The End of Subjective Universality and the Privatization of Aesthetic Taste

In 2026, any take that uncritically treats “pop” as the low or mass culture term in a high/low or art/craft binary is a red herring designed to divert attention away from the fact that the political ontology that makes that aesthetic binary possible is obsolete. Structured by political and fiscal privatization, algorithmic personalization, and the like, present reality in so-called Western liberal democracies no longer reflects the enlightenment public/private binary that has long shaped Western modernity.

As I have written about elsewhere, the traditional art/craft binary is rooted in the classically liberal distinction between public and private: one is the realm of freedom and universality, the other is the realm of particularity and dependence.

The autonomy that Enlightenment aesthetics grants art is analogous to and philosophically intersects with the autonomy of the liberal subject. Cleaving the public sphere from the private in parallel to the way Kant cleaves fine art from craft, classical liberalism holds that autonomy exists in the civil sphere, whereas the private sphere is the realm of material need and dependence. Just as art’s autonomy comes from its purported ontological separation from everyday life, the liberal subject’s autonomy exists outside the sphere of life’s reproduction.

It’s a simple analogy - art:public::craft:private.

But if the public/fine art was both the realm of autonomy and of universality, this posed a problem: how could free individuals all come to the same, universal ideas of the true, the good, and the beautiful? Why wouldn’t free individuals have individual, subjective ideas of truth, ethics, and beauty?

This is the problem Kant’s critical trilogy set out to solve: the first critique is about truth, the second is about ethics/the good, and the third is about aesthetics/beauty. I’m going to focus on the third one because I’m a philosopher of art, but the solution is the same in each case.

For Kant, beauty was both subjective - the judgment of an individual subject - and universal. As Kant puts it, “Taste must be an ability one has in oneself (79), and “a judgment of taste requires everyone to assent; and whoever declares something to be beautiful holds that everyone OUGHT to give his approval to the object at hand and that he too should declare it beautiful” (86). To say that something was beautiful was also to say that everyone else would think so too. This is literally the ...