(sacrosanct: defer the man back to society) This is why, in a colder gesture as per his nature, even the elevation to art of the everyday – what Arthur C. Danto defined the transfiguration of the commonplace – has something sacred, as Andy Warhol did in recovering from the Fordist production lines some soup cans (Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962) and some boxes of scouring pads (Brillo Box, 1964) raising them to paintings and sculptures, redeeming them from their destiny of garbage, in an idea of coin-operated salvation starting from the industrial, serial production and reproduction, involving everything and everyone, while incinerating elitism. (sacrosanct: defer the man back to the planet) This is why 7000 Eichen (1982) has something sacred, the monumental installation that Joseph Beuys, the art shaman whose motto has been «The revolution is us», conceived for Documenta 7 in Kassel: seven thousand basalt stones in front of the Frederician Museum, each one acquirable, the proceeds of which have been used to plant as many oaks. Once completed the purchase phase in 1987, it will take about three hundred years before the seven thousand oaks will become the great forest imagined by Beuys. Imagined. An artistic act whose sacredness lies in the great collective rite, in the shared action, aimed at healing the morbid relationship between man and nature. «Tell all the truth but tell it slant / Success in circuit lies», wrote Emily Dickinson in Poem 1129. Or rather, in short circuit. Given that art does not need to adjective itself to be validated, and that when it does so it goes back to propaganda or news report, the work of art cannot be its caption, and the slant truth lies in the imagistic power of the symbol. In what Benjamin, analyzing the German Baroque drama, traced in the field of contemporary art in the replacement of the beautiful with the allegorical, the new main value of art and a fundamental way to welcome ethics in art. interlude symbolum ‘71 There is a chapel, in Houston, more sacred than the sacred, for its symbolic value and for its artistic mark. The Christian, the Buddhist, the Muslim, the Atheist go in there, each side by side, each one respecting the other, each one to gather in his personal prayer. Inaugurated in 1971 for the will of the spouses, art collectors and human rights activists John and Dominique de Menil with a secular ceremony that saw the participation of exponents of all confessions, the Rothko Chapel – a non-denominational chapel known to treasure fourteen works commissioned to Mark Rothko (1903-1970) on its walls – has just turned fifty. Fourteen large and livid monochromes, «primal scream colors» as Alberto Arbasino defined them, abstract and religiously rarefied, far from any decoration and propaganda, close to every man and every creed. In their monochrome, aniconic and powerful recollectedness, they recall for their mighty humanity the latest feature film by Derek Jarman, Blue (1993): eighty minutes in which a single color invades the screen, Klein blue, the tone of freedom and at the same time of the blindness due to the retinal detachment of the director, AIDS terminal. In the blue expanse of celluloid flow reflections on disease, discrimination, fear, memory, refined sounds and visionary glimpses of four voiceovers, including that of Tilda Swinton – his friend and muse – and that of Jarman himself, rendered alive forever: «The monochrome is an alchemy, effective liberation from personality. It articulates silence. It is a fragment of an immense work without limits. The blue: landscape of liberty». An invaluable testament, as for the Rothko Chapel, because you don't necessarily need an image to convey a message. Emptiness that is fullness. Outside the Rothko Chapel, Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk is dedicated to Martin Luther King. That chapel, sacred and deconsecrated, symbolizes art. That chapel, sacred and deconsecrated, symbolizes ethics. track #04 adorno mon amour Aesthetics is one of those words that everyone, in the academic environment, fills his or her mouth with, a bit like speaking with ease of resilience in this scarred historical moment. But quality, my friends, quality is the only one capable of making a difference, as the overabundant quantity can only create inflation. Given that it is not enough to say that beauty will save the world to make a catch phrase, however shareable, a complete aesthetic theory, quality means digging. Or better, it means digging down deep, embracing the double meaning of wanting to go deeper and wanting to reach out to the shadowy part of every question: «The ones who can call themselves contemporary are only those who (elevate your thought) (none excluded)
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