Sensus communis aestheticus and the project of emancipation: The Utopian frame of the avant-gardes

the conceptual basis which would be later developed by the artistic avant-gardes was settled by german romantic and idealist thought, whose utopian dimension could be easily recognized in the oldest system-program of german idealism (1796), a text which provided idealist thought with the claim of a new rationality or a mythology of reason in hegel, an intellectual intuition in schelling and the humanity in schiller. although this emancipation project developed later by the avant-garde has lost its credibility for us, we still have to investigate to what extent today's art can maintain a social function. this article point out certain idealist concepts in light of a philosophy of art modeled along lines sketched out in kant's critique of judgement and that have contributed to the history of the "advanced" art.