Nominalist re-turn in contemporary art
Nominalist re-turn in contemporary art

Summary/Abstract: Hans Blumenberg has shown (Die Legitimität der Neuzeit) that the appearance of nominalism in the debates of the Middle Ages had laid grounds for modernity. Nominalism assumes that only individual, concrete objects exist and that common properties are not grounded in any kind of supra-individual properties or relations that would exist independently of what is singular. In Thierry de Duve’s interpretation, “pictorial nominalism” of Duchamp puts stress on a particular or a singular name, stops the process of reference and shows its “plastic being”. This aesthetic idea opens up a new field that we now call “art”, where art becomes a “proper name”. I would like to follow his analysis, but also to re-think it the context of the present, to explore the specificity of the nominalist re-turn in contemporary art. The contemporary aesthetic experience of art as such is nominalist in the sense I would like to examine in this article.

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