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Deactivating the aesthetic function of art can open it up to other functions. In this article, we explore the epistemic function of art and how art can enable the emergence of what we refer to as “knowledge of the third kind.” Starting from the principle that any work of art encapsulates its own theorization in action, we analyze the Artavazd Peleshian’s film Nous and Harun Farocki’s video installation entitled Schnittstelle as examples illustrating our premise. Resonating with the “third estate” defined by Abbé Sieyès and the “third landscape” of Gilles Clément, the concept of “knowledge of the third kind” outlines a potential epistemic space that resists both the academization of established knowledge and the instrumentalization inherent in knowledge produced by cognitive capitalism, a space which is heterogeneous and liminal and which perpetually reinvents its own knowledge economy, along with its own theoretical tools, forms of production and means of achieving visibility.