Course information

Today the most difficult thing seems to be to define the work of art, despite the fact that the real problem is just the opposite: it no longer makes any sense to ask whether a work can be art, since the answer is always in the affirmative ( if an “artist” has defined it as such). As Boris Groys writes, a work of art cannot today be “produced” as such, only presented as such. Or, as Danto says, “nothing is a work of art without the interpretation that will make it so”. But today works of art vibrate much more than any conceptual definition or visual vocabulary, by their stock market character. Is it worth wondering if we will ever again be able to see a Van Gogh or Picasso painting as art rather than a stock market value? Erwin Panofsky observes that it is almost impossible to determine scientifically what is the decisive moment when a manufactured object becomes a work of art, that is, what is the moment ὀwhen form prevails over function. This course will attempt to chart the cataclysmic philosophical changes that have occurred in the artistic century from the beginning of the 20th century to the present.