Critical Inquiry. Art and Non-Propositional Thinking

The lecture considers art and the theory of art under the notion of artistic production rather than reception. Since reception-aesthetics in philosophical aesthetics was dominant during the last three decades, the presentation attempts to shift perspective. The starting point is the concept of non-propositional truth, from which I try to move to what I call an ‘other-than-metaphysical-thought’ by which I mean the peculiarity of artistic thinking as something you cannot reconstruct in terms of classical concepts such as poiēsis, technē, form-matter distinction, imagination or design and the like. In specific the lecture elaborates on differences between art and science in order to outline what ought to be called – in Greek language – a ‘me-hodological’ approach of artistic labor (a ‘non-methodological’ way of work), because one of the features of art is that it cannot be stuck to definable procedures or methods but to a constant search or erratic experimentation. The conclusion, hence, is that thinking in the arts, as well as ‘artistic research’, is based in practices of incessant deconstruction and doubt.