This paper tests the aesthetic theory presented in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation against the Foucauldian Turn in art in the 1980s and Damien Hirst's early artworks, in order to ask if the concepts taken from the more general aesthetics to be found in A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy? are better suited to an understanding of contemporary art, before returning to the question of whether there is something truly significant at work in this folie à deux between (...) painter and philosopher. (shrink)