[en] The point of departure for this article is Kai Widmaier’s book Bilderwelten: Ägyptische Bilder und ägyptologische Kunst. Vorarbeiten für eine bildwissenschaftliche Ägyptologie, its invitation to assess one’s own art historical definitions and methods and its assertion that Egyptian figurative culture should not be considered art but images.
In response, this article presents a definition of art as the product of the deliberate manipulation of pre-existing forms to communicate abstract meaning. It defines art as a product of thought and as such dependent on the transcendental categories of Time-and-Space. Having defined art in general, the article goes on to apply this definition of art to sculpture from the perspective of its specific phenomenology, technique and transcendental meaning.
