Anxiety and Community: Clune on Judgment

Abstract: In my response to Michael W. Clune’s A Defense of Judgment , I express some reservations about the notion of “community” that Clune invokes when he describes the sort of aesthetic judgment characteristic of a community of experts. More exactly, I ask whether a community focused on works of art and coming into being in a situation determined by modernism in the arts can ever cohere in quite the way that Clune needs it to, whether it can (or should even want to) attain the kind of sureness characteristic of, say, a scientific community.