Truth, and Beauty From Work to Play: Gadamer on the Affinity of Art

In this essay, the author maintains that Gadamers affirmation of the relation among art, truth, and beauty is less a sign of conservatism or nostalgia than it is a key to his innovative and insightful examination of our experience of art. Gadamers approach to both the truth claim and the beauty of art flows from his association of the being of art with enactment (Vollzug). Yet, increasingly over the course of his writings, Gadamer appears to relinquishes talk of art in this sense as a ,work in favor of an emphasis on the kinship between art and the phenomenon of play. In light of this shift, it is argued that Gadamers conception of the truth claim and beauty of art may best be understood not as properties of a product or artifact, of something already enacted and thus complete in itself, but, instead, as nothing other than the very enacting of that freedom which he finds at the heart of human play.

From Work to Play: Gadamer on the Affinity of Art, Truth, and Beauty Academic Article