Issue 5 · Winter 2021

Art Worlds

A Way of Knowing

Nishiki Sugawara-Beda

Robert E. Gordon 

I have always felt that art is an epistemology, a way of knowing the world. Art is a form of knowledge even as it is an object of knowledge, highlighting not so much what we know but how we come to know it. In terms of knowledge, contemporary artists tend to take facts as given, as ground zero from their aesthetic point of view. Certitude, then, becomes less important than the array of emotive reactions the art object can engender. If this conception of art is viable, then we might ask what does Nishiki Sugawara-Beda want us to know with her “Zero at Home” exhibition? And how does she want us to know it?

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This article appears in Athenaeum Review Issue 5 (Winter 2021), pp. 50-55. Download a PDF copy.
Filed under Art History