CONCEPTUAL ART: ART AFTER PHILOSOPHY OR ART AS PHILOSOPHY

Abstract

Summary. The purpose of the work is to understand the phenomenon of conceptual art, which is considered as visual philosophizing. For artists of conceptual art, it is not the form that is important, but the concept it expresses, because conceptual art seeks to influence the intellectual, not just the emotional or aesthetic perception of the viewer. Methodology. The posed problem involves the use of methods of hermeneutic understanding, applied not only to ideological and conceptual material, but also to the phenomena of art. When working with the texts, the author followed the method of phenomenological description, which follows the subject itself and makes it possible to realize a conceptualized understanding of the set goal. Scientific novelty. The author argues that conceptual art is a way of philosophizing: conceptual artists enter the dimension of philosophy by creating concepts in order to understand the world. As a result, they undermine the established ideas of what art should look like, asking questions about the essence of art in general. For conceptualism, the concept is more important than the artistic embodiment, and they set the philosophical task of awakening reflection. The desire to objectify and comprehend a concept brings the work of conceptual artists closer to philosophy, as it provokes the viewer to intellectually comprehend what they see, which is the work of philosophical reflection in the dimension of art. In this context, it would be unfair to say that classical art is limited to emotional impact, while the specificity of conceptual art is that it purposefully sets out to go beyond art as such. Conclusions. Conceptual art is not just related to philosophy, but it is a specific form of philosophizing, because the idea of conceptual art is aimed at intellectual contemplation, like some philosophical theory. Like philosophy, conceptual art aims to think about something that is beyond human sensory experience, and for this purpose both philosophy and conceptual art create concepts that can be used to think about the world around us, man in the world, history, ecology, etc.