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The idea that art is disruptive has ancient roots and is today ubiquitous. Its ubiquity in recent history is visible in the cultural policies of liberal and repressive states alike. While liberal governments have, by and large, fostered and protected artistic freedom as an engine of progress and societal self-criticism, repressive governments have restricted artistic freedom for the same reason.

Is the idea of art as intrinsically disruptive analytic or contingent? In this paper I will argue that while the phenomenology of aesthetic experience is in part intrinsically disruptive, it does not follow that the concept of art is also necessarily so. A large proportion of instances of artistic creativity, as well as our experience of it, is better understood in terms of compliance with cultural and aesthetic norms. Our intuitions to the contrary, I argue further, have more to do with the contingencies of twentieth-century history and the illusion of perpetual peace which governed its second half. The limits of this illusion are visible today both in art and politics.

Recently, cognitivist accounts about art have come under pressure to provide stronger arguments for the view that artworks can yield genuine insight and understanding. In Gregory Currie’s Imagining and Knowing: Learning from Fiction, for example, a convincing case is laid out to the effect that any knowledge gained from engaging with art must “be judged by the very standards that are used in assessing the claim of science to do the same” (Currie 2020: 8) if indeed it is to count as knowledge. Cognitivists must thus rally to provide sturdier grounds for their view. The revived interest in this philosophical discussion targets not only the concept of knowledge at the heart of cognitivist and anti-cognitivist debate, but also highlights a more specific question about how, exactly, some artworks can (arguably) afford cognitive import and change how we think about the world, ourselves and the many events, persons and situations we encounter. This paper seeks to explore some of the ways in which art is capable of altering our epistemic perspectives in ways that might count as knowledge despite circumventing some standards of evidential requirement. In so doing we will contrast two alternative conceptions of how we stand to learn from art. Whereas the former is modelled on the idea that knowledge is something that can be “extracted” from our experience of particular works of art, the latter relies on a notion of such understanding as primarily borne out of a different kind of engagement with art. We shall call this the subtractive conception and cumulative conception respectively. The cumulative conception, we shall argue, better explains why at least some insights and instances of knowledge gained from art seem to elude the evidential standards called for by sceptics of cognitivism.