  Now we can turn to Kant’s analysis of fine art and our experience of it. For Kant, all art is intentional human production that requires skill or talent, yet fine or “beautiful” (schöne) art is produced with the intention of doing what anything beautiful does, namely, promoting the free play of the cognitive powers. That a work of fine art must be the product of intention and yet produce the free play of the mental powers seems like the paradox that “beautiful art, although it is certainly intentional, must nevertheless not seem intentional” (CPJ, §45, 5:306–7). Further, Kant also assumes that although our pleasure in beauty should be a response to the form of an object alone, fine art is paradigmatically mimetic, that is, has representational or semantic content (CPJ, §48, 5:311). This too seems like a paradox. Kant aims to resolve both of these apparent paradoxes through his theory that successful works of fine art are products of genius, a natural gift that gives the rule to art (CPJ, §46, 5:307). A work of genius must have “spirit,” which it gets through its content, typically—as Kant assumes without argument, although perhaps in his time, long before the invention of non-objective art, without any real need for argument—a rational idea, indeed an idea relevant specifically to morality. But in order to be beautiful, a work of art must still leave room for the freedom of the imagination, and therefore cannot present such ideas to us directly and didactically (indeed, such ideas cannot be directly and adequately presented in sensible form). Instead, a work of art succeeds when it presents an “aesthetic idea,” a representation of the imagination that “at least strive[s] toward something lying beyond the bounds of experience, and thus seek[s] to approximate a presentation of the concepts of reason.” A successful work of art also “stimulates so much thinking,” such a wealth of particular “attributes” or images and incidents, “that it can never be grasped in a determinate concept” (CPJ, §49, 5:314–15)—thereby stimulating a pleasurable feeling of free play among the imagination, understanding, and reason while at the same time satisfying the demand that a work of art have both a purpose and a content.