In addition to the World Days on Earth, Peace, the Environment and others, today’s one on Art also demonstrates its ideological nature, in the sense that it is not possible to plan any effective action that has a coherent, incisive and political world dimension, given the heterogeneity of cultures, especially Islamic ones, and of social forms. The argument would therefore lend itself to an easy irony if this appointment did not call us all to a series of bitter reflections; the first concerns the status of art, now totally exhausted and confused in the more general dimension of a widespread aesthetic, while we know that art produces, when it still manifests itself as a rare alienity, a critical action of the existing. The second concerns the complexity of reality, today transformed into the greatest work of art of Capitalism: the use of the coexistence of ideologies and religions, ethnic groups and traditions, medievalisms and futurisms, kept alive in their conflicts and favoring – because of this incurable intertwining of contrasts and contradictions – the ground for the culture of one’s consent.
The third consideration starts from the historical reconstruction of this Day, proposed by Turkey in 2011, shared by a certain number of countries, especially non-European ones, including China, Japan, Mauritius or Cyprus, absent Italy, which will participate starting only since 2016. I read that the commitment, also and above all the Italian one, is specifically dedicated to “educating to beauty”. Beauty is the deepest enemy of the meaning of art, not only but also of the perception of our environment, our territory and our world: the forma urbis, architecture, the so-called figurative, multimedia, behavioral and quantum arts. other, they are dimensions made “visible” only thanks to the theories that study and describe them.
Last reflection. The proof of the ideology of this Day is testified by the insignificance that the history of art has in our schools, when, on the other hand, everything that surrounds us belongs to the visible realm of the artificial, which must be studied and practiced. This visible must not, in fact, be what Goethe called an Augenweide, a pasture for the eyes, but a terrain of criticism and sharing.
* Author of essays on aesthetics, history and art criticism (Aesthetics of power, Mimesis 2015, Aesthetics of objects, Il Mulino 2009), he has also written several manuals for universities and high schools (the most recent is Dell ‘ art, De Agostini 2021 https://bit.ly/3gbxbiY). He was professor of Art History at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice and of Contemporary Art History at the Faculty of Design and Arts of the University of Architecture of Venice (IUAV) and other universities.