Sarah Firth, Kemal’s Aesthetic Judgments and Idealism.

In the book Kant and Fine Art Kemal states that “…pleasure, even in aesthetic judgment, should be explained in casual terms, as a matter of fact, rather than as a demand that must be satisfied.” My interpretation of this is that art does not need to satisfy pleasure to be beautiful. He says that explaining an object existence and how it gives us pleasure makes our endeavor to understand the object redundant. The author explains that to say that the aesthetic use of ideas is linked with understanding and interpretation is to say that art is only determined by whether it produces pleasure and so if the art of other cultures throughout time is not understood to be pleasurable it is no longer art and holds no influence on human development. Kemal does admit that much of art is of interest to people because it causes pleasure, and aesthetic judgments can stir the same emotions in the same manner. However, he says that the difference between something that is pleasing and something that has good aesthetics is that we can identify what it is that is so agreeable about a pleasing object and why it is so agreeable, but with an object that possesses aesthetics we can not.
My observation is that Kemal contradicts Hume by saying it is not an agreed understanding that establishes an object as art, but actual physical qualities that determine art to be art. My understanding of Kemal statements is he asserts that art does not have to be pleasurable to be beautiful. I would argue that the essence of beauty is creating some sort of pleasure whether it is the pleasure of an unfamiliar feeling, the pleasure of being in awe or surprise, or the pleasure of a revelation derived indirectly from the beauty. However, not all art must be beautiful.