commercial mass communication
modern mediated mass communication is poles apart relative to any aesthetic feeling: vulgarity and arrogance nullify any hypothesis of meaning. On the contrary, the research of an aesthetic point of view is the attempt to assign – again – a sense to our human paths.
ÆSTHETICS
In my opinion aesthetics is the more powerful answer to the violence of mass communication (or modern commercial communication).
CONTENT
the goal of mass communication is always the dissipation of any content.
The only alternative to the effects of mass communication is a return to an aesthetic feeling of things, a kind of aesthetics not so much ideological, but rather more active (e.g. Adorno) – a kind of aesthetics able to bring again into society and culture feelings of economic unconcern (rather an unconcerned interest), discretion, moderation, the taste for challenge, witticism, and seduction. Aesthetics is exactly this.
TECHNO-POSTIVISM
technology stays in the background: it creates the necessary conditions for spreading one’s own creativity through digital media.
deleuze & guattari: the question of style
What happened to Deleuze and Guattari’s theories is merely what always happens: human thought is faster than technical progress.
value / matters
To affirm that aesthetic forms possess a social and cultural (even pedagogic in some ways) value, it means to negate – at root – the modern social organization that comes to measure any expression, including artistic ones, on the basis of market value.
p e d a g o g y o f t h o s e o p p r e s s e d b y c o n s u m e r i s m
As for students, they seem to me mainly oriented to use the more various objects (PC,digital devices, books, etc…) and not inclined to ask themselves questions about the things they are using. They use them without asking themselves where they come from or which valences they express over the function of use, or even, which evolutionary paths they design? This attitude is probably the fruit of the ruling consumerism that represents, de facto, the only historical reality that new generations know first hand. Nevertheless there is perhaps something more: the more or less widespread resignation and renunciation of playing an active and critical role in examining what surrounds us. Most of the students I usually meet seem to incarnate the ideal consumer model dreamed up by marketing gurus. They uncritically accept a lifestyle that other people have designed for them, rather than shaping their own. The picture of the situation could appear tragic, nevertheless, it’s amazing to look at the reactions that you can breed in them when you are able to uncover some conditioned thought processes of which they are victim. When it happens, you can clearly see how a growing interest rises in them, together with the determination to react (also in a creative way). The walk is quite long, therefore it’s important that none of us give up the responsibility to educate and make new generations aware.
regionalism
it is completely evident that non-anglophone realities suffer enormously from the inability to participate in an active way with the European (or international) cultural debate. This fact pushes these realities to retreat into themselves and to bring to life expressive modalities distinguished by perspectives that are more regional than global.
A R T
which is true art? The expression of the individual artist, or a perfect representation of the divine (in which the artist suppresses any trace of his personal vanity)?
– Vito Campanelli, interviewed by Geert Lovink, here
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