Resilience in art

In art, resilience is the capacity of the work of art to preserve through aesthetics its particularity distinguishing it from any other object, despite the increasing subjectivization in the production of works. Resilience in art appears as a response to the gradual setting aside of beauty during the twentieth century resulting today in an inability to define the work of art.

History

The late nineteenth and twentieth century saw the birth of art movements such as Symbolism, Cubism and Surrealism which sought to adjust to the great social, industrial, economic and political changes that were taking place at the time.^[1] Parallel to these movements is a series of strangest movements such as Hirsutes, Hydropathes, Incohérents and highly politicized and subversive movements such as Constructivism, Suprematism, Futurism and Dada. These movements, combined with Anglo-Saxon Analytic Aesthetics from the 1950s which is characterized by the rejection of the notion of beauty as the foundation of art, call into question the very existence of the work of art as a specific human achievement.

The Analytic Aesthetics will base art on the consensus of the "world of art",^[2] thus accepting that any object whatsoever may be considered as art as long as it is shown in a place provided for this purpose. Thus art no longer offers homogeneity linked to a cultural substratum but a plurality of individualities. It does not unfold in time, its duration often becomes ephemeral. Beauty is considered superfluous, asserting that a work of art does not have to be based on beauty, for it is self-sufficient.^[3]

Analytic Aesthetics is rooted in the philosophy of the eighteenth century when philosophers, like

Resilience in art tends to restore the foundations of art on the beauty and restore art to unity.[10]

• In the division of the perception between objective and subjective resilience opposes a joint operation.
  neurobiology which studies by medical imaging the behavior of the brain in relation to the beauty and where actually we can record these two times in which intervenes in turn the neocortex and the archaic brain. Moreover, every individual instantly recognizes the beautiful as such,^[12] which encourages the idea of the beauty based on the structures of the world (see Pythagoras, Influence on art and architecture). Follows the judgment "I like, I do not like" .^[13] The indistinction of these two times certainly favored the idea of beauty as a subjective taste. This double factor is in action also during the creation by the artist. On the one hand, it takes into account his experience,^[14] his way of seeing the world, his knowledge and intuitions, but also his capacity to capture and restore the world around him. To this is added the quality of elaboration and structuring of the work with the same harmony found in nature.^[15]
• Where contemporary art relies solely on the intention of the artist, resilience sets the artist's responsibility to the community, because art is a receiver of the "image" of the community and acts in parallel on the cohesion of it. Man is a social being, by nature he must live in society to exist, excessive individualism is impossible, these two facets must be harmoniously combined.
• Theoretically, instead of an split approach, resilience is a systemic approach.[16] At the level of practice, resilience removes the discourse that clutters art productions and focuses on the development of the work.^[17]
• Considering that the quality of a work of art is objectively identifiable, resilience in art rules out random, purely gestural, unsightly, conceptual or only decorative productions. A work of art consists of aesthetic regime and ethical regime.^[18] We can rationally judge the aesthetic quality of the work and we can apprehend it by our sensitivity in its "legible" part, in what it "speaks" or what it evokes.
• Resilience relegates the ephemeral art to the game or the show and opts for the work that projects itself in the long term. One of the reasons is its formative nature.^[19][20]
• At the formal level, resilience requires the diversity of expressions in place of contemporary art production, which for decades has finally generated instantly recognizable images as "contemporary art" and finished in a new academicism ^[21] rejecting any other form of art as obsolete.

All cultures generate images of themselves through art images, but not all art images are works of art. Contemporary art imposing itself as current art is perhaps the image of ours, but resilience is essential when it comes to its quality as art.^[22][23]

References