80 The fragments splashed with beauty that are saturating our present respond then to the same social fragmentation that is atomizing our mankind, trapped in an aesthetic plastic sub-brand. In History of Beauty (2004), Umberto Eco underlines how every era has been willing to tailor a customized beauty, moving away from the platonic idea for mere calculation, using beauty to dress up an amphibious area between its needs and its desires. A philosophical reconstruction, the one proposed by Eco, that finds its foundation in science: in 1999, the neurologist Semir Zeki coined the term neuroesthetics, elaborating the theory of synthetic acquired concepts by observing the activity of some brain cells, present in the orbit-frontal cortex and particularly skilled in acting by abstraction, operating on the perception of what we consider beautiful, going along with what we are most exposed to, demonstrating the fact that in our brain there is an abstract and "acquired" concept of beauty that comes from the cultural model which we belong to. A kind of recognition between equals, to activate the mirror neurons. It is the psychological mechanism on which fast fashion strategies, trends, audience, thumbs up on Facebook, hearts on Instagram and the media barrage marketing are all based. Not only beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but rather beauty is in the eye of the system, beauty is what has been vertically touted to be. Fragments of beauty socially spread by the apparatus. Transposing into the contemporary world, our current reference apparatus was born during the Second Industrial Revolution, fully developed in conjunction with the economic boom of the Second World War, in synchrony with the worldwide development of the 'Made in Italy' brand of excellence and with the fundamental attention to beauty pursued by industry, translated into attention to the aesthetics of the products, which does not necessarily mean only form – because behind every colored envelope, as Yves Michaud defines them in incipit, there lies research, there lies work, there lies imagination. For this reason, its name is emblematic: our contemporary reference system is called Artistic Capitalism. the artistic capitalism There was a time when gods came to terms with men. At that time, near Ankara, King Midas asked Dionysus to give him the power to transform everything he touched into gold. The Artistic Capitalism, a systemic model theorized by the French philosopher and sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky, recalls the reign of King Midas, all in gold: in Artistic Capitalism, all is beauty. However – as King Midas soon learned at his own expense, not being able to eat a meal turning into gold at his mere contact – even beauty must be handled with care. And most of all, when everything claims to be beautiful, beauty needs to be recognized. There was a time when men caressed the dream of being able to fly. At that time, near Crete, Daedalus built wings of feathers, gluing them with wax to his body and to that of his son, Icarus. So it was that they took flight, opening new horizons to mankind's aspirations for power: in total opposition to the idea of solidity assimilated to cement and of power associated with arsenal, which marked the first capitalism, in Artistic Capitalism, as in flight, we want lightness, we crave speed: «The world has changed, notably thanks to the development of lightweight technologies, up to the current digital virtualization and to the ongoing revolution in nanotechnologies: that is, a world of objects almost on the verge of materiality. With one hundred grams of technology in your pocket, you can come into contact with almost all of mankind. Our material world bends more and more to the strange imperative law of lightness» Gilles Lipovetsky, De la légèreté, 2015 However - as Icarus soon learned at his own expense, drowned by falling into the sea, ignoring his father's warning not to fly too close to the sun – «lightness is not superficial, but gliding above things, not having weights on your heart» (Italo Calvino, Six memos for the next millennium, 1988). And most of all, mostly our times teach that we cannot delude ourselves into thinking that we can be able to dominate nature. Both myths, that of King Midas and that of Daedalus and Icarus, are present in Ovid's Metamorphoses (8 AD). The most complete theorization of the Artistic Capitalism model, on the other hand, can be found in an essay, L’esthétisation du monde. Vivre à l'âge du capitalisme artiste (2013), co-authored by Lipovetsky together with Jean Serroy, his colleague and Professor at the University of Grenoble. Developing the intuitions of Walter Benjamin (The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,
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