Art as a cultural universal

The article substantiates the scienti c expediency of expanding the conceptual boundaries of re ection on the phenomenon of art. Among the trends of improvement of humanitarian knowledge in general and cultural knowledge in particular there is a research attitude to the use of interdisciplinary approach to various phenomena, including art. The gurative nature and genre- species richness of art, the versatility of its functional range and the cumulative potential of the artistic heritage, on the one hand, and the ambiguity of aesthetic transformations, on the other hand, determine the need to enrich the range of concepts, or, more precisely, to more productively use such a category as «cultural universal» in the methodology of understanding art. Proceeding from the fact of development of art culturology in recent decades, the authors of the article reveal the conceptual nature of this category, which is not a «challenge» to the concepts approved in the history of philosophical and aesthetic thought of art de nition, but opens the possibility of holistic comprehensive comprehension of the essence of «thinking in images» and its cultural and humanitarian potential.