Neutralization and Aesthetics in Contemporary Art

Abstract

I read Gerard Vilar’s Deartification. Paradoxes of endless art soon after it was published in 2010. Since then I have come back to it both for my teaching and research work because it deals with a wide range of issues, some of them very relevant for understanding contemporary art and the reactions which it provokes, and so it is a very helpful book for reflecting on the role of art in our society. That role would be none other that a significant, privileged way of thinking about the world; art would constitute a critical and dissonant voice, although it has shown itself as radically plural and apparently messy. This would be in fact a very good thing since artistic pluralism represents “a sort of polytheist view”; a sane counterweight to the unifying and totalized point of view aspired to from science and technology, and also from the normative culture of law and morals. It will be “an antidote against any pretension of eliminating the disagreement and the sovereignty of the individual”Therefore, it represents a democratic guarantee, because the polyphony that emerges from pluralism would help to strengthen the procedures of social democracy, threatened in many ways.