Normativity and beauty in contemporary arts

our intuitions related to art are generally associated to ideas such as creativity, free- dom of expression, experimentation. e fact that so many artists (especially writers, but also musicians, painters, performance artists) are or have been people with train- ing in legal disciplines should be taken into account when considering the apparently extrinsic relationship between art and law. e question we have to answer is the fol- lowing. when we make a judgment of taste looking, say, at the Mona Lisa, what does that mean exactly? what do we mean when we say that “the Mona Lisa is beautiful and an absolute masterpiece of western art”? is statement contains a judgment of taste (Mona Lisa is beautiful) and an artistic judgment (it is a masterpiece of western art). In what follows I will show that: i) the two judgments are di erent, ii) both judgments have normative nature, but the normativity of the judgment of taste refers to di erent elements from the artistic judgment and, nally, iii) contemporary visual arts require the formulation of an artistic judgment rather than a judgment of taste.