The third great historical moment that organizes the
relationship between art and society reflects the modern age in the West.
Finding its fullness to give birth in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
coincides with the development of a more complex artistic sphere, more
differentiated, freeing themselves of the old nobility and religious powers.
While the artists gradually emancipated from the tutelage of the Church, the
aristocracy, then the bourgeois order, art imposes itself as a system of high
degree of autonomy in their own instances of selection and consecration (academies,
salons, theaters , museums, dealers, collectors, publishers, critics,
magazines), its laws, values, and principles of its own legitimacy. As the
field of art becomes autonomous, the artists claim aloud a creative freedom to
works that are accountable only to themselves and stop bowing to requests that
come from "outside". Social emancipation of artists very concerning
to the extent that it is accompanied by a dependency of a new genus, economic
dependence on market forces.
But while art itself evidence its proud sovereignty in
contempt for money and hatred for the bourgeois world, constitutes
"commercial art" that, for profit, for the immediate and temporary
success, tends to become an economic world as others to adapt to public demand
and to offer products "without risk", the rapid obsolescence. It
opposes these two universes of art: its aesthetic, its public, as well as their
relationship with the "economy". The modern age is organized in
radical opposition between art and business, culture and industry, art and fun,
pure and impure, authentic and kitsch, art elite and mass culture, avant-garde
and institutions. A system of two antagonistic modes of production, circulation
and consecration, which developed essentially within the strict limits of the
western world.
This historic social setting brings a general overturn
of values, invested art with a higher mission than ever. In the late eighteenth
century, Schiller says it's for aesthetic and practical education of the arts
that humanity can move towards freedom, to reason and to the Well. And for the
German Romantics, the beautiful, the access road to the Absolute, is set, with
art, at the summit of the hierarchy of values. The modern age is the framework
in which it has made an exceptional sacralization of poetry and art, only known
to be able to express the most fundamental truths of life and the world. While
following the Kantian criticism, philosophy should renounce the absolute
revelation and science should concentrate on enunciating the laws of the
phenomenal appearance of things, you assign to art the power to know and
contemplate the very essence of the world. Now, art is placed above society, tracing
a new secular spiritual power. Not an area designed to give consent, but it
reveals the ultimate truths that elude science and philosophy: an access to the
Absolute, while a new instrument of salvation. The poet enters into competition
with the priest and takes its place with regard to the ultimate revelation
being: the secularization of the world was the springboard of modern religious
art.
It must be added, however, that the sacralization of
art held by the romanticism and symbolism was then fought fiercely for several
avant-garde movements such as Constructivism, Dadaism and Surrealism.
Sacralization of art that illustrates so well in the
invention and development of the institution of the museums. By extracting the
works of their original cultural context, while cutting its traditional and
religious use by not limiting them to private use and personal collection, but
offering them to the gaze of all, the museum stages its specifically aesthetic
value universal and timeless; becomes practical or cultural objects to be
admired aesthetic objects, contemplated by themselves, by their beauty that defies
time. Place of aesthetic revelation destined to make known unique,
irreplaceable, inalienable works, the museum has a responsibility to make them
immortal.
While desecrates cultural objects, endows them, on the
other hand, an almost religious status, the masterpieces should be
isolated, protected, restored, and testimonies of the creative genius of
mankind. Worship space devoted to the spiritual elevation of the democratic
public, the museum is marked by rites, ceremony, for a certain sacred
environment (silence, recollection, contemplation), imposes itself as a secular
temple of art.
Sacralization of the museum at the same time sparked
the ire of avant-garde currents denouncing the symbolic
institution of excellence of ancient art to destroy: "We want to demolish
museums, libraries (...). Cemeteries Museums!..." (Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti's" Futurist Manifesto "in Le Figaro, 1909).
The art supposedly provides the ecstasy of the
infinitely large and the infinitely beautiful, does contemplate perfection, in
other words, opens the door to experience the absolute, something beyond the
ordinary life. Became the place itself and the ideal way of life once reserved
for religion. Nothing is higher, more precious, more sublime than art, which
allows, thanks to the splendor that produces, endured the ugliness of the world
and the mediocrity of existence. The aesthetics replaced religion and ethics:
life is only worth by beauty, many artists argue the necessity of sacrificing
material life, politics and family life to the artistic vocation: it is for
them to live for art, consecrate their existence to his greatness.
To assert its autonomy modern artists rebel against
the conventions, constantly invest in new objects, appropriating itself of all
elements of the real for purely aesthetic purposes. Enforces the right of all
styling, all transmuted into art, are mediocre, the trivial, the unworthy, the
machines, the resulting collages of chance, the urban space of democratic
equality was made possible affirmation of equal dignity aesthetics of all
subjects, the sovereign freedom of artists to qualify as art everything you
create and expose. Given the absolute sovereignty of the artist there is no
reality that can’t be transformed into work and aesthetic perceptions. After
Apollinaire and Marinetti, the Surrealists launch the motto "Poetry is
everywhere." By breaking with all heterogeneous function of art, to assert
themselves in transgression of codes and established hierarchies, modern art
set in motion a dynamic of aesthetization boundless world, any object could be
treated in an aesthetic point of view, be attached, absorbed in the sphere of
art only by decision of the artist.
But the ambition of modern artists was far beyond the
horizon purely artistic. With the avant-garde born new utopias of art, taking
this as the ultimate goal being a vector of transformation of living conditions
and mentalities, a political force in the service of the new society and the
"new man". As opposed to art for art and symbolism, Breton declares
that it is "a mistake to consider art as an end" and Tatline
proclaims: "The art is dead! Live art machine "by refusing the
autonomy of art, not recognizing any value to the decorative aesthetic
"bourgeois", constructivists declare the glory of the technique and
the primacy of the material and social values on aesthetic values. The
beautiful functional should eliminate the beautiful decorative and utilitarian
buildings (homes, clothing, furniture, objects ...) to substitute the
ornamental luxury, synonymous with decaying waste. Art should no longer be
separated from society and just an enjoyable hobby for the wealthy: the
aesthetics of the engineer should be able to reset a "complete
design" completeness of the everyday environment of men. No longer the
beautification projects of the living, but "the machine to inhabit"
(Le Corbusier), responding to the practical needs of men and at minimal cost.
The modern era sees well be argued, on the one hand, the "religion"
of art, on the other, a process of desaesthetization produced very particularly
for architecture and urbanism, condemning artificial ornaments and
beautification of the building, advocating geometric constructions completely
stripped, replacing the harmonious composition of classical gardens by
"green spaces".
At the same time, in various streams a new interest in
so-called minor arts arises. While multiply the criticisms leveled at modern
industry - accused of spreading ugliness and uniformity - the flower
beautification projects of the everyday life of all classes, the desire to
introduce art everywhere and in all things by diffusion of the decorative arts.
From Ruskin to Art Nouveau, William Morris to the Arts & Crafts movement,
and then to the Bauhaus, modernist currents abound who denounced "the
egoistic conception of life as an artist" (Van de Velde), the pernicious
distinction between "Great Art" and "minor arts",
advocating the equal dignity of all forms of art, a useful and democratic art
sustained by the rehabilitation of the applied arts, industrial arts, arts of
decoration and construction. No longer want pictures and statues reserved to a
high social class, but an art that invests in furniture, the wallpaper, the
tapestries, the kitchenware, textiles, architectural facades, on posters. With
the democratic era, the art takes on mission to save society, regenerate the
quality of the home and the happiness of the people, "change the
lives" of all days: the Modern Style was baptized by Giovanni Beltrami as
"socialism della Belleza".
The very aesthetics of the modern age followed, so the
two main roads. On the one hand, the radical aesthetics of pure art, art for
art's sake, freed from all works of utilitarian purposes, having no other
purpose than themselves. On the other, precisely the opposite, the project of a
revolutionary art "for the people", a useful art that makes itself
felt in the smallest details of everyday-oriented and well-being of most life.
Indeed, the industrial and commercial world was the
primary craftsman of modern aesthetization
of the world and its democratic expansion.
