Hume and contemporary art the pictoriality of the image

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to articulate David Hume’s thought in relation to contemporary art, the consolidation of which requires a continuity not only among images but also among concepts and objects, whether abstract or not. The skeptic understands philosophy through the pictorial nature of thought, and it is Hume who deepens this pictorial perspective, evident in his analyses of relations, identity, color, among others. The suggestion is that the proximity between skepticism and poetry facilitates an understanding of how ordinary objects become works of art, how laundry detergent boxes or mere chairs are transformed through visual operations of concepts. Contemporary art would this rely, in its large spectrum, on the ability to perceive as a skeptic. Furthermore, it is suggested that, in contemporary art, it is the contemporaneity between artworks and objects that liberates imagination to move horizontally across different artifices. From this standpoint, the paper argues that the Treatise converges with contemporary art in endowing the phenomenon of the image with a material vocabulary, through which the inside and outside of consciousness are either not clearly delimited or in a distinct relation of continuity.