The new colourists in American photography in the 1970s --Len Jenshel, Richard Misrach, Joel Sternfeld, Stephen Shore -- worked with a conception of beauty. I find that their embrace of beauty in color was a traditional one--art is about beauty, even if the photographs were supposedly about everyday life in the US.

I cannot really do beauty. The urban environment that I live in Adelaide is anything but beautiful. It's actually downright ugly. So what do I do. Ignore my local urban area? Go hunting for beauty in it?

Don't we make pictures because of what stands in front of the camera? That is not necessarily the beautiful in the sense that Kant understood it:---“judgments of taste” that are based in an individual’s subjective feelings, they also claim universal validity. This is based on the “free play of our cognitive powers” that underlies our judgment of taste. Kant's appeal is to a sensus communis, the idea of a sense shared by us ie., --inter-subjectivity or what is common to different people in society.

Aesthetic communication is the universal communicability of a feeling we all know through the play of our faculties. It is a passage from “I” to”we”. We say you ought to feel the  way  I feel, you ought to agree with me”.

These days sensus communis is interpreted as common sense. The English term “common sense” has its own history, mainly through Berkeley, Hume, and the Scottish school. It already has a specific meaning: a healthy understanding that is opposed to skepticism or nonsense.This not at all what Kant has in mind when he speaks of the sensus communis. In fact, he wants to distance himself from such an understanding of the
sensus communis.

What the American new colourists did was to divorce beauty from ethics or the good. They dumped Kant in favour of Greenberg. Their “aesthetics” was a theory of beauty. They assumed that there is such a common feeling, or sense, that we share and that also decides about beauty in matters of taste. The beautiful object gives pleasure and the notion of taste contains an element of social commonality in it, and, with the presupposition of a common sense.

Contrary to Kant we do not possess the faculty of spontaneously empathizing with the human in us all. We cannot say that Our pleasuresand displeasures are universal since these are the outcomes of the processes of our cognitive faculties, which are the same in everyone.