PLOTINUS AND CONTEMPORARY ART: ART, BEAUTY AND THE UNIFYING POWER OF THE SOUL

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.