Abstract

Ever since the time of Hegel, there has been a growing philosophization of art in which artists increasingly make works where visual/formal concerns are supplanted by philosophical questions concerning the definition of art itself. At the same time, however, an equally vociferous defence of art against its subsumption by philosophy has been made by theorists such as Nietzsche, Sontag and Barthes who have sought to rescue the sensuous immediacy of art from the abstractness of philosophical thought by advocating a more spontaneous and less rationalistic response to works of art. While it may seem paradoxical that two such diametrically opposing conceptualizations of the relation between art and philosophy should coexist, it is argued that they are in fact two sides of the one coin and reflect the fundamentally contradictory nature of the project of art in modernity. Furthermore, both conceptualizations are one-sided insofar as they fail to grasp the essentially antinomous nature of the relationship between the two in which art is inescapably dependent upon philosophy at the same time as it is irreducible to it.