ABSTRACT
Postmodern art appears as the most advanced point at which the process of secularization described by Arnold Gehlen has arrived. Friedrich Nietzsche, in making the expression 'The will to power as art' the projected title of a section of his final theoretical work summarizes in perhaps the clearest and most demythified terms this profound current of the modern spirit. The long struggle of the aesthetics and poetics of modernity against the Aristotelian definition of art as imitation attains here its full meaning, which can only be called an ontological one. In the work of Immanuel Kant, the rooting of genius in nature corresponds to the rooting of scientific knowledge in an objectivity of the world of nature that impedes the identification of the scientist with the artist. Modernity is characterized as the era of Diesseitigkeit, namely the abandonment of the sacred vision of existence and the affirmation of the realm of profane value instead, that is, of secularization.
