A photograph of a pre modern image. It is a long way from the autonomous modern art of modernity and from Plato's explusion of the artists (poets) from the republic that was to be grounded in reason and truth alone.

John Coppi, Aboriginal rock art at Nourlangie Rock, Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory east of Darwin, 1992

It is an example of why we need to think of the discourse of aesthetics in terms of modernity, especially the modernist conception of art as beauty divorced from truth and morality that was first articulated in Immanual Kant's Critique of Judgement.

In that text we find an understanding of individual judgements of taste as disinterested and the bracketing of knowledge and morality to focus on form. Thus we have the outlines of the modernist understanding of the aesthetic attitude where beauty is equated with formal elegance.

This kind of indigenous rock art in a hunter and gather society enables us to overcome a modernist aesthetics and restore to art its status a form of cognition. It is not great art (as in the sense of some works of Van Gogh or Picasso that disrup the visual tradition). On the contrary thsi image discloses another kind of world, that of a hunter and gather society, and it indicates another way of centring visual representations to the subjectivist one in modernity that places an emphasis on originality and genius.