"If there exists a sort of potential connection with philosophy or theory in the ar ts, such that one can speak of a ‘non-philosophical understanding of philosophy’ in and through the arts, to which philosophy (and the teaching of philosophy) is addressed, it is because in philosophy itself there is an element of ‘un-learning’ what is given to us to know and see, a kind of ‘dis-identification’ with given ways of talking and seen, which supply our images and words with their ‘common sense’. To teach such ideas, in arts as in philosophy, providing for new for spaces in which they can be linked to one another, is thus not to ‘academize’ them – quite the contrary. In the issue of ‘institutionalizing’ ideas or research in art academies, in short, we need to include that element in having an idea, which takes us ‘outside’ academization to the fresh air of other ways of doing things. For in the case of what I’m calling ‘ideas’ (as already with Kant) to learn is never to imitate. It is more a matter of finding a way to place oneself in the peculiar situation and aesthetic state in relation to oneself and to others to invent in turn.
That is perhaps why, in an odd way, for me the question of - and in - contemporary art is that of thinking itself."