Autonomous Audiences 

If one takes Kant's concept of aesthetic ideas seriously, especially in Gautier's version of that argument, and holds that the absence of firm, definite, and rational ideas and meanings is the nature of both the creative process and the perception of artistic beauty, then the elimination of all narratives and the disappearance of all kinds of representations appears as the necessary step. Art must stop representing something, must stop meaning something in order to be what it is (art). (pg 664)

When art ceases to be recognised (and definable) in its aesthetic properties, one needs a "theory" which would contextualise and explain something as art, and the "artworld" in which such objects can function as art. (pg 672)

Yves Klein's exhibition entitled "Le Vide" (void), opened in 1958 in the Iris Clert gallery in Paris, is the action that reduces art to emptiness in a paradigmatic way. Its visitors were presented with an empty gallery; emptiness or "nothing" (apart from freshly painted white walls of the gallery) was all that was exhibited. Art appears here as being liberated not only from mimesis, formal elements of visual art, material objects or the compelling presence of the artist; the "pure" and "real" nature of art appears as nothing, signifying the final stage of the vanishing acts. The absence, emptiness, and/ or nothingNess that are derived from Klein's project can probably be interpreted as disclosing the real nature of (autonomous) art, as the aesthetic argument aspired to establish it. "Nothing becomes the final stage and a complete self-realisation of art as an autonomous phenomenon. (pg 671)


Source Džalto, Davor. "Art: A Brief History of Absence." Filozofija i društvo 26 (2015).