This paper aims to discuss the way in which Nietzsche discusses the issue of nihilism in the texts he prepared for publication, especially those between 1886 and 1888. During this late moment of his work, the author formulates his genealogical hypotheses about moral values and highlights the link between the morality of Socratic Platonic origin and Christian values that strongly influenced Western culture. Modernity is qualified by Nietzsche as nihilistic par excellence, as it updates and repackages the same ways of devaluating life the ascetic ideals bring upon. We intend to discuss here to what extent Nietzsche opens the possibility of thinking of art and its gay science as powerful forces against nihilism and the ascetic ideals when he describes nihilism as a determining feature of Modernity itself, and when he points out with his genealogy that all great things would bring about their own demise according to the law of "necessary 'self-overcoming'". Being the place of the cult of the untrue and an instance fully attuned to the very movement of creation and destruction of forms that make up life, art would be the main engine through which Nietzschean gay science could contribute to the realization of a transvaluation of values.
