The logic that leads to the conclusion that art is now is a socio-cultural
laboratory and a mode of engagement and means of reformation, depends on our
abandoning a taxonomy premised on the need to privilege one term within a
dichotomy over another, and instead adopt one in which we embrace the
Derridean notion of deference (differentiation and deferral). After Modernism
demonstrated that there could no longer be a clearly defined class of objects
that count as art, it is no longer necessary to differentiate art as being
either an objects that produces special experiences (as in Kantian and
phenomenological aesthetics), or as a particular system of symbolic
representations (as in Hegel, Cassirer, and Goodman.) Likewise it is no longer
necessary to assert that works of art are received in a purely subjective
manner (as Hume suggests), as opposed to providing an objective content
because the ontological status of an artwork tends to be bound to the
particular way it is interpreted (Danto). Primarily this notion of the work
art as a conflicted self is a result of art's thematization of art itself in
modernity in which the link between art as signifier and signified came to
reconciled in the act of critical analysis and interpretation. Must This
resolution was a consequence of an ongoing attempt to determine what role
art may play in a secular culture committed to abandoning metaphysics and
ideology. Within this post Modern project increasingly there have been
attempts to employ art as a means to provide a corrective to
instrumentality (as Merleau-Ponty and Adorno argue), by reflecting upon and
transforming our logics and as such is thought to be essential for the
education of sensibility and judgment ( as advanced by Dewey.) As such
artworks are a primarily playful character (Gadamer) while supplying a basis
for historical and cultural identities (in Hegel's sense.) Thought of in this
manner art comes to have a genuinely political dimension (Benjamin, Rancihre)
be it is somewhat in effable and emergent in its forms and content
representing and open-ended process that cannot be contained (Derrida) within
our increasingly instrumental society art preserves just enough autonomous so
that it by it very nature may be thought of defacto politically engaged and at
times a tool of subversive. Premised on this conclusion and the fairly general
hypothesis concerning the development of an integrative, and indexical vision
of art and its attendant discourses, we return to our initial subject that
the underlying assumption which is that this ill-defined territory called art
can be used to to intervene in the established inter-change of
embodiment/awareness/knowledge and produce within the context of our becoming
human a new range of experiences, thoughts and reflections upon.
