The work of art in the age of aestheticization (Ordinario)

Anticipated by the Benjaminian diagnosis of the aesthetisation of politics and the Adorno's analysis of the Culture industry, the triumph of aesthetics seems to mark the contemporary era. A form of diffuse aestheticization, in which all components of public life are experienced as aesthetic, profoundly characterises the current historical phase. What is the relationship between this process that began in the mid-1950s and the aesthetic dimension of human experience? How have artistic practices been transformed and what functions can they still fulfil in a context in which the fruition of art gives way to the diffuse and 'gaseous' form of an aesthetic experience of the everyday? The course intends to address these questions from an analysis of the forms of aesthetic experience and modes of existence of artworks. In the first part of the course, these themes will be presented and discussed with the tools offered by the research conducted by Gerard Genette in the diptych «L'oeuvre de l'art» (1994-1997), in which the reflections of authors belonging to heterogeneous epochs and philosophical traditions such as Hume, Kant, Dewey and Goodman converge. Starting from Genette's anthropological characterisation of the aesthetic attitude, the second part of the course, structured according to a workshop format, intends to focus on the space of the artistic and the aesthetic in contemporary societies, reformulating the ancient question of the relationship between art and society around new and topical themes such as the function of art within different political systems, the relationship between art and globalisation or the role of aesthetic experiences in the context of the ecological crisis.