The ontology of art according to Hans-Georg Gadamer

Abstract

What we aim from this paper is to restore Gadamer's analysis of the "ontology of art." For Gadamer, art is an experience with reality, existence, and truth. However, this truth has become one of the things that is least shared among us, due to the dominance of aesthetic awareness, which views works of art as an aesthetic subject by stripping them of their moral and cognitive content. Therefore, the first moment of any appropriate ontology of the artistic work requires us to recognize that subjectivity is not master of what happens to it in aesthetic experience. The true subjectivity of the artistic experience is not the self but the work of art itself.