The Artist Body and the Standard of Taste

  

 Shigeko Kubota, Vagina Painting, 1965


Kant discusses aesthetics with his critique of aesthetic judgment. “Kant’s usage, is a judgment which is based on feeling, and in particular on the feeling of pleasure or displeasure.” (Ginsborg 2022)
His philosophy categorizes art as beautiful, what is sublime, or what is made under the headings of fine art, beautiful art, and genius art. Hume addresses that Taste “summarizes the finer emotions of the mind” and that not everyone has the capacity, interest, or connection to art and is willing to observe these finer emotions of the mind.
Shigeko Kubota’s “Vagina Painting” (1965) utilizes performance art in a demonstrative painting style as she crouched over a sheet of paper with a paintbrush handle attached to her underwear and used red smears of paint representing menstrual blood. At the time, art critics in Japan were dismissive of female artists and the avant-garde art movement. Something like painting or writing by vagina instead of hand might be classified as a lowly parlor trick used by Geishas to entertain their guests and nothing more. Kubota found better career opportunities in New York as an emerging avant-garde Artist and cocreator of the NY Fluxus community. (Hawley 2016) Kubota recognized the contrast between high and low art and played with the correlation of her contemporaries and their celebrated contributions to “genius art” namely Jackson Pollock. Her work reflects a hyper-feminine display of Abstract expressionism in contrast with his hyper-masculine abstract painting style that uses an aggressive paint splatter reminiscent of ejaculate.

Hume writes about the “Standard of Taste” a rule about sentiments that qualifies, quantifies, and observes the importance of one taste over another. One might ask if is it possible to have a standard when taste is a matter of how people feel about things subjectively. Can one’s sense of taste be right and another be wrong? However, we commonly agree on aesthetics and gravitate around a similar taste and appreciation for beauty or a perception of what is poignant, ugly, or scary.


References
Hume, D. (1757) Of Standards of Taste In J Van Camp (Ed.)
Ginsborg, H. (2022) Kant’s Aesthetics and Teleology In E.D Zalta (Ed) Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy.
Hawley, E. (2016) Shigeko Kubota In MoMA

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