The basic fact about a work of art is that it is a nonthing or a strange tool. It is something that we can’t see or recognize;…
The basic fact about a work of art is that it is a nonthing or a strange tool. It is something that we can’t see or recognize; it is without lavel. It lacks a concept, as Kant might have said; there is therefore no knowing what it is, and so to see it we are, in a way, thrown back on ourselves, on the very question, What is it about our ethos—our habits, our way of being—that stands in our way? So the engagement with an artwork is an engagement with oneself, and also others, and the work of aesthetic engagement with an artwork requires a kind of unveiling of the self to oneself that also tends, of its very nature, to alter us, to reorganize us. Again, this is why, on my understanding, art and philosophy are reorganizational practices, and this is why they offer something like emancipation: they free us from the ways that we just find ourselves, as a matter of fact, organized by habit, by culture, by history, and even by biology.
Alva Noë. 2023. The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.