Gianni Vattimo
L'arte oltre l'estetica, Jaar, o l'impegno ritrovato
LECTURE
2 July 2005
Spazio ex-Ticosa
Gianni Vattimo investigates the bounds between art and action referring to post-kantian aesthetics. If, with Immanuel Kant, modern aesthetics established as a discipline that studies “empty” cognitive capabilities, i.e. not strictly linked to production nor intervention, with the avantgarde the aesthetic thought connected art and truth in different ways, being aware that the encounter with the work of art shapes the cognitive coordinates and so changes the experience of the world. A new figure of intellectual emerges, who faces a wider audience and moves within a mediatic and commercial system that still they refuse. With his artistic practice, Alfredo Jaar works in a post-aesthetic dimension, which aims to affirm a new critical consciousness of contemporary political issues. “Finally, Jaar promotes an interventionalist conception of art which is perhaps the most mature and interesting development of that readjustment of relations between art and truth that twentieth century philosophy sought to explain.
Gianni Vattimo (b. in Turin, 1936) is an italian philosopher and professor. Exponent of the “weak thought”, he states that there is no possibility for the thought to affirm or achieve a stable and ultimate truth, and that philosophy has the task of identifying a new path for a plural and relativist thought. He teaches in Turin University and is a columnist for La Stampa, La Repubblica and L’Espresso. Among his works, La società trasparente (1989), Filosofia al presente (1990), Credere di credere (1996), La fine della realtà (2012).