On how art can be understood as a space within which the project of reason is pursued.Modern and contemporary art have often defined themselves against the conceptual and linguistic mediations of reason, claiming that their practices offer a different and more direct access to the real or the material. Employing a unique configuration of philosophy, art theory, and a consideration of specific artworks together with analysis of popular culture, current political events, and Hollywood cinema, artist, and theorist Amanda Beech challenges this deep-seated orthodoxy, asking how art can instead be understood as a space within which the project of reason is pursued. Developing out of the idealism of theological-sacral art, sustained in Romanticism and entrenched by poststructural antirealist critiques, the notion that art is opposed to reason defined the political and social hopes of the avant-garde, was manifested in the crisis of a self-conscious conceptualism, and remains implicit in the
