The ‘Uffa‘ of philosophy and art : apologies to Marx, Shakespeare, Shelley, Gramsci

Abstract

Philosophers have attempted to change reality for more than a century, the question however is, not to change reality but to re-interpret it, again. The Adornian question on the inability of philosophy and its conceptual language to articulate and to dig into the meaning of a work of art is one which is persistently encountered. Due to this question, Picasso’s artistic-creative energy was aborted for a couple of years, pushing him to opt for poetry, poetic-philosophy, Dantesque-poetic-philosophy, in versed prose. Arthur Danto, amongst others, quite correctly believed that such an inability is caused by the fact that contemporary art has itself become philosophy, and without such a categorisation art is constrained to blur into nonsense.