Art as Practice of Differentiation: From a Performative Exercise to the Epistemic World of Imponderable Evidence

Abstract

How does art help to differentiate reality for us? My reflections start by describing a small performative exercise in a teaching context. What kind of knowledge arises when we experience a shift in the reality we expect to encounter in teaching contexts? How can we understand such aesthetic shifts in an epistemological and academic context? Wittgenstein creates an intellectual environment in which it is possible to reflect on artistic processes as tools of differentiation. Thus, new, critical perspectives on how we experience the world we exist in are made possible – through art, through participation in artistic settings and not least through reflecting on art. In this article, I only indicate some central Wittgensteinian patterns in aesthetic epistemology.