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To be alienated is to be estranged from something. In the case of abstract art, its critics have held that such works are alienated in the sense of embodying a flight from reality into a vacuous realm of theory, which renders them unintelligible to the majority of people. In this paper, I shall argue that the former claim is true only in a restricted sense, and that if freed from this restriction, the latter claim need not apply. To show this, I shall, in Part 1, outline a theory of alienation inspired by Schiller but derived substantially from Merleau-Ponty and Hegel, with some nods towards Marx and Heidegger.¹ In Part 2, I will relate this to the theoretical justifications offered by some abstract artists for their work, and will suggest that whilst such theories do indeed involve an element of alienation, this is irrelevant from an aesthetic point of view. In Part 3, I will argue further that, grounded in terms of a complex notion of aesthetic experience, abstract artworks actually turn out to be disalienating in both ontological and political terms.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-3847-2_6

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