Abstract

The essay draws on Paul Valéry’s motif of the »white thing« young Socrates finds on the beach, taking it as a paradigmatic description of the objects of art. It conceptualizes these as transitory objects in the sense of Donald Winnicott’s psychoanalytic theory which stresses their undecidability concerning their status as being inside or outside, real or imaginary. This does not entail a fixation on works nor their – theoretical or practical – rejection. The transitoriness of art is pursued from its realization within reception through the transition between simultaneity and succession, the objects’ indeletable relations to other spheres within and outside the world of art, and the blurring of borders between different art genres, eventually turning to explicit interventions into other contexts. Finally, undecidability is posited even concerning the difference between culture and nature.