부산대학교 도서관

The theorizing of seeing and visible has been a typical and essentially defining philosophical problem since the very beginning of philosophy. Plato and Aristotle define the basic ways of approaching to reality. Whether it is considered to be illusion (idealism) or sensory givenness (materialism), it always remains presented. We try to analyze different aspects which point out the cognitive side of visual arts (painting above all) and which we recognize as consciousness of reality.The historical development of art, considering its cognitive character, appears explicitly with Hegel for the first time. The necessary consequence of such development, according to Hegel, is so called the end of art which means that art emerging does not correspond to its ultimate definitionand meaning. His prediction of the death of art can be seen in the major part of the 20th century art, which abandons mimetic presentation and aims at abstraction and the destruction of visual in narrow sense. In spite of that, we are going to try to present even such an approach as the presentation of something or as making something visible. That “something” is, in our opinion, nothing else but the consciousness of reality.