Liberties and Servitudes of Art, or About the Temptation of Existence

Abstract

This study departs from the premises that the idea of freedom determines a paradoxical condition of the relation between art and politics. The author uses the concept of freedom in a Kantian manner, as a transcendental condition of the co-ordination of the historically constituted values in the fields of art and politics. Metaphorically speaking, the experience of freedom can be understood as a temptation to existence. Analytically speaking, from the perspective of the practical reason, one can observe that freedom funds the paradoxical relations between the competences of a certain field of culture and the creative performances of the artists. More exactly, political persuasion can be rediscovered in what recent history calls “the Manicheist spirit of the artist”.