Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

The Art Issue

Art As An Encounter

Daniel Vargas Gómez considers what we encounter when we encounter art.

When Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) wrote Concerning the Spiritual in Art (Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 1911), his purpose was to portray art as the greatest expression of the human spirit. Nor was he the first, and certainly not the last, to propose this link between art and spirituality; before him Karl Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), and Romantic thought in general, had developed an approach to aesthetics that highlighted the incompatible nature of human life and modern industrial creations. Nevertheless, the Twentieth Century has witnessed such a variety of art concepts and artistic production that assuming a vision of art like that of Kandinsky’s may seem arbitrary, and even naïve, just because Kandinsky’s vision can argue neither in favor of nor against the value of Twentieth Century radical aesthetic trends, such as conceptual art, among others.

The artistic freedom in at least most of the Western world for the past hundred years has had no precedent in history. Yet at the same time as all sorts of artistic manifestations and movements have appeared, any pretense of finding objective values in art or even implying their existence has become more and more unlikely.

…