Abstract
This essay draws on Diarmuid Costello's paper Greenberg's Kant and the Fate of Aesthetics in Contemporary Art Theory. It is mainly focused on two topics - the concept of media specificity originally introduced by Clement Greenberg during the 1960s and the Kantian interpretation of conceptual art developed by Costello in his text.
It will be argued that although Costello is right in seeing the theory of medium specificity as the main cause of the difficult acceptance of conceptual art by aesthetic theory, his interpretation of conceptual art based on several of Kant's concepts from his Critique of Judgement is not sufficient, because it is not able to distinguish between conceptual art and other genres using denotative symbols. In this context Mukařovský's concept of aesthetic norm will be introduced.