Artistic research, philosophy, and cognitive progress.

Abstract

The evolution of those tendencies of the recent art that fall under the concept of «artistic research» are pushing us to rethink some old problems of the theory of the art, especially those that have to do with the thesis that art would be a form of knowledge. Traditionally, however, it has been understood that art is not a form of knowledge of the same kind as science and technology. For this reason, one cannot speak of the progress of art in any sense except in the progress of certain techniques. Artists who defend the idea of «artistic research», however, are disrupting these traditional ideas since they understand that at least some types of art projects do produce knowledge in a strong sense. So, of some few art research projects is possible to affirm that they represent a cognitive progress of the same sort as we find in sciences. This type of progress of art is, in any case, minority. However, progress in artistic research practices in general, excepting those stronger, resembles, from the cognitive point of view, the cognitive progress of philosophy. The final thesis is that the concept of cognitive progress that we use in philosophy as an endless reflection and proliferation of perspectives can be applied, therefore, to the practices of artistic research.