Ethicality of aesthetics

Abstract

This paper relates the end of art to the end of metaphysics or the decline of Eurocentric humanism and approaches critical aesthetics from a postcolonial social context. The end of art, as revived in postmodern thought, points to the decline of humanism as the result of a limited metaphysics; such metaphysics is unable to show a "beyond" the limits imposed by the positivism of science and technology. It is through the manipulation, denial, and imposition of a cultural criterion of the hegemonic system that the death of art is represented in silence, with a nihilistic attitude on the part of the artist, who remains imprisoned and inactive for political practice. The opposite of inactive nihilism is the praxis of liberation