However, arts practices differ from Enlightenment conceptions of intelligence and knowledge in the following way: They do not…
However, arts practices differ from Enlightenment conceptions of intelligence and knowledge in the following way: They do not (usually, primarily) mine the world for symbols. The historical emergence of the academy itself is a product of these Enlightenment values in the sense that it valorizes the distillation of abstract symbolic representations from the world. Art operates directly upon embodied, sensorial materiality, making physical, material, and temporal permutations that are invested with intelligence unintelligible from a cognitivist perspective. These intelligences have been relegated to the realm of skill, the merely artisanal because they engage materiality directly and do not traffic primarily in the symbolic notations that have become the lingua franca of our age. Penny, Simon. Making Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art, and Embodiment.Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017.