110 misery. In conclusion, embracing Adorno's aesthetic theming, the contemporary work of art is a visionary and courageous artwork. To be against, to withstand wither and to demand reflection, so to encourage the development of critical thinking. To be against, to imagine alternative ways through art, so as to be ethics. (Is it art of protest? No. It is much more. It is art, an alliance between culture and imagination. And it is humanity's greatest line of defense). interlude jam session «Beauty will be convulsive, or will not be at all» - André Breton, Nadja, 1928 «Ah, M. Picasso, so it was you who did that» «No, you did». - Pablo Picasso in reply to the Nazi hierarch Otto Abetz, watching a Guernica photograph, 1937 «Your diploma in failing is a degree for reacting». - Afterhours, Non è per sempre, 1999 «And behold they will teach you not to shine. And you shine, instead, Gennariello» - Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lutheran letters, 1976 track #05 unheimlich schön (feat. romeo castellucci) My much-loved grandmother – eighty-six years old and still going strong, beautiful and hyper-dynamic as she is – when asked what I do, replies: «She works in beaux arts». Platonic school, obviously. Art must be beautiful, artist must be beautiful, Marina Abramović obsessively repeated in a historical performance in 1975, for fifteen exhausting minutes, at first fluty, then more and more furious, putting in place the same climax in combing her hair until hurting herself. Until hurting ourselves, involving us in her desperate request for the sense of beauty in relation to the spirit of the age. Because beaux arts are no longer needed as Plato and my grandmother conceive them, a beauty whose only function is static and sterile contemplation is no longer needed; that’s what we have the mass lobotomization perpetrated by the media industry for. In response to a social complexity based on the defense of one’s own garden, contemporary beauty in art is, must be, dynamic, it must hurt to wake up. A diseased oyster can cause the growth of pearls, Karl Jaspers wrote. To be ethical, aesthetics in contemporary art must be unheimlich schön, disturbing beauty, borrowed from Sigmund Freud's 1919 essay Das Unheimliche (transl. the uncanny): a sensitivity that was beginning to appear in aesthetics and literature and which has, for the father of psychoanalysis, the fundamental function of awakening the unconscious part of man, the one that calls to responsibility towards oneself and humanity. The one that requires not to look the other way – just like art, through disturbing subjects, asks its users not to look the other way in encountering a beauty more human than ever: the beauty of the other than itself, the other than the stereotype. The Freudian uncanny is linked to the nineteenth-century aesthetic category of the sublime: sub-limen, on the verge, at the threshold. Artists began to take the liberty of crossing that threshold and become problematizers, opening questions otherwise reduced to silence through a new kind of aesthetics, far from decoration: the aesthetics of the uncanny, of discomfort, of the unfinished, of the different, of the reject. Épater le bourgeois, shattering the hypocrisy of the bourgeois (a)morality, as the inflamed verses of the Accursed Poets indicated: «One evening, I sat Beauty on my knees. – And I found her bitter. – And I reviled her» (Arthur Rimbaud, A season in hell, 1873). Épater le bourgeois, an aim carried out as a mission in contemporary art, elevated and devastating visions starting from an intimate urgency, by artists such as Francis Bacon and his disfigured faces, Lucien Freud and his overflowing flesh, Carmelo
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