ARTWORK AS AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL PROBLEM

Abstract

Art, just like other disciplines, helps us understand the environment and ourselves. What separates art from other activities is its method to comprehend existence and the way it transmits it to us. How does art do the work of undestanding and making sense? If, at the end of this activity, knowledge emerges, how does art reach the knowledge of its environment? To be able to understand how art reaches the knowledge of reality, firstly we need to know what knowledge is.

After the creators of modern world make our judgements on reality a matter of debate,  at the end they come to a consensus: Our knowledge on reality comes from experiment and goes through mental processes and gets monitored. Kant determines two competencies while criticising what this mind can and can not do: Representation and conceptualizing.

Knowledge was conditioned firstly on the intelligibility of utterance ,then the obtention of corresponding conditions from experiments. The condition of presence of artwork, by sensibility, is non-functional pleasure bonding us togeher around the same consensus without depending on any concept beforehand. It needs to be mentioned that artwork ,at this point, is stuck between its competence of coceptualizing and competence of representing an object that corresponds to a concept, because an epistemologial transition between these two points doesn’t seem possible. It can be said that artwork doesn’t inform us about anything in regard to reality when looked from an epistemological perspective.