Art: a thought without a slogan

Abstract

This article aims to pose the problem of the work of art as a modulated interruption of the world of work and moral responsibility. It is a repudiation of all ideology and its slogans, on the left and on the right. More than twenty authors are reviewed, from Gombrich to Eco, from Hartmann to Francastel, from Ortega to Brecht, and from Foucault to Comte-Sponville. The artwork is nothing that many of them assume, but the fact that they were able to conceive it in those ways is very significant: the times are not always prepared to deal with it. Criteria shake, value judgments shake, and still the works go on. That the work of art is not a game without transcendence does not mean that it ceases to be a game in a much deeper sense; that it is not mere depravity does not mean that it normalizes such a state; that it is not the salvation of mankind is not the same as cancelling its links with the sacred, and that it is not the absolute does not mean dissolving it into an all-is-allowed and all-is-worththe-same. The work of art is the effect of a specific faculty of our species: figurative or plastic power, a power incapable of acting alone and independently.