| Summary: | Traditionally, beauty is understood as an ability of some objects (artworks included) to occasion in viewers a distinctive type of unmediated/pure pleasure—aesthetic pleasure. According to this common understanding of beauty, political–critical art does not seem to raise in viewers the feeling of aesthetic pleasure. Many contemporary critical artists and politically engaged artists deliberately produce an art as unappealing to the senses as possible (their attitude could be called, following Arthur Danto, kalliphobia—“beauty phobia”). Critical art is a type of art which usually does not strike us with beauty at first sight because this “political art” usually deals with issues of social injustice and political struggles, rendering contemplation and aesthetic pure pleasure unachievable. Yet, even if beauty, in critical art's case, seems to be a difficult, demanding, and not an immediately recognisable one (mostly because of its unappealing, unsettling look), this does not mean that it lacks or is at odds with critical engagement (as some critical artists and theorists have argued). The argument of this paper is that not every beautiful thing looks good at first sight. By the same token, not everything that looks beautiful is in fact beautiful. Drawing on Immanuel Kant's neglected pulchritude adhaerens (dependent beauty), I argue that political–critical art is characterised by a dependent type of beauty (beauty a thing has as a thing of a certain kind and with a certain function) as opposed to free beauty (as something we like it freely on its own account, independent of what it is and what it does). Political–critical art can claim a dependent beauty (an impure, “difficult” and not straightforward pleasurable type of beauty) without being compelled to submit itself, at the same time, to the free beauty.
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