Interesting art

This article considers the logical form of judgements of contemporary art setting out from Donald Judd's famous 1965 remark that a work of art 'needs only to be interesting'. It traces the form of the judgement of the interesting back to Friedrich Schlegel's early, proto-Romantic text 'On the Study of Greek Poetry' (1797), and forward to the present, via a critique of Sianne Ngai's recovery of the concept from the standpoint of a 'postmodern aesthetic'. It is through 'the interesting' – and its constitutive under-determination – it is argued, that politics enters art judgement.