In part one of the Critique of Judgment, Immanuel Kant wrote that "the judgment of taste . . . is not a cognitive judgment, and so not logical, but is aesthetic [1]." While the condition of aesthetic discernment has long been the subject of philosophical discourse, the role of the arbiters of that judgment has more often been assumed than questioned. The art historian, critic, connoisseur, and curator have long held the esteemed position of the aesthetic judge, their training, instinct, and eye part of the inimitable subjective processes that Kant described as occurring upon artistic evaluation. Although the concept of intangible knowledge in regard to aesthetic theory has been much explored, little discussion has arisen in response to the development of new types of artificial intelligence as a challenge to the seemingly ineffable abilities of the human observer. This paper examines the developments in the field of computer vision analysis of paintings from canonical movements within the history of Western art and the reaction of art historians to the application of this technology in the field. Through an investigation of the ethical consequences of this innovative technology, the unquestioned authority of the art expert is challenged and the subjective nature of aesthetic judgment is brought to philosophical scrutiny once again.

Computer-generated art has long challenged traditional notions of the role of the artist and the curator in the creative process. In the age of machine learning these philosophical conceptions require even further consideration.

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Although recent advances in artificial intelligence to generate images with deep learning techniques, especially generative adversarial networks (GANs), have offered radically new opportunities for its creative applications, there has been little investigation into its use as a tool to explore the senses beyond vision alone. In an artistic collaboration that brought Chef Alain Passard, art historian and data scientist Emily Spratt, and computer programmer Thomas Fan together, photographs of the three-star Michelin plates from the Parisian restaurant Arpège were used as a springboard to explore the art of culinary presentation in the manner of the Renaissance painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo.