Creation, Imagination and Aesthetic Sense

In the century of organised capitalism (of politics and economics), human symbols, artistic creation and aesthetic sense are under respiratory assistance. It is the commercial logic and the financialisation of art that give them an injection. The motor of the aesthetic sense is thus in relative heteronomy. Precisely because it is possible to put a damper on this “aesthetic engine, daughter of capitalism” that we must resist the disfigurement of life by questioning — from several angles and in a repetitive way — the functionalism that invades the “aesthetic dimension” of man through the exploitation of his/her attention and imagination. In this re-creation of the aesthetic sense, the art object will have another status. It will force us to move our gaze from the object to the work on the object, from the object as a product to the conditions of production that provide information about the worker and his working conditions. A gaze that goes beyond the materiality of the object with its possible commercialization towards what this object promises or what it doesn’t promise, towards what this object communicates or what prevents it from communicating. We must restore to the object of art the aura (as Walter Benjamin said) which is always removed by the mass culture that vex it with its shortcuts, its small connivances, its murderous sentences, calculated consecrations, itsorganized markets, and its disdain for everything that doesn’t fit into the accounting system. The aesthetic sense will thus be a work on the Motivations of the Subject, on the complications of his imagination, on its utopias as well as on the status of the object of art which points to our bloodless lives.