This Strange Idea of Art

In dialogue with the recent writings of François Jullien, this essay seeks to develop an alternative to the standard conception of artistic form that animates many different approaches to contemporary Western art theory. It explains how this notion of form follows from what Jullien has described as the "strange idea of beauty" that has been developed by Western philosophy. By analyzing a number of different artistic movements from the 1950s to the present, an attempt is made to demonstrate the viability of conceiving of artistic form in terms of xing 形, that is, as an energetic formation or dynamism of things.