FILOZOFIJSKI PRILAZ UMJETNOSTI
A PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACH TO ART

Summary/Abstract: Preceding art, reflection on art (the philosophy of art) deals with questions of the essence and meaning, sources and purpose of art, artistic creation and its works. However, the question of the specific forms in which art manifests itself and the course it takes is an issue for history and the theories of individual forms of art, which serve the philosophy of art as hypotheses and the starting point for its consideration and reflections on the essence of art and the artistic. What this means is that the philosophy of art and aesthetics as a practical philosophy is not a normative discipline or a system of norms – it prescribes no canon of laws for artistic creation. There are two basic and opposing poles and philosophical views of the essence of art, which may provisionally be dubbed realistic or objectivist and subjectivist, with individual interpretations ranging between the two, with the emphasis on one or the other but never entirely excluding the opposing view. The “objective” theoretical approach highlights the mimetic meaning of art, designating the imitative as the basic, general and objective meaning of art. However, where artistic creativity is concerned, it is not a matter of the mechanical imitation of experienced reality; rather, the work has not only its own true essence and the artist’s “self-hood” (M. Heidegger), originality, talent and inspiration, his own experience and view of reality, but also the transposition of these into a work of art.

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