading to questions such as: Do artists speak on behalf of all of us? Is art the transcendental ground of democracy? Or, Was Adorno right when he claimed that no poetry could be written after Auschwitz?

Loaded with de Duve’s trademark blend of wit and erudition and written without jargon, these essays radically renew current approaches to some of the most burning issues raised by modern and contemporary art. They are indispensable reading for anyone with a deep interest in art, art history, or philosophical aesthetics.

Thierry de Duve is a historian and philosopher of art, the Evelyn Kranes Kossak Professor at Hunter College, City University of New York, and professor emeritus at the Université de Lille 3. He studies the consequences of modernism on the institutionalization and historiography of "art" in the twentieth century.

Herman Parret is a philosopher of language and aesthetics, and is professor emeritus at the Higher Institute of Philosophy at Leuven University in Belgium. Old friends with de Duve and a lover of contemporary art, he is working on a book about the aftereffects of Kant in twentieth-century philosophy.

This event is free and open to the public.

E-mail booksmomaps1@artbook.com to order a signed copy of Aesthetics at Large: Vol I: Art, Ethics, Politics.

Book Space
Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore
Saturday, April 6 from 3–5PM
22-25 Jackson Avenue
Long Island City, NY
(718) 433-1088