A discussion around the politics of art and its relationship to history and memory in the context of modernity. This article reviews a short history of aesthetics and there relationship to the artist's practice in the modernist sphere citing Charles Baudelaire, Edmund Husserl and Jacques Derrida. The author analyzes the exhibition The Art of Memory/The Loss of History in relation to the argument the he poses. His argument suggests that works of art that concern themselves with history and works that concern themselves with memory were considered to be distinct and in political opposition.