What the stories could tell was secondary and no longer interesting. Unfortunately, the constructive idea was hardly more intriguing, since it was merely a farfetched variation on an exploit that had already been realized, and with much more vigor, by contemporary narrative. As a result, Saporta’s was only an extreme case, and remarkable only for that reason.
But one does not need a Saporta to reach this kind of conclusion. As we all know, some interpretations of Finnegans Wake risk being more interesting, informative, and entertaining than the work itself. Similarly, the summary of a movie, or a description of the criteria according to which it has been realized, is often more persuasive than the movie itself. Indeed, it often happens that a work falls quite short of the expectations that its poetic intentions have aroused in us.
The banal question of the neophyte confronting a work of abstract art («What does it mean?»), a question that would seem to have nothing to do with aesthetics, criticism, or the history of poetics, is much more illuminating than it seems. The hapless viewer asks what the author of the painting wanted to do, because if he does not know this he won’t be able to enjoy the painting. If someone explains it to him, then he may begin to appreciate the work. The work or its rationalization? In any case, his critical approach clearly shows us (as if it were necessary) that in modern art the question of poetics has become more important than the creation of the work itself, that the way in which a work is constructed has become more important than the constructed work, and that form can be appreciated only as the outcome of a formal approach.2
If these observations are true and can be applied, though with different emphasis, to all the products of contemporary art, then we have to admit that aesthetic pleasure has gradually changed from the emotional and intuitive reaction it once was to a much more intellectual sort of appreciation. This is only a hypothesis, but if it is correct there is no reason for despair.
After all, didn’t the medieval reader find pleasure in applying his intelligence to the discovery of many allegorical meanings beneath a literal surface? And wasn’t this intellectual discovery colored by emotion? Throughout the centuries, the idea of art has undergone numerous changes. The intuitive spark and emotional shiver that were once thought to accompany all aesthetic revelation are today not only dated but also limited to a particular historical period and a precise set of cultural models, even though it would be wrong to assume that they have lost all their appeal.
But if this is what Art means to contemporary aesthetics, then the intensely selfanalytical trend I have just described can certainly be seen as a sign of the decline of art—more than that, of a concrete example of its death.
According to Piero Raffia, «the avantgarde is a trick of history meant to hasten the ‘death of art,’ or, rather, art’s transition from the cultural function it fulfilled in the past to a completely different one. In order to express this concept I have used a metaphor (a ‘trick of history’) which, however, should not be taken to mean that most avantgarde ideologies are not aware of what is happening.
Quite the contrary: most of them are so aware of it that it is all they can speak about . . . This change manifests itself as a surplus of rational selfconsciousness in relation to the creative process and the kind of artistic pleasure it is supposed to produce . . . Today’s art demands an increasingly keener critical awareness, an ‘ideologization’ of itself . . . This has resulted in a paradoxical imbalance between what the works actually say and the doctrinal surplus that justifies them.»‘
We can understand how this phenomenon, or this coincidence of phenomena, may, for the sake of description, be defined as «the death of art,» but this is not enough to explain what in fact the phrase means. Should it be taken as a facile Hegelianism, implying the dissolution of art into philosophy, or should it instead be seen as the premise of a more subtle speculation?
I have in mind the sort of speculation, more philosophical than aesthetic, that one finds in an essay such as «La questione della `morte dell’arte’ e la genesi della modema idea di artisticity» (The question of the ‘death of art’ and the genesis of the modern idea of artisticity), with which Dino Formaggio opens his book L’idea di artisticita.’
In this essay, Formaggio shows how the elements that have preoccupied us in the preceding pages—that is, the emergence of a poetry of poetry and of the critical awareness of this phenomenon—were already present in Schiller, Novalis, and Hegel, not to mention HOlderlin. The careful analysis that he devotes to these authors and to the evolution of the notion of the «death of art» shows that it would be much too simplistic to believe in «a historical end of art,» and that it would be much more reasonable to understand the formula in the Hegelian sense of «the end of a certain form of art,» part of a historical development in which the advent of a new idea of «art» must appear as the negation of what the same term meant for the preceding culture.
In the course of his essay, Formaggio quotes a page by De Sanctis (18171883) in which the famous Italian critic clearly showed how the idealistic nineteenth century was very much aware of this process. Rather than interpreting it as a symptom of impending death, however, De Sanctis chose to see it as the beginning of a new development born out of dialectic negation. «What’s the point of complaining about the state of art and wishing this or that?
Science has infiltrated poetry and is here to stay, because this fact corresponds to the current condition of the human mind. We have never been able to look at something beautiful without immediately wondering whether it is also reasonable and here we are already in the midst of criticism and science! Not only do we want to enjoy, but we also want to be conscious of our enjoyment; not only do we want to feel, but we also want to understand.
Today, honest poetry is as impossible as honest faith. Just as we are unable to speak of religion without being irked by doubts (‘But is it really true?’), so are we unable to feel without philosophizing about our feelings, or to see without trying to understand our vision.
All those who resent Goethe, Schiller, Byron, and Leopardi for constructing, as they see it, a «metaphysics in verse,» remind me of those priests who rail and rant against philosophy and bemoan the loss of faith. Unfortunately faith is gone, and poetry is dead.
Or rather, since both faith and poetry are immortal, what is dead is one of their particular ways of being. Today, faith springs out of conviction, and poetry out of meditation. They are not dead; they are only different.»‘
Obviously, the situation described by De Sanctis is not our current one; but aside from the fact that it certainly contained the seeds of our situation, what matters in this statement is the dialectic confidence and the lightheartedness with which the great critic accepted the crisis of a notion of art which, until then, had seemed the only possible one. We, too, should be capable of this confidence, even though what lies ahead may for the moment seem quite uncertain.
Formaggio is clearly capable of it when he posits, at the very basis of his notion of art, the Hegelian concept of the «dialectic death, within the artistic and aesthetic activity, of certain figures of consciousness, and through this their constant transformation and regeneration in an ongoing selfconsciousness.» Formaggio sees all contemporary art as stirred by a movement of mortal selfconsciousness, recognizable in its «fundamental intention to start again from zero,» in its intensely selfreflective attitude. But he sees this as a positive movement: death as «the death of death,» negation as «the negation of negation.»
All this should lead us to conclude that, even if the proposed hypothesis were valid (by which I mean the prevalence of poetics over poetry and of the abstraction of a rationalized structure over the concreteness of the work itself), far from discouraging us, it should instead invite us to study the new critical categories which could be applied to the works that will be born out of this new idea. And we should not be afraid that, by turning the artistic object into both the pretext for an intellectual investigation and the support of a rationalizable model, the artistic process might forever lose its autonomy. It has happened before: What autonomy did petroglyphs have?
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