# Introduction: Fear of Knowledge?

Louis-Antoine Mège, Lejla Mrgan, Anthi-Danaé Spathoni, Paula Stoica

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Louis-Antoine Mège, Lejla Mrgan, Anthi-Danaé Spathoni, Paula Stoica. Introduction: Fear of Knowledge?. Periskop – Forum for kunsthistorisk debat, 2025, 2025 (33), pp.4-18. 10.7146/periskop.v2025i33.162406 . hal-05423429

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PERISKOP
FORUM FOR KUNSTHISTORISK DEBAT

Periskop: Forum for kunsthistorisk debat

Nr. 33, 2025

“Fear of Knowledge”

Titel: Introduction: Fear of Knowledge? Artistic and Curatorial Practices as Critical Knowledge Production

Forfattere: Louis-Antoine Mège, Lejla Mrgan, Anthi-Danaé Spathoni, Paula Stoica

Sidetal: 4-18

Dato: 04.12.2025

DOI: 10.7146/periskop.v2025i33.162406

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INTRODUCTION

# Fear of Knowledge?

## Artistic and Curatorial Practices as
Critical Knowledge Production

In his 1960 contribution to the prestigious Reith Lectures on BBC Radio, art historian Edgar Wind drew attention to a persistent and problematic assumption that had shaped art history since the early nineteenth century: the belief that knowledge impedes the artist's imagination.¹ The transitional period between the Enlightenment and Romanticism was crucial for the consolidation of this notion, as the ideal figure of the artist was radically redefined. Moving away from the earlier conception of the artist as a *doctus artifex* or *pictor doctus*—a learned artist distinguished from the mere craftsman by erudition and intellect (Białostocki 1984; Damm, Thimann, and Zittel 2013, 2-6)—Romanticism enshrined a different ideal: the artist as an intuitive genius, untainted by the “touch of cold philosophy,” as John Keats famously put it in *Lamia* (1820).² Despite the fact that artists continued to acquire and mobilize various forms of knowledge³ (e.g. Holert 1998; Le Men 2016), this Romantic idea proved extraordinarily resilient within academia as well as the broader public and policy makers.

This idea of the artist as a kind of anti-intellectual figure resurfaced in Denmark in 2021, where heated discussions and political debates arose over the role of research, theory, reading, and writing at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Some of these issues have already been addressed in Periskop 24 (2020), which looked at the idea of “unruly knowledge” in artistic research. Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and various crises—social, political, economic,

Part of Bertel Thorvaldsen's book collection at Thorvaldsens Museum. © Jakob Faurvig, Thorvaldsens Museum.
humanitarian, planetary, ecological, and climate Periskop 24 presented artistic research as a critical, dynamic field that raises awareness about the precariousness of life in its various forms and fosters the imagining of alternative worlds. In the meantime, the cry for reimagining and building an equitable, inclusive, and genuinely sustainable world has grown even louder and more urgent. In line with the transformative potential attributed to artistic research by Periskop 24, our issue adopts a broader yet complementary perspective, expanding the claim raised by our colleagues to include artistic production and curatorial practice more generally.

The first occasion to discuss knowledge and artistic production arose in an online session of the 13th triennial NORDIK Conference of Art History in the Nordic Countries (2022), entitled “The Fear of Knowledge. Artists’ Book Collections.” This session focused quite narrowly on the relationship between artists and books—how artists collected, owned, circulated, and used them—as a way of probing the broader tension between knowledge and artistic practice.

A second call for papers, which has resulted in the present volume, shifted the focus slightly. While still grounded in the historical tension between, on the one hand, the artist as *doctus artifex* and, on the other, as an intuitive genius, it sought to expand the scope, situating the debate within the broader history and politics of knowledge, considering multiple forms of knowledge beyond books, and explicitly engaging with critical concerns such as postcolonialism, decolonialization, power structures, and the situatedness of knowledge. The issue at hand thus opens up to wider, more theoretical dimensions of knowledge production and circulation. The papers collected here engage primarily with twentieth-century and contemporary art, more specifically conceptualism, exploring how artists and exhibitions negotiate, contest, or reimagine knowledge. Together, they situate questions of knowledge within broader artistic, theoretical and historical contexts.

## From Conceptual Art to an “Epistemological Turn” in Art

As art historian Tom Holert argues, “Marcel Duchamp and Conceptual art paved the way for the visual arts to be considered a special realm for interrogating knowledge claims and art’s ontology” (2020, 11). Since the early twentieth century, but especially from the mid-1960s onwards, artists have increasingly challenged the myths of the unlearned creator and the purely formal autonomy of art. From this perspective, the emergence of Conceptual art in the late 1960s can be understood as a rejection of the “fear of knowledge,” or conversely, as a reevaluation of “the potential cognitive significance of art” (Harrison and Orton
1984, xiii). In a seminal 1968 article, critics Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler summarized this shift:

> During the 1960's, the anti-intellectual, emotional/intuitive processes of art-making characteristic of the last two decades have begun to give way to an ultra-conceptual art that emphasizes the thinking process almost exclusively. [...] The studio is again becoming a study. Such a trend appears to be provoking a profound dematerialization of art, especially of art as object, and if it continues to prevail, it may result in the object's becoming wholly obsolete. (Lippard and Chandler 1968, 31)

Art never became wholly dematerialized, nor did the object become obsolete, however much traditional know-how, manual skills, and material qualities were abruptly devalued. Instead, ideas, information, and process assumed central roles in contemporary artistic practice. As conceptual artist Ian Burn declared in the 1980s: "What was witnessed with Conceptual Art was an absolute separation of mental or intellectual work from manual work, with a revaluing of the intellectual and a devaluing of the manual" (1980, 61). This theme recurs throughout his writings, collected in an anthology reviewed by **Louis-Antoine Mège** at the end of this issue.

Stephen Melville famously described the “extraordinary epistemologism of the sixties” (1966, 234), which found concrete expression in a generation of artists who actively appropriated, manipulated, and assembled wide-ranging interdisciplinary knowledge—not merely as material, but through innovative methods. Artistic practice increasingly adopted analytical and critical approaches (observation, description, analysis, criticism), sometimes reflecting the rigor of philosophical or scientific inquiry. In this context, language (including mathematics, logic, and even algorithms) emerged as a privileged medium for knowledge-based practice. Some works were logically and linguistically structured, such as Mel Bochner’s *Measurement Series: By Formula (CIRCLE)* (1970) or Christine Kozlov’s *Neurological Compilation, The Physical Mind Since 1945 (Project 1: The Bibliography)* (ca. 1967). Others functioned as iconotextual devices, such as Adrian Piper’s *Hypothesis Situation #19* (1969-70) or *Art is all over* (1971) by N. E. THING CO. LTD. More broadly, exhibition spaces themselves became “studies.” Texts, books, archives, matrices, lists, filing systems, maps, diagrams, charts, and even furniture such as tables, chairs, and bookshelves—objects conventionally associated with intellectual labor and the organization of knowledge—were presented in an art context. Examples include Joseph Kosuth’s *Information*
*Room* (1970), which displayed dozens of books and newspapers on tables, and *Women & Work: A Document on the Division of Labour in Industry* (1973-75) by Margaret Harrison, Kay Hunt, Mary Kelly, which combined binders, screens, and wall-mounted documents. In addition, at the end of the 1960s, American conceptual gallery owner Seth Siegelaub was dedicated to “redefining the exhibition catalogue, running a publishing house, selling rare books, building libraries, compiling bibliographies and creating online databases” (Martinetti 2012). This phenomenon extended beyond post-Duchampian practices and Conceptual art, significantly reshaping both the foundations and the formal structures of contemporary art (McEvilley 2005; Osborne 2013; Holert 2020). Art theorist Peter Wollen even described Conceptual art as “the single greatest shift in art since the Renaissance” (1999, 81).

From the postwar period to the present, artists have not only renewed their interest in knowledge but have also interrogated its forms, criteria, scope, and limits (Holert 2020, 50). Attention thus shifted from the nature of art itself (ontology) to the types of understanding it generates (epistemology). In doing so, artists established new and often experimental relations between art, knowledge, and their social uses,⁴ thereby challenging conventional aesthetic concepts and practices.

## In a Changing Global Political Economy of Knowledge

The epistemological ambitions of conceptual and post-conceptual practices must, however, be situated within the broader material and infrastructural conditions of the postwar global economy. Contemporary art has become deeply entangled with the “global political economy of knowledge” (Holert 2020, 8), shaped by processes of expansion and acceleration at multiple levels. The accessibility of knowledge increased with the democratization of higher education. Artists enrolled in reformed academic programs that became progressively interdisciplinary.⁵ Simultaneously, the proliferation of books (notably anthologies) and the growth of libraries and bookstores stimulated intellectual curiosity and encouraged cross-disciplinary exchange. A rapidly developing global infrastructure further facilitated and accelerated the circulation of information, first within the Western world and later, progressively, on a global and digital scale (Burke 2012; Lässig 2016; Feichtinger 2020).

The emergence of high-speed data networks and digital repositories has fostered the “knowledge society” (Drucker 1993) and the “knowledge economy” (Powell and Snellman 2003),⁶ both of which have shaped the informational and conceptual forms of contemporary art (Buchmann 2006 and 2015; Holert 2020).⁷
The archival and anthological tendencies of conceptualism, for instance, laid the groundwork for digital platforms such as *Monoskop*, *UbuWeb*, and *e-flux*—online projects that aggregate artworks, essays, experimental forms and vast digital reservoirs of knowledge.

Recent scholarship has sought to overcome entrenched dichotomies between intellect and matter, idea and materiality, mind and hand. This so-called “material turn” redefines knowledge not simply as conceptual content but as something materially embedded in infrastructures, institutions, technologies, and forms of labor (Burke 2012; Bert and Lamy 2021). Within the field of art history, a parallel effort has demonstrated that many approaches since the 1960s—even those apparently most “dematerialized”—have aimed to transcend the restrictive dualism between thinking and making, between intellectual and manual labor (Berger et al. 2019; Parvu et al. 2025). Questions of access to knowledge have likewise come to the fore. British conceptual artist and art historian Paul Wood recently emphasized that access to knowledge in the 1970s depended on substantial infrastructure—from postal systems to early computing. He adds: “For all our limitations we were beginning to see that theory and knowledge did not by any means function in abstract context but were linked in subterranean ways to the power of institutions” (2024, 53).

This insight resonates with the broader emergence of artistic critical perspectives on the infrastructures of knowledge production, often shaped by post-structuralist and post-Marxist theories. From the institutional critique of the 1970s (Alberro and Stimson 2009) to more recent investigations of infrastructural power (Vishmidt 2017; Beck et al. 2022), artists have devised “counter-institutional” practices that contest—or at least render visible—the dominant modes of organizing, accessing, and legitimizing knowledge (Neugärtner 2023). These practices foreground the multiplicity of knowledge forms—expert and vernacular, explicit and tacit, intellectual and material—while exposing the ways in which knowledge is framed, filtered, and policed.

## Knowledge Revisited: The 1960s and Beyond

These critical art historical accounts and artistic practices have emerged during widespread reevaluations of the concept of knowledge and its prerequisites, mainly from feminist, postcolonial, and post-structuralist perspectives. One of the most consequential critiques of the concept of knowledge as a progressive accumulation of facts resulting from “free” and “objective” inquiry was initiated by Michel Foucault. His analysis (1994 [1966]) of the very condition of possibility of the emergence of knowledge (the so-called *episteme*) offers signifi-
cant insights into crucial factors like historical specificity and contingency that delineate what can be thought and known at a particular time and in a specific context. Equally advocating for rethinking the notion of knowledge is Foucault’s (1980 [1976]) exploration of the so-called power/knowledge complex. The latter famously states that power and knowledge, besides being interconnected, shape each other. As a subtle network consisting of discourses, practices, technologies, and institutions, among others, this complex’ all-encompassing effect becomes evident in how knowing subjects and known “truths” emerge both as products of and vehicles for power-knowledge relations. Against this background, Foucault (1980 [1976]) emphasizes the importance of subjugated knowledge,⁸ encompassing on the one hand historical knowledge, concealed by an imposed order or particular systematization efforts in the name of “true knowledge” (82). On the other hand, subjugated knowledge also includes marginalized forms of knowledge, regarded as inadequate and pushed to the very bottom of the hierarchy, “beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity” (82).

## Situated Knowledges, or: Feminist Objectivity

In a similar vein, Donna Haraway (1988) departs from a diagnosis of the epistemological field, “where traditionally what can count as knowledge is policed by philosophers codifying cognitive canon law,” (575) to denounce objectivity, the very epitome of scientific knowledge, as something of a “god trick” (584). Objectivity implies transcendence, propagating divisions between subject and object, mind and body, and distance and responsibility, and as such is accessible only to (the disembodied and unmarked positions of) White Men. In opposition to this impossible transcendence, Haraway introduced the (limited and partial) vantage points of the subjugated—i.e., that of “women and colonized bodies” who “are not allowed not to have a body, a finite point of view” (575)—as a more accurate account of the world. Coined as “situated knowledges,” this account not only reveals the ideological claims of objectivity and its equivalent universality, but also proposes a feminist-political epistemology based on embodied objectivity. The latter builds on the knowing subject as “partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original” which enables the subject to “join with another, to see together without claiming to be another” (1988, 586).

A productive way of “seeing together” was already established in the 1970s through the feminist method of consciousness raising, which relies on lived experience as a source of knowledge and agency alike. Although articulated from an individual, situated standpoint, it extends beyond the particular by establishing a foundation rooted in shared experiences of oppression, paving the way
for collective action against it. Consciousness-raising and lived experience were ushered into the art world around 1970 by feminist initiatives as part of the counterculture, embedded in the social upheavals of the time (such as the 1968 student uprising, the second wave of the feminist movement, and the Stonewall riots, among others). Even if some women artists opposed the rising feminist efforts and the labels “woman artist” or “women’s art,” the oppression of women in both the art world and everyday life remained a hard-to-ignore reality. The renowned feminist critic and curator Lucy R. Lippard (1976) describes this precarious situation for women when recalling her feminist awakening as follows: “Androgyny was attractive because it was too hard to be a woman” (4). The conceptual artist Hanne Darboven reacts to this intricate situation by declaring her incessant writing as her form of resistance, introducing significant epistemological implications, as **Paula Stoica** argues in her article in this issue.

## Geo- and Body-Politics of Knowledge

The 1960s and 1970s also saw major geopolitical shifts driven by the ongoing Cold War, the fall of colonial empires, and the emergence of new, post-colonial countries, the so-called “Third World.” However, far from overthrowing colonial hegemonies, it merely reproduced them as neo-colonial dynamics. Indeed, according to decolonial approaches, real and lasting change towards an equitable and democratic world emerges from epistemic disobedience and decolonization, along with decolonial knowledges. Building on and expanding the concept of “situated knowledges,” Walter D. Mignolo (2009) addresses the strong link between racism and epistemology by emphasizing that the knower is always “implicated geo- and body-politically in the known” (162). Its location is determined by what the author refers to as the colonial matrix of power, encompassing economy and authority, along with gender and sexuality, knowledge, and subjectivity. This racial system, besides manufacturing Occidentalism and Orientalism, and dividing the world into first, second, and third during the Cold War, also classifies bodies, whereby inferior bodies equaled inferior intellect.

Introducing the aspect of geo- and body-politics in the field of knowledge not only throws into relief how Western epistemology has succeeded in concealing its own geo- and body-political involvement in the known by constructing the figure of the detached, unimplicated observer—“a neutral seeker of truth and objectivity” (2009, 162). It also enables a radical reframing of the parameters of knowledge-making rooted in Western cosmology (theology and philosophy-science), enforced and reproduced by the European imperial languages and
institutions that form (obedient) knowers and control disciplinary knowledge-making: who can engage in knowledge-making, which knowledge is allowed and validated, and which is devalued and disavowed. This radical shift is what Mignolo calls “the decolonial option,” propagating epistemic disobedience to and epistemic de-linking from Western imperial epistemology and its self-declared universality as a prerequisite for both decolonizing being and for establishing alternative “modernities.”

Decoloniality has already gained traction in art production, curatorial practices, and exhibitions⁹ with its ongoing effort to decolonize aesthetics and liberate aesthesis (that is, senses and perception),¹⁰ as forcefully proclaimed in the Decolonial Aesthetics Manifesto in 2011. Besides highlighting the importance of decolonizing the visual realm within the larger effort of decolonialization, it also emphasizes art's active role in advancing decoloniality as well as its instrumental role in (decolonial) knowledge-making (Mignolo and Vazquez 2013). **Thomas Laval** persuasively argues in his article enclosed here that Fareed Armaly's (re)Orient (1989) and Renée Green's *Import/Export Funk Office* (1992) represent early examples of epistemic disobedience through de-westernizing knowledge.

Indeed, it appears that art has never been more valued as an ally in creating a more equitable, sustainable, and inclusive world than in our troubled times, as the buzzword “worlding” suggests. Art’s potential to challenge established knowledges, thereby facilitating transformation, brings us back to Foucault. In the preface to his influential “The Order of Things” (1994 [1966]), Foucault credits Jorge Luis Borges’ fictitious taxonomy as the source of inspiration for his work. Supposedly originating from a Chinese Encyclopedia, it classifies animals according to the following, deeply idiosyncratic categories:

(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies (*Foucault 1994* [1966], xv).

The laughter provoked by this classification, as Foucault notes, broke down “all the familiar landmarks of my thought—*our* thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography” (1994 [1966], xv). In a similar vein, Allan McCollum’s hundreds of identical casts of symbolically charged museal objects deeply challenge the *museum dispositif*, as **Filip Pręgowski** argues in his article. This certainly does not suggest
that art is a domain eluding the “touch of cold science” to adapt Keats’s remark quoted at the beginning of the introduction. Nor should this imply that science is inherently negative or incompatible with art; for, as argued above, it has at least since Conceptual art served as a reference, paving the way for artistic research. The 1999 Bologna reform, however, marked a significant shift in art education, art practice, and curatorial work, prompting discussions such as applying the peer review system to exhibition-making. **Anne Julie Arnfred** discusses in her article the challenges and potential benefits associated with this.

This volume brings together a series of essays that interrogate knowledge in contemporary art and visual culture. Across a range of case studies—from conceptual practices and curatorial methodologies to postcolonial exhibition strategies and reflexive photography—these contributions explore how knowledge is not merely represented but actively constructed, challenged, and transformed through artistic means. Whether through the institutional critique of museum authority, writing as artistic practice, the tactile intimacy of books, or the political implications of visual perception, the following papers trace how art practices engage epistemic questions in ways that often exceed the frameworks of traditional scholarship. Together, they propose that knowledge is never neutral or fixed, but always contingent—shaped by context, medium, history, and power.

In his article, **Filip Pręgowski** explores how the American artist Allan McCollum critically engages with the production, representation, and institutional framing of knowledge. Through projects involving mass-produced casts of natural and historical artefacts, such as fossilized dinosaur bones, Pompeian remains, and lightning-struck sand, McCollum questions the authority of museums and the assumed objectivity of scientific knowledge. Pręgowski shows how McCollum’s work reflects a deep skepticism toward the coherence and usefulness of knowledge systems, echoing themes from Gustave Flaubert’s *Bouvard and Pécuchet*, and ultimately revealing knowledge as fragmented, commodified, and shaped by power.

**Anthi-Danaé Spathoni** explores how books function as both material objects and sources of knowledge in the artistic practice of Cy Twombly. She argues that books—whether collected, annotated, or handmade—fuel the painter’s creativity and become integral to his art. Through an analysis of Twombly’s personal library, his use of literary fragments in his paintings, and his own artist’s books, the study reveals how tangible and intangible forms of knowledge are interwoven in his work, ultimately showing the book as a dynamic medium of inspiration, transformation, and creation.
**Paula Stoica** revisits Hanne Darboven's 1970s conceptual writing to demonstrate how the simple claim “i am a woman, writing, have me” introduces writing as Darboven's political strategy. By simultaneously writing and unwriting “woman,” the artist exposes the contingency of accepted epistemologies and invites new ways of knowing at the nexus of art, gender, and self, challenging categories (“woman,” “art,” “knowledge”) that usually organize what we take to be true.

**Thomas Laval**'s essay argues that two installation-exhibitions, Fareed Armaly's (re)Orient (1989) and Renée Green's *Import/Export Funk Office* (1992), turn the very format of the exhibition into a tool of “epistemic disobedience.” Working within the second wave of Institutional Critique, each project stages a different encounter with documents, artefacts and spatial design to expose the Eurocentric assumptions embedded in museums, media and popular culture, and to circulate alternative, post-colonial ways of knowing. Armaly's enclosed, fragmentary scenography forces visitors to confront the imperial debris that still structures Western knowledge, while Green's open, archival landscape maps the global flows of African-American music and activism, inviting viewers to navigate a networked, non-hierarchical archive. Together, they demonstrate that exhibitions can do more than display objects, they can rewrite who gets to produce, possess and distribute knowledge.

In *Unacknowledged knowledge, Anne Julie Arnfred* questions conventional definitions of academic knowledge by arguing that certain art exhibitions should be recognized as legitimate research outputs, equivalent in status to peer-reviewed journal articles. Drawing on case studies from the UK, Denmark, and the online *Journal for Artistic Research*, it shows how curatorial work generates knowledge through embodied, spatial, and collaborative practices. These processes—described as “knowing how” rather than “knowing that”—often elude traditional academic recognition. By framing exhibitions as active sites of inquiry rather than secondary presentations, the author makes a case for developing peer review models suited to the epistemic nature of exhibition-making itself.

In *Works in spite of myself, Leszek Brogowski* presents four casual photographs paired with short essays to demonstrate how images unintentionally betray the art-historical and cultural knowledge informing our ways of seeing. He argues that no gaze is innocent: it always involves a form of knowledge, often unconscious, that affects how we look, judge, and interpret. The accompanying texts challenge philosophical traditions, from Bergson's exaltation of intuition to Russell's suspicion of the intellectual eye, that have tried to divorce art from cognition. Brogowski recruits figures such as Duchamp, Wittgenstein and Levinas
to show instead that aesthetic experience is inseparable from acts of recognition, judgment and language. In doing so, his artistic contribution reframes photography as a laboratory for testing how knowledge inhabits perception and calls for a renewed philosophy that acknowledges the intellect within artistic experience.

**Louis-Antoine Mège** reviews the anthology *Ian Burn: Collected Writings 1966–1993*, edited by Ann Stephen. It highlights Burn's role as both artist and thinker, committed to merging politics and art. A key theme is knowledge; Burn argues that seeing is shaped by what we already know. The review explores how his concept of “local knowledge” challenges dominant art historical narratives. Mège shows how Burn's writing invites us to rethink knowledge as situated, collective, and historically specific. The author thus positions Stephen's anthology as an essential resource for understanding knowledge's role in contemporary art.

**Inge Lise Mogensen Bech** reviews Jesper Svenningsen's *Champagneårene. Kunsthandel og udstillingsliv i København 1870–1920*, a richly documented study of Copenhagen's art market during its so-called “champagne years.” More than a history of exhibitions and dealers, the book shows how the networks of artists, critics, collectors, and the public shaped how art circulated and gained value. In doing so, the book demonstrates how knowledge about art is not only embedded in aesthetics, but also in the economic, social, and cultural mechanisms that determined which works were seen, sold, and remembered. It reminds us that any history of art is also a history of markets, strategies, and perceptions that turn objects into cultural knowledge.

Our aim is not simply to document the enduring ambivalence toward knowledge in art, but to confront it directly. By reexamining the multiple intersections between art and knowledge—historical, conceptual, political—we seek to move beyond mistrust and misunderstanding. The contributions assembled here demonstrate that art and knowledge are not antagonistic domains, but can function as mutually constitutive forces whose entanglement continues to shape the conditions of artistic practice and knowledge today.

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## NOTES

1. This lecture was published a few years later in Edgar Wind's book *Art and Anarchy* (1963).

2. Wind explained that "the fear that knowledge might hurt the imagination, that the exercise of artistic faculties, both in the artist and in the spectator, might be weakened by the use of reason. This is a modern fear and, if I am not mistaken, unfamiliar before the Romantic period." See also Thomas McEvilley: "It was the cognitive faculty, epitomized as science, that the Romantic tradition had excluded above all from the art context" (2005, 77), and Holert (2020).

3. We do not wish to conflate these different notions, but we adopt a broad understanding of what "knowledge" encompasses: first, in a subjective sense: what we have experienced, what we have been informed about, or what we have learned; second, in an objective sense: what is subject to experience, information, or learning. In both cases, it is positive knowledge, whether empirical, factual, theoretical, or scientific" (Cassin et al. 2004, 364).
4 In parallel of a “material turn,” the last decades have witnessed the emergence of an “educa-
tional turn,” reconsidering the social implications of artistic practices in terms of learning,
transmission and participation (Bishop 2006; O’Neill and Wilson 2010).

5 The post-war era and especially the 1960s are a moment of rethinking the “the specialized nature of knowledge that stemmed from the nineteenth-century organization of the research university into divisions and disciplines.” Interdisciplinarity became increasingly common in the second half of the twentieth century with the ambition “to solve problems that are beyond the scope of any one discipline” and “to achieve unity of knowledge, whether on a limited or grand scale” (King and Rudy 2023, 12;23). Since the late 1950s, numerous reforms have transformed higher education in Western countries—particularly in the field of arts educa-tion—with the aim of professionalizing curricula and fostering greater interdisciplinarity.

6 Since the post-war period, the cybernetic notion of “information” has gradually been supplanted by the broader concept of “knowledge.” The fields of economics, sociology and management studies have been particularly attentive to the ways in which the society and the economy have become increasingly driven by technologies oriented toward the production and dissemination of knowledge and information. A landmark publication of this period is Daniel Bell’s *The Coming of Post-Industrial Society* (1973).

7 According to Holert, the art after Conceptual art has been more and more aligned with “the shifts of economy, labor, and power that are said to characterize the contemporary and possibly future condition of postindustrial, immaterial, algorithmized, automatized, AI-controlled knowledge societies” (2020, 12).

8 These elaborations on subjugated knowledge served Foucault to define his genealogical method of inquiry.

9 Some of the most noteworthy early exhibitions are Modernologies, MACBA 2009; Altermoder-
nity, Tate Modern 2009; Decolonial Aesthetics 2010, Bogota, and Duke University 2011.

10 The full manifesto can be found here: https://transnationaldecolonialinstitute.wordpress.com/decolonial-aesthetics/.