Abstract

GOMEZ PEREZ, Gustavo. PLOTINUS AND CONTEMPORARY ART:: ART, BEAUTY AND THE UNIFYING POWER OF THE SOUL. Univ. philos. [online]. 2011, vol.28, n.56, pp.109-127. ISSN 0120-5323.

Duchamp's legacy in contemporary art is manifest in the increasing importance of the conceptual dimension in art and in the separation of art and beauty. Art as a conceptual or intellectual activity is, thus, dissociated from a sensible appreciation of beauty. Plotinus' metaphysics of the beauty challenges this separation between intellect and beauty by referring beauty to the perception of what is intelligible in the sensible. Accordingly, the thesis of this paper is that Plotinus' metaphysics of the beauty illuminates social and political aspects of art that are of interest for understanding some important trends of contemporary art. In order to support this thesis, I will analyze Plotinus' account of the relation between the sensible and the intelligible, and the concepts of participation and imitation as they appear in Enneads I 6[1] and VI 4 [22]. Finally, I will refer to Richard Box's Fields of Light (2003) as an instance that clarifies this thesis.

Keywords : Plotinus; beauty; perception; metaphysics; contemporary art.

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