Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment depends on a specific condition: that the judging subject can encounter an object freely, without prior determination by interest, desire, or conceptual rule. This disinterestedness is not a psychological attitude one can simply choose to adopt. It is a structural requirement, and, like all structural requirements, it presupposes a set of conditions that must hold for it to be possible at all. This requirement has always been contested. Nietzsche argued that aesthetic pleasure is inseparable from the will; Bourdieu showed that what passes for taste is structured by class and cultural capital; Adorno insisted that the autonomy of the artwork and the autonomy of the subject are both won against conditions that systematically undermine them. What these critiques share is the suspicion that Kantian disinterestedness was never a description of how aesthetic experience actually works; that it was, at best, a regulative ideal, and at worst, a philosophical fiction that served particular social functions.
Artificial generation presses this suspicion in a new and precise way. When texts, images, and musical compositions can be produced fluently, endlessly, and without any of the necessity, risk, or experience that once characterized artistic making, the question of what the aesthetic encounter actually requires becomes newly urgent not from the side of the object, but from the side of the subject. Can a judging subject approach an aesthetic object with the openness that disinterested attention demands, when she cannot know whether there is anything in the object that warrants such attention? And if that knowledge — or that uncertainty — shapes the encounter before it begins, what becomes of aesthetic autonomy? This is not a question about whether machines can make art. That question, however interesting, belongs primarily to the philosophy of production. This issue is concerned with what happens on the other side, with the judging subject, the conditions of the subject’s freedom, and the philosophical tradition that has both articulated and idealized those conditions.
Recent empirical research shows that knowledge of artificial origin systematically alters aesthetic response. Samo and Highhouse (2023) found that people cannot reliably identify AI-generated artwork yet consistently prefer human-generated work and experience richer positive emotions (self-reflection, attraction, nostalgia, amusement) in response to it: the same music is rated lower when attributed to an algorithm, the same poem differently when attributed to no one. Hullman, Holtzman, and Gelman (2025) have argued that our encounters with generative AI inherit the interpretive apparatus of art history and museology — the expectation of decorum, of narrative, of an object that bears the traces of a human situation — without being able to satisfy it. This can be dismissed as mere bias. But it may be something more philosophically significant: evidence that aesthetic judgment has always depended on assumptions about the kind of thing being encountered, assumptions that artificial generation now renders unstable across the entire aesthetic field.
The question this issue poses is not whether disinterestedness is achievable under the new conditions. It is whether the Kantian ideal was ever coherent and what a more honest account of aesthetic judgment would look like once the fiction of pure aesthetic autonomy can no longer be maintained. G. H. Hardy observed that chess problems, however ingenious, are trivial because nothing is at stake. The same might be said of generative outputs. But the philosophically harder question is what exactly is at stake in art and whether what is at stake has always been, in part, our belief that the encounter is real.
We invite contributions from aesthetics, the history of aesthetic theory, literary theory, media studies, and adjacent humanistic disciplines that engage with these questions. The issue does not presuppose a position on the value or legitimacy of AI-generated art. It presupposes only that artificial generation has created a philosophical pressure on the theory of aesthetic judgment that has not yet been adequately addressed and that addressing it requires returning to the tradition, not abandoning it.
Topics may include:
- The structural preconditions of disinterested attention
- Aesthetic autonomy as ideal, norm, or fiction
- Knowledge of origin and its effects on aesthetic encounter
- The Kantian tradition and its critics: Nietzsche, Bourdieu, Adorno
- What is at stake in art: necessity, risk, and the conditions of seriousness
- Free play of the faculties and its preconditions
- Aesthetic judgment under uncertainty of origin
- Taste, imitation, and the claim to universality
- Intentionality, embodiment, and what they contribute to reception
- The aesthetic idea and its conditions of intelligibility
- Historical precedents: automatic writing, chance, constraint
- Beauty, culture, and the conditions of aesthetic life
Submissions should be written in English or in Italian and prepared for blind review. They must not exceed 40,000 characters, including notes, bibliography, and blank spaces. The evaluation will follow a double-blind process.
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