Presentation of the book “La funzione moderna dell’arte”
by Dario Evola
Speakers:
Dario Evola
Antonio Valentini
On Thursday 24 January, the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art presents the book by Dario Evola, La funzione moderna dell’arte (Mimesis, Milan 2018).
The volume explores the modern function of museums, academies and aesthetics from the 18th century onwards, focusing on the institutions that mark a fundamental turning point in the history of Western thought. The Age of Enlightenment, the revolutions, progress and the new conception of science and technology are summarised in the new man who adopts the motto sapere aude. Thus art, in its operation and enjoyment, redefines an original function as a means of knowledge and identity.
There are three institutions that simultaneously redefine the new meaning of art as an evolutionary and design function of man: the Modern Museum, the Academy of Fine Arts and Aesthetics.
The Modern Museum, following the example of the Capitoline Museums and the Vatican Museums in Rome after the Napoleonic requisitions, establishes a vision of art as identity.
The Academies take on the task of training the artist no longer as a workshop craftsman, but as an intellectual aware of a design function.
Finally, Aesthetics redefines the theory of the sensible beautiful as a critical intellectual action, judgement, taste. Diderot’s salons, the exhibitions, the market, open up a new perspective from Winckelmann to Canova, to Kant and
the Encyclopédie. The artist is no longer a servant of form, but a maker and creator. Indeed, art becomes the “science of art”.
The 19th century, with the industrial revolution, the machine, photography and cinema, will open a new phase that develops in the 20th century under the banner of technical reproducibility, the loss of the aura and the awareness
of social unrest in the metropolis. The “visible” becomes a problem and no longer a certainty, and the museum becomes a place that produces a new imaginary, which, like art, does not reproduce but reconfigures out-of-joint gazes and narratives.
The book’s final reflection addresses the role of art academies and art education, which, as Giuseppe Di Giacomo writes in the introduction, have the formative and strategic role of reconfiguring perspectives in a world dominated by processes of standardisation and commodification.
The operational and design function of art, in its exercise, is to awaken the gaze and reactivate thought.
Dario Evola teaches Aesthetics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. He has taught history of contemporary art at the University of Rome La Sapienza and at the Academies of Macerata and Florence. He is the author of essays on theatre, cinema and the relationship between the arts and technology. He collaborates with the cultural services of RAI and with periodicals and newspapers. He is a member of the Italian Society of Aesthetics.
Antonio Valentini is a researcher in Aesthetics (RTD) at the Department of Philosophy of the Sapienza University of Rome. In 2011, he was the winner of the “Premio Nuova Estetica” awarded by the Società Italiana d’Estetica (S.I.E.). He is a member of the Editorial Board of the international journal “Aisthesis. Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico” and of the Scientific Committee of the editorial series “Figure dell’estetica” (publisher “Alboversorio”, Milan) and “Filosofie” (publisher “Mimesis”, Milan). He is the author of monographs and publications in national and international journals.
national and international journals.