Australian Aboriginal Art And Immanuel Kant

“There is beauty here in exactly the way that Kant meant the word, a beauty that comes from the pleasure of looking at designs that ‘mean nothing on their own.’ … The problem is that … Aboriginal artists aren’t working with anything like a Kantian conception of a free play of the faculties and they have, in the vast majority of cases, no interest in the idea of abstraction as that idea emerged in … painting in the 20th century.”