Hume locates the standard of taste in the responses of ideal critics. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), responding to Hume in the Critique of Judgment (1790), thinks this is not quite right, and his argument reveals something important that Hume's account misses.
Hume's ideal critic is essentially a very refined version of a normal person: someone who has cultivated their natural taste through practice and reflection. But the judgment they make is still, in Hume's framework, a judgment about a sentiment: "this work reliably produces pleasure in qualified observers." The authority of the standard comes from the qualities of the observers.
Kant thinks the structure of aesthetic judgment is stranger and more interesting than this. When you judge something beautiful, you are not merely reporting your own pleasure ("I enjoy this") nor making an empirical claim about what most people enjoy. You are doing something that feels like both: you are saying "this is beautiful" in a way that carries an implicit demand that others agree. If someone disagrees, you do not just shrug and say "well, we have different tastes." You feel that they are missing something, that their disagreement is somehow wrong. You argue. You point things out. You try to bring them to see what you see.
Kant calls this the universality claim of aesthetic judgment: when you judge something beautiful, you are implicitly claiming that the judgment holds not just for you but for everyone capable of aesthetic experience. But this universality is strange, because it is not the universality of a logical proof or an empirical fact. It is what Kant calls a demand or a call: you are asking everyone to agree, knowing you cannot compel them.
What makes this possible is what Kant calls disinterestedness: genuine aesthetic pleasure is pleasure taken in the object itself, in its form and the free play of imagination it generates, independent of any interest in the object's existence, use, or moral purpose. You are not pleased that the object is yours, or that it is useful, or that it confirms your values. You are pleased by what it is. And this disinterested pleasure, Kant argues, is capable of being shared universally precisely because it is not tied to any particular personal interest.
The contrast with Hume is productive. Hume's aesthetics is empirical and naturalistic: the standard of taste is grounded in human psychology and refined experience. Kant's is more idealist: the structure of aesthetic judgment carries a claim to universal validity that goes beyond any empirical consensus. Hume tells you how aesthetic authority actually works in practice. Kant tries to explain what we mean when we make aesthetic judgments, regardless of how practice actually goes.
Both accounts are incomplete. Hume cannot fully explain the felt universality of aesthetic claims. Kant's disinterested pleasure is an idealization that does not describe most actual aesthetic experience, which is deeply entangled with personal history, cultural context, and embodied response. Contemporary aesthetics has been working in the space between these two positions for two centuries, and the question is still alive.