Since the advent of what Germain Bazin famously described as the “museum age”, many have argued  that “art”, as a mode of creative production rooted in aesthetics, has become increasingly rarified, institutionalized and entangled in the politics and sociology of taste, making it a poor medium for critical appraisal of social or political issues. Drawing primarily on the history of the development of modern art, Terry Eagleton’s thesis on the advent of the aesthetic as a philosophical category advanced in The Ideology of the Aesthetic, and modern theories of mind which root rationality in the senses, I will argue that, notwithstanding the undisputed “entertainment” value of art, and its commercialization, the differentiation between aesthetic-­‐artistic knowledge and rational-­‐scientific knowledge might not be so simple to sustain, and that art thus serves a fundamental, if often unnoticed function in shaping social and political values in the contemporary world.