"In the absence of available standards": Leo Steinberg on judgment

For some decades, judging has been considered in bad taste, a symptom of being out of touch with contemporary thinking. In recent years, however, aesthetic judgment has won new respect: not only in philosophical aesthetics – philosophy could not really be uninterested in judgment –, but also in some internationally trendy art journals and publications. Steinberg was adamant about the role of aesthetic appreciation and value judgments: «Art is cherished, or it does not survive. A succession of value judgments, embodied in acts of neglect or preservation, largely determines what we receive from the past». But what is more relevant in Steinberg’s thought and practice is the exercise of a judgment which cannot rely on definitive criteria, on criteria that can be made explicit and used at will as tools for interpreting. This essay aims at clarifying what the concept of judgment meant to Steinberg, not only in relation to contemporary art (here, in particular, with reference to artists as diverse as Jasper Johns and Hans Haacke), but also to Kant’s aesthetic judgment and Hannah Arendt’s issue of «thinking without a bannister».