105 do not allow themselves to be blinded by the lights of the century, and so manage to get a glimpse of the shadows in those lights, of their intimate obscurity. […] The contemporary is the one whose eyes are struck by the beam of darkness that comes from his own time», wrote Giorgio Agamben in a book made by few fundamental pages. Here it is, ethics within an aesthetic theming: because talking seriously about art means talking about human. Because there is no complete aesthetic theory that is not also anthropology. Because the greatest contemporary art is that which has the courage to become anti-art, in defense of the oppressed and in respect of the other than itself. Who said so? The author of the most powerful aesthetic theory of modernity. Theodor W. Adorno said so. The Aesthetic Theory by Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) appeared posthumously in 1970, written after the bucket of ice and blades represented by Auschwitz, and the principle on which it hinges is the recognition of the blind will, by the ideologies in power, to impose a straitjacket on art and culture, in order to be able to immorally exploit man and nature. The only but detonating weapons of self-defense in the hands of art are then the irruption of the other and the rupture, both marked by the establishment as "scandal". However, according to the etymology of skàndalon, a scandal is but an obstacle, a stumbling block, that art has the right and the duty to oppose against an authority capable of annihilating all humanity, in order to feed itself. In this sense, contemporary art has the duty to be scandalous, to give voice and shape to what is otherwise downgraded to inferior and reduced to silence, to the point of making Adorno affirm that art is not given without scandal, it is not art if it cannot trigger a short circuit in thought. Adorno is a Hegelian; therefore the dialectical moment of the antithesis is necessary for him to be able to reach the synthesis, the spiritualization of art, its being deeply ethical starting from its symbolic capability. For this reason, the principle of autonomy from the power system is essential: as an antithesis, contemporary art must become anti-art to defend the freedom to question what is given as a thesis, that is, the system itself: «Spiritualization in art must pass a test: it must demonstrate that it is superior to affirmative culture and it must regain oppressed differentiation». The spiritualization of art is what allows it to be a living work: in Adorno, so that an image can be called art – and not sterile decoration, little picture good for a social profile or for a local newspaper, news section – it must become an enigma, knowing how to be symbolic, it must indulge that obscurity which Agamben will talk about shortly afterwards and which Nietzsche spoke of as a Dionysian element. It must be able to exceed its own shape. The power of the symbol works in such a way that, with each new glance, the work of art can reveal itself in a further meaning not grasped before, subtracted from the surface and which can emerge only in the course of time, so that humanity in front of its presence may never stop reflecting: «Under patient contemplation, artworks begin to move». And here it is, the great difference in Adorno between traditional art and modern art (Adorno defines “modern” the art produced by the avant-garde Dada of the twentieth century onwards): the traditional work of art, commissioned by the central power, fulfilled its ethical function through the contemplation of the masterpiece; the modern work of art cannot, and does not want to, aspire to this qualification. The masterpiece presupposes faith in its eternal duration; the modern work of art, being antithesis of the system, is aware that in the era in which it lives there is no longer room for triumphalism. It would be as if Auschwitz had never existed: «To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric», Adorno admonishes to underline how, in reality, a different art, no longer contemplative, is more necessary than ever to give voice to what has been silenced. Consequently, modern art replaces contemplation with reflection as its founding ethical function; to the completeness of the traditional masterpiece, modern art opposes the incomplete work of art, placed under the sign of openness, which validates also the moment of its making, as for the horizontality of Pollock's immersive gesture. Of course, even masterpieces belonging to traditional art keep on generating new keys of interpretation in the contemporary – Caravaggio and his saints with dirty feet, Dante's Comedy and his words still deeply punctual – and this is what also makes them, forever, living works. However, their attention to the final completeness of the masterpiece makes them witnesses of a beauty that is no longer here. That, after Auschwitz, can no longer be. Contemporary art can never really come to terms with its time; it must, through rupture and irruption of the other, provide tools to overcome it and to build a new, fairer, more harmonious one. Humanity is called upon to search for a meaning in its unfinished form, so that contemporary art can finally free itself from the mere representation of stereotyped beauty and give voice to diversity, magnifying through the artistic gesture the aesthetics of ugliness, the poetry of the unfinished, the sanctity of the different, the ethics that exists in scandal as if it is that single voice out of a choir that only knows how to bleat. This is why the contemporary work of art is a work without fear, ungraceful and disgraced, but which – precisely by virtue of this disgraced being – contains the most authentic breath of grace, like certain films of Italian Neorealism whose lyrical beauty lies in their
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDUzNDc=