Philosophical Readings VI.2 2014

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PHILOSOPHICAL READINGSONLINEJOURNALOFPHILOSOPHY

VINUMBER 2SUMMER 2014

Special Issue on:

REALISM AND ANTI-REALISM:

NEW PERSPECTIVES

Guest Editors:Leonardo Caffo, Sarah De Sanctis

and Vincenzo Santarcangelo

ISSN 2036-4989

Philosophical Readingsphilosophicalreadings.org

ARTICLES

EditorsForeword 3

Maurizio FerrarisWhy Matter Matters 4

Anna LongoSpeculative Realism and Other Heresies 26

Richard DaviesWhat Documents Cannot Do 41

Roberto MarchesiniKnowledge and Different Levels of Reality 53

Leonardo CaffoThe Anthropocentrism of Anti-realism 65

Enrico TerroneMaps of the Shared World. From Descriptive Metaphysicsto New Realism 74

Dario CecchiDocu-mentality 87

Tiziana AndinaThe Artistic Disfranchisement of Reality 94

Davide Dal SassoExploring Conceptual Art 101

Maria Regina BrioschiWhitehead e il Nuovo Realismo: Per una filosofia del concreto,tra senso comune e scienze 115

Luca TaddioNew Realism as a Frame of Reference 131

INTERVIEWS

By Sarah De Sanctis and Vincenzo Santarcangelo

Interview with Tristan Garcia 143

Interview with Lee Braver 147

Interview with Graham Harman 151

ABSTRACTS AND INDEXING 156


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Philosophical Readings

Online Yearbook of Philosophy

Philosophical Readings, ISSN 2036-4989, features ar-ticles, discussions, translations, reviews, and biblio-graphical information on all philosophical disci-plines. Philosophical Readingsis devoted to the pro-motion of competent and definitive contributions to

philosophical knowledge. Not associated with anyschool or group, not the organ of any association orinstitution, it is interested in persistent and resoluteinquiries into root questions, regardless of thewriters affiliation. The journal welcomes alsoworks that fall into various disciplines: religion, his-tory, literature, law, political science, computer sci-ence, economics, and empirical sciences that dealwith philosophical problems. Philosophical Readingsuses a policy of blind review by at least two consult-

ants to evaluate articles accepted for serious consid-eration. Philosophical Readingspromotes special is-sues on particular topics of special relevance in thephilosophical debates. Philosophical Readings occa-sionally has opportunities for Guest Editors for spe-cial issues of the journal. Anyone who has an ideafor a special issue and would like that idea to beconsidered, should contact the Excutive editor.

Executive editor : Marco Sgarbi, Universit CaFoscari - Venezia.

Associate editor : Eva Del Soldato, University ofPennsylvania.

Assistant edi tor : Valerio Rocco Lozano, Univer-sidad Autnoma de Madrid.

Review editor : Laura Anna Macor, Universit diPadova.

Editorial Advisory Board : Laura Boella, Uni-versit Statale di Milano; Elio Franzini, UniversitStatale di Milano; Alessandro Ghisalberti, Universit

Cattolica di Milano;Piergiorgio Grassi, Universit diUrbino; Margarita Kranz, Freie Universitt Berlin;Sandro Mancini, Universit di Palermo; Massimo Ma-rassi, Universit Cattolica di Milano; Roberto Mor-dacci, Universit Vita e Salute San Raffaele di Milano;

Ugo Perone, Universit del Piemonte Orientale; Stefa-no Poggi, Universit di Firenze; Riccardo Pozzo, Con-siglio Nazionale delle Ricerche; Jos Manuel SevillaFernndez, Universidad de Sevilla.

Editorial Board: Raphael Ebgi, Universit SanRaffaele di Milano; Luca Gili,Katholieke UniversiteitLeuven; Eugenio Refini, The Johns HopkinsUniversity; Alberto Vanzo, University of Warwick;Francesco Verde, Universit La Sapienza di Ro-

ma; Antonio Vernacotola, Universit di Padova.

Board of Consultants : This board has as itsprimary responsibility the evaluation of articlessubmitted for publication in Philosophical Readings.Its membership includes a large group of scholarsrepresenting a variety of research areas and philoso-phical approaches. From time to time, PhilosophicalReadings acknowledges their service by publishingthe names of those who have read and evaluated

manuscripts in recent years.

Submissions : Submissions should be made to theEditors. An abstract of not more than seventy wordsshould accompany the submission. Since Philosophi-cal Readings has adopted a policy of blind review,information identify the author should only appearon a separate page. Most reviews are invited. How-ever, colleagues wishing to write a review shouldcontact the Executive editor. Books to be reviewed,should be sent to the Executive editor.


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Realism and Anti-Realism: New Perspectives

ISSUE VI NUMBER 1 SPRING 2014

PHILOSOPHICAL READINGS

Foreword

he 2000s have been unequivocallymarked by a return to realism ora shift to realism. The now wide-spread term Object-oriented phi-

losophy was coined in 1999, in GrahamHarmans PhD dissertation, published in2002 as Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Meta-physics of Objects. The same year, ManuelDe LandasIntensive Science and Virtual Phi-

losophy came out. In 2006 Quentin Meillas-souxs Aprs la finitude was published, fol-lowed in 2007 by Paul Boghossians Fear ofKnowledge. The same year, a conference washeld in which Speculative Realism was born.In 2011, a notorious article on La Repub-blica, which then was turned into a fullmanifesto, marked the birth of New Realismin Italy, and the year after Markus GabrielsIl senso dellesistenza. Per un nuovo realismoontologico came out. And this is just to namethe most famous publications.

So, all these books seem to signal a cer-tain paradigm shift in philosophy. Further-more, two new movements appear to havebeen born. The name Speculative Realism,which later became that of an entire philo-sophical movement (even though a veryvaguely defined one), was originally the titleof a conference held at Goldsmiths Collegein London on April 27th 2007. Italian NewRealism was born during a conversation be-tween Markus Gabriel and Maurizio Ferraris(apparently in Naples, at half past one onJune 23, 2011) and was later inaugurated atan eponymous conference in Bonn in 2012.

The debate triggered by this turn wasimmense (to get an idea, visit the Press Re-

view on New Realism, or the many blogsand journals devoted to Speculative Realism,such as Speculationsor D.U.S.T.). What fol-lows is a contribution to the discussion, in-cluding some of the protagonists (an essayby Maurizio Ferraris and a triple interviewto Tristan Garcia, Graham Harman and LeeBraver) and many interpreters and youngscholars reacting to it.

The topic addressed are varied: fromdocumentality (Davies and Cecchi) to artand aesthetics (Andina, Dal Sasso), the roleof anthropocentrism in philosophy (Caffo)and that of realism as a frame of reference(Taddio). Also, this is one of the very firstissues gathering the receptions of Specula-tive Realism and Object Oriented Ontologyin Italy (see, especially, Longo).

We hope to provide the reader with agood overview of the relation between dif-ferent forms of post-postmodern realism andthe consequences of realism to quote thetitle of a recent international conference onother fields of knowledge.

The Editors

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Why Matter Matters

Maurizio FerrarisUniversit di Torino

(Italia)

1. Work of Aura

ow do you picture your funeral?If you think you ll opt for a civilceremony, then you know there

will be relatively improvised speeches andapplauses: the impromptu is likely to prevail.There will be no structuring ritual, no for-mal apparatus to make the pain bearable.And yet the same might happen in a relig-ious ceremony, if it were to mimic the civilrite and acquire its uncertainties and difficul-

ties: imagine it took place in an ugly churchwith poor ornaments, and the speeches didnot make use of a high register but of every-day language. The experiment of the funeralis somewhat extreme but, in the end, appro-priate (as it affects everyone) to address thedifficulties of sacred art currently confusedwith profane art, which is not in its goldenage either.

Why is it so? Camille Paglia, in GlitteringImages: A Journey Through Art from Egypt toStar Wars,1 speaks of a crisis of the spirit.Gone are the days of the cathedrals, and re-ligion is no longer the subject of art. Accord-ing to the author, this is manifested at a mac-

1Paglia 2012.

roscopic level in the oblivion of the canon(people don t understand an annunciation

or a flight into Egypt because they do notknow what they are). I would add that themain client of art has changed, as it is nolonger the Church but the government: art-ists now have to simulate social interests justas they had to simulate religious interests inthe past. And the public does no longer gosee art in the church, but at exhibitions,pushed by the media and advertisements. As

a result, the only occasions in which there istalk of sacred art is when it comes to provo-cations, such as Piss Christby Serrano, Kip-penberger s crucified frog, or Cattelan sJohn Paul II crushed by a meteorite.

To counter this trend, the CatholicChurch is now seeking to recover a relation-ship with art that would not be subordinatedor mimetic, by designing a Vatican pavilion

at the Venice Biennale or involving contem-porary artists in ancient churches (think ofthe altar by Parmeggiani in the cathedral ofReggio Emilia, Kounellis bishop s chair orthe candlestick by Spalletti). The results arenot obvious, because the difficulties of sa-cred art are only the strongest symptom ofthe difficulties of art in general as authori-tative and even conservative commentators

have recently pointed out, see Marc Fuma-roli,2Jean Clair3and Roger Scruton.4Art, infact, seems to be realizing Nietzsche sprophecy about humanity after Copernicus:

2Claire 2011.3Fumaroli 2009.4Scruton 2009.

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it is rolling off toward the x, without anend and without an orientation.

Now, it is easy to see that many sectors ofcontemporary art are in crisis. It is even eas-ier to see that the return to religion talkedabout for the past twenty years has largelybeen a false alarm: it has not lead to any realchange of customs or beliefs, which remainsecular in all respects. However, I find it tooeasy and simplistic to establish (as Pagliadoes) a direct relationship between a spiri-

tual crisis and an aesthetic crisis. Theresurely is a relationship between the two but,if anything, it is the reverse of what theauthor posits: the hyper-spiritualization ofart, become conceptual, is what has causedthe aesthetic crisis. This phenomenon wasdescribed very well by Hegel: while ancientclassical art develops an aesthetic religioncharacterized by a strict correspondence be-

tween form and content, in modern romanticart content (the spirit, the concept) prevailsover form. Christ on the cross is not nice tolook at, what matters is the spiritual signifi-cance of the scene: here, in this extreme con-ceptualism, we have the most powerful ante-cedent of Duchamp.

All romantic art as well as its heirs, theavant-garde, which not coincidentally

mainly took place in the Christian world (tomy knowledge there are no Islamic, Jewish,Confucian, Taoist, or Hindu avant-gardes) develops this hyper-spiritual vocation.The claim made by contemporary visual artthat beauty is not at its centre5is a statement

5Benjamin 1968.

of hyper-conceptuality. It is not true, as isalways repeated following Benjamin, that in

the age of mechanical reproduction art haslost the aura resulting from uniqueness.What has happened is exactly the opposite,the artwork is now essentially a work ofaura, the result of a fully spiritual consecra-tion by which any object is transformed intoartwork, museums are transformed intotemples, visitors turn into pilgrims and peni-tents, and art dealers become merchants of

aura.6

Assuming that, if exposed in a favourablelocation and with the appropriate ritual, any-thing can become a work of art, means plac-ing transubstantiation within artistic produc-tion: the artist consecrates any object, trans-forming it into an artwork, through readinga devotional text written by an art-critic. Soit is true that there is no more sacred art

(with sacred subjects) and that we no longerknow how to build beautiful churches. Butin new and often beautiful cathedrals mu-seums we are engaging in a perpetual ado-ration. If this is the case, then, art is notdead, but more alive than ever, and indeed ithas taken the place of religion.

One can always object to this interpreta-tion that conceptual is not equivalent to

spiritual, that the spirit may be mysteryand revelation, while the concept is trans-parency, clarity, and often a futile game. Itmight also be objected that the aura of con-ceptual works is an aura of plastic. Sure, butthe problem is that in order to restore the

6Dal Lago Giordano 2006.


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myth perhaps to create a new mythol-ogy as the romantics dreamed two centu-

ries ago the will to do so isn t enough. Af-ter all, the whole story is already written inWar and Peace: at the eve of the battle ofBorodino, Napoleon, the bourgeois and En-lightened emperor, contemplates the pictureof his son, the King of Rome. His opponent,Kutusov, kneels in front of the icons. Theoutcome of the battle is uncertain, while thatof the war will be disastrous for Napoleon.

But in the long run, in the two centuries thatseparate us from Borodino, Napoleon sprinciples have had the upper hand. We arenow more able to see the limits of thoseprinciples, in art, economy and politics, aswell as in our own lives. But we are alsoaware (or at least this is my steadfast belief)that spirituality and the divine are bound to apower we have to acknowledge, but with

which we can not reconcile if not in an illu-sory form, sacrificing the values, merits andpains of modernity.

2. Contractual Art

t is important to define the meaning ofconcept in the phrase conceptual

art. In what sense is Duchamp s bottlerack more conceptual than the School ofAthens by Raphael, who manages to em-body in the single gesture of Aristotle shalf-raised hand the via media character ofethical virtues? In hindsight, the notion ofconceptual art is a legal concept: if we take

the couple law and art,7we will notice thatthe former is not extrinsic to the latter (un-

like what would happen if, say, we tried toexplain artworks through their authors pa-thologies according to the couple psychia-try and art.)

For the past century conceptual art has, infact, been contractual: it deals with the eco-nomic data (the world of art is above all theart market) and seeks to broaden the defini-tion of art, renegotiating the implicit con-

tract between buyer, author and user to thepoint of essentially becoming a contract it-self. In fact, the only concept used by con-ceptual-contractual art is, after all, the law ofart, the canonical idea that an artwork is aphysical thing, made by an author and en-dowed with an attractive appearance. There-fore, it is necessary to contradict the canons,move around them, expand them, remove

them, and all this, rather perversely, happensthrough a tool that is traditionally associatedwith the canon and legality: the contract.

The powers of the contract are great, as ithas a performative dimension and allows oneto do things with words, as suggested by theEnglish philosopher John L. Austin,8 thetheoretician of speech acts, who noted thatthe words I do at a wedding do not merely

describe a ceremony, but produce two newsocial objects, a husband and a wife. Thesame thing systematically happens withdocuments, which allow one to certify,document, archive, name, and so forth ac-

7See Donati 2012, Ajani-Donati (eds), 2011.8Austin 1962.

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cording to a dual mode which I believe canbe traced back to the following: weak

document (record of a fact) and strongdocument (inscription of an act). To beclear, all the artists that record performancesotherwise destined to disappear produceweak documents. The same happens whenartists such as Gordon Matta-Clark, whomakes collages with legal papers take ad-vantage of the aesthetic appeal of paperworkand the magic power of archive.

But documents can be used in a strongerform, that is, to literally produce acts: Theo-dore Fu Wan contractually changes hisname to Saskatche Wan, Alix Lambert getsmarried with five different wives in sixmonths, Maria Eichhorn conceives of herown artistic activity as the drafting of con-tracts in order to protect urban areas threat-ened by speculation. The conferring power

of the document is at the heart of practicessuch as those by Stefan Bruggemann andRobert Barry, who have two of their worksassigned by contract every five years to oneor the other. Similarly, exploiting the laws ofcopyright, Philippe Parreno and PeterHuyge acquire the rights to use a Manga fig-ure. The contract can go up to the staging ofa subversion of the rules that are no longer

those of art, but of the Criminal Code, suchas when the artist gives the order to rob agrocery store, or, as in Corruption Con-tract by the group Superflex, the buyer inobvious derogation from the standard the-ory of beauty as a symbol of moral goodness is committed to extort or bribe.

One can also create artworks by a merecontractual fiat. In 1959 Yves Klein made

Empty Artist, an exhibition withoutworks, in which the user was issued a con-

tract for the sale of a zone of immaterialpictorial sensibility. Much later, in 2010,Etienne Chambaud made a work that con-sists only of contracts, certificates and state-ments of authenticity. Similarly, the contractcan turn the author into an artwork, as in thearrangement by which Jill Magid gives aspecialized company a mandate to transformits charred remains into a diamond. But the

extreme case is perhaps that of Robert Mor-ris 1963 contract, which consists of twoparts: on the left, an iron plate with a fewlines engraved on it, on the right a statementin which the artist withdraws the artworkstatus from the artwork itself, transferringthe artistic aura onto the document.

Immanuel Kant said that the character ofart consists in making people think. But

what thoughts are aroused by these works?Questions of an essentially legal nature. Forexample: who is the author, if she merelygives instructions for others to make thework? She can be intimidating if, as SethSiegelaub did, she prescribes in the contractthat even the slightest change involves an ir-reversible alteration of the artwork. She caneven be despotic, in a perverse way: this is

the case of Daniel Buren who rigorouslyavoids signing or authenticating his works.And again, can we say that the curator of anexhibition or a museum is an author, whenhis responsibility goes far beyond the man-agement of the exhibition space? (For in-stance, an artist like Cattelan has co-curatedthe Berlin Biennial in 2006 with Massimil-iano Gioni).


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pertise accumulated in his years of artisticmilitancy.

3. From the Vittoriano to the Urinal

nd beauty? It is no longer a prob-lem, of course, provided that it hasever been one. Since 1993, in Bos-

ton, there has been a MOBA, a Museum ofBad Art which organises exhibitions and

conferences developing an idea that is simplebut efficacious: take some bad paintings andcall them by their real name. This doesn talways work, some pieces are not that badafter all, and overall one gets the impressionthat the percentage of bad art is not signifi-cantly greater than that present in many mu-seums of fine arts, both ancient and modern.What matters, though, is that MOBA

ironizes about what for a century now hasbeen the fundamental aesthetic creed ofavant-gardes, which I would call dogma ofaesthetic indifference. That is, the thesis ac-cording to which beauty is no longer theprimary objective of what used to be calledfine arts to distinguish them from usefularts.

This aesthetic (or more exactly anaes-

thetic) creed comes from afar and goes backat least to Romanticism, characterised byHegel (who didn t really like the Roman-tics) as a prevalence of content over from, asa prearranged and strongly wanted dishar-mony. It is not by chance that in 1853 aHegelian, Rosenkranz, wrote Aesthetics of

the Ugliness,10grasping the spirit of the age:beauty is not needed, aura is enough, al-

though this took place in the epoch of da-guerreotype that is, of that technical re-producibility which, according to Benjamin,endorses the end of artistic aura. This is aprecocious and evident proof, I believe, ofthe thesis I am trying to defend, namely thatthe disappearance of beauty and the imposi-tion of aura are two concomitant phenom-ena.

Nonetheless, like in any religion, thedogma of aesthetic indifference has manymore followers in theory than in practice.When writing an essay on aesthetics, one isalways ready to affirm that what one is deal-ing with is a conceptual experience in whichbeauty is a fossil out of place. One is not asready, though, to affirm the same when buy-ing a table or an armchair, a carpet or a

dress: then the requirement of aestheticpleasantness stays unchanged. It is not hardto recognise a contradiction here (or, to stickto religious jargon, a double truth), so thatwe have an age, ours, that carefully culti-vates the myth of beauty and yet easily ac-cepts that what used to be called fine artsno longer have beauty as their primary ob-jective.

Thus we have, on the one hand, the mostbeautiful women and men in history, thebest-finished objects, the most-selected food,incomparably better wines than all the winesmankind has ever drunk and works of artthat are ugly, on purpose so, or unkempt, or

10Rosenkranz 1853.

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meaningless, or at least an art that thinks itcan be ugly because it sees itself as intelli-

gent. And since looks (and taste) still matter,the consolation for visitors is offered by gal-leries, which are beautiful (we shall comeback to this later, as it s not a detail). Orperhaps the gratification lies in the free whitewine and cheese you are offered at inaugura-tions (unlike the cinema, where you re theone to pay for wine and cheese, if you wantthem, since supposedly the aesthetic gratifi-

cation comes from the show). Now, thereare people convinced that between what yousee in a gallery and what you put into yourown house there is an abyss. I (and I doubt Iam the only one) believe it is not so, also be-cause many works are destined to enter peo-ple s houses, just like many other handi-works. In the following pages I will there-fore try to fight the correlated dogmas of

aesthetic indifference and auratic omnipo-tence attempting an answer to the question:what can be done to avoid that any MOMAor MOCA or MACBA or MADRE orMAMBO becomes indistinguishable from aMOBA?

Despite the appearances, the MOBA be-longs to an ancient tradition, as its predeces-sors can already be found in the situation de-

scribed by Carlo Dossi when commentingon the sketches for the Vittoriano in I mat-toidi: al primo concorso pel monumento inRoma a Vittorio Emanuele II (literally, Thenutcases: for the first competition for the VictorEmmanuel II monument in Rome)11: ccomi

11Dossi 1884.

a voi, pveri bozzetti fuggiti od avviati almanicomio, dinanzi ai quali chi prende la

vita sul trgico passa facendo atti di sdegno echi la prende, come si deve, a gioco, si ab-bandona a momenti di clamorosa ilarit.12This was in 1884, that is, in an age of badtaste and eclecticism possibly produced bythe vast photographic material at disposal (itis on this side, rather than that of the loss ofaura, that we should measure the impact oftechnical reproducibility on art). Beauty was

still being searched-for, but it wasn t found,and the outcome was the very white, marblewriting machine that we can still see in Pi-azza Venezia in Rome which is not so bad,after all, if we compare it with other rejectedsketches that Dossi laughed about.

Also, it is not so bad when compared withmany works of art that fill galleries and mu-seums, and that appeal to what I propose we

call Great Conceptual Art: the art that hascultivated the dogmas of aesthetic indiffer-ence and auratic omnipotence. If the worksof the nutcases were often ugly but not onpurpose, those of the Great Conceptual Artare just as ugly, but purposely so. Onewould be tempted to see in this an extra re-sponsibility but instead, with a somehow mi-raculous proceeding (as it has to do with

transfiguration) it is not so. While laughingat the Vittoriano, scorning its ugliness andpitying its author are all accepted attitudes, if

12Here I am, you poor sketches escaped from ormade in the madhouse, before whom those whotake life tragically pass showing disdain, and thosewho take it (as they should) as a game abandonthemselves to moments of clamorous hilarity.


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one risked doing the same with Great Con-ceptual Art one would be in trouble, accused

of nostalgia, incompetence, bad taste andaesthetic insensibility (and it s bizarre, giventhat this art does not aspire to beauty).Beauty is no longer art s business and if youdidn t get that you re an ignoramus.

If you think about it, this doctrine it is bi-zarre because it would be like saying thathealth is not medicine s priority. Given thatGreat Conceptual Art comes not long after

the Vittoriano, someone could malevolentlythink that the dogma of aesthetic indiffer-ence is a late version of the fable of the foxand the grapes. Yet the intimidated audienceaccepts and endures. They go to exhibitions,applaud and buy if they can, proving to bemuch less self-confident than the nineteenthcentury bourgeoisie, that would perhapsscorn Impressionism, but at least, in doing

so, showed that it had its own taste. GreatConceptual Art users can, at most, say tothemselves: I could have made this. Butthey are wrong: the endeavour is far beyondtheir reach, it is very, and romantically,monumental. In the age when nutcases werecompeting for the Vittoriano, Nietzschewrote Beyond Good and Evil proposing atransvaluation of all values. An undoubtedly

vast project, that nonetheless was realised inart. When the last unprepared visitors those ready to shout Ugly! Ugly!, in theright or the wrong, in front of ugly or beau-tiful works were gone, a spell was cast sothat their very sons or grandchildren sayBeautiful! Beautiful! before works thathave only one declared feature, namely thatof not aspiring to beauty.

The Zarathustra of this transvaluationwas obviously Duchamp, thirty years after

the nutcases of the Vittoriano. ButDuchamp s genius did not consist, as issometimes believed, of his breaking with thepast. Rather, in the opposite way, it con-sisted of his art s ultimate continuity with it.His urinal, as well as the Mona Lisa withmoustaches, draws together the threads ofthe aesthetic frustrations accumulated bygenerations of eclecticism and pompierism,

together with a forced and semi-religiouscult of Great Non Conceptual Art. Are youtired of showing an aesthetic devotion thatdoesn t belong to you before the MonaLisa? Don t worry, draw some moustacheson her and you shall be saved by the inter-vention of Great Conceptual Art. Are youfed up with works that struggle to be beauti-ful and are just vulgar or ordinary? Again,

don t worry: take a urinal, or a bottle rack(curious tool, by the way) or a bicyclewheel, exhibit it in a pertinent environment(a gallery or a museum), give it a title andsign it: you ll have realised the marvellousconceptual transubstantiation thanks towhich a common object becomes a work ofaura. From this point of view, applying thedogma of aesthetic indifference and auratic-

ity at all costs is crucial, so as to avoid someincompetent thinking that the miracle de-pends on the action of aesthetic propertiesinstead of the conceptual invention. Here sthe first difference from the Vittoriano, amonument that loved beauty, despite not be-ing loved back.

There is a second difference. Dossi couldeasily laugh at the Vittoriano, whereas with


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Duchamp s urinal one needs to be very se-rious and thoughtful, admiring and concen-

trated. Otherwise one risks ending up likeFranti, who in Cuore is defined a villainfor smiling when the teacher narrates the fu-nerals of king Umberto. Like in every mira-cle, a good deal of faith is necessary on thepart of the observers. You have to believe it.But once you do, then any transvaluation istruly possible. It d like to demonstrate thiswith an anecdote. A few years ago an impor-

tant foundation of Great Conceptual Artasked me to organise a cycle of conferencesin conjunction with the exhibition of an art-ist who proposed, I was told, a profound re-flection on violence. When I requested toknow what the meditation was about theyexplained to me that the artist had gone to aslaughterhouse in Mexico and had killed,with a hammer, a dozen horses there. The

reflection on violence consisted of the re-cordings of the massacre. I pointed out that Icouldn t see the meditative side, given that(if words have any meaning at all) it was nota reflection but an action, a cruel and ex-tremely violent one, a kind of snuff movieagainst animals. I was then told that thoseanimals were going to be slaughtered any-way.

So if the artist had gone to the showers inAuschwitz hammering to death the wretchedpeople who entered (and who were going todie anyway) maybe some critics or curatorswould have said that the artist s was a pro-found reflection on violence. The entireconversation took place, as it had to (weshall get back to this point, which mightseem lateral or environmental but it s cru-

cial in its being lateral or environmental), ina white room, minimal and very elegant like

an Apple Store, and the people talking to mewere all educated, well-mannered and kindmen and (mostly) women. I was the ill-mannered one, unwilling to understand. Onmy way back home, I wondered if thetransvaluation of all values wasn t movingfrom aesthetics to ethics, because perhapsaesthetic atrophy, the habit of swallowinganything, has started to unleash a form of

moral atrophy.

4. Int imidat ion and Indulgence

n the end the exhibition didn t takeplace, as is was prohibited by animalrights activists and by the superinten-

dent. I wonder: if it had taken place, what

would the artist have done? Would he havestood at the door of the gallery holding ahammer? Maybe, but even without armedartists welcoming them, visitors normallyseem quite intimidated in art galleries: theyoften pay to see an exhibition, and yet theywalk around with a shy and respectful atti-tude. One may wonder how much fear peo-ple have, and who exactly is threatening

them. Also, one may wonder whether it ishumanly possible to find everything beauti-ful: at a restaurant or in a shop that is neverthe case, as there are always things one doesnot like. In art, however, everything is takento be beautiful, and this for a further para-dox happens just at the time when GreatConceptual art imposes the canon of aes-thetic indifference. And yet this paradox

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ceases to be when one realizes that the aes-thetic indifference hides an auratic omnipo-

tence.One is tempted to reach a very simpleconclusion: in this transfiguration (as in alltransformations) not only is there circum-vention but also a good deal of social intimi-dation. This intimidating factor relies on thesolid bourgeois element that thinkers fromNietzsche to Bourdieu have called distinc-tion.13It is not distinguished not to appreci-

ate the slaughter of horses. It is not distin-guished to show hesitation in the face of awork that consists (I happened to see it) of achainsaw put into a boat I guess it wasmeant to refer to the transience of all humanaffairs, somehow like a Stilleben created byLeroy Merlin. The chainsaw in the dinghywas the repetitive and almost paroxysmalversion of the readymade, almost a hundred

years later. Now, I know that this observa-tion is far from original, but the readymadetruly seems to be a gimmick that changeswith time, with iteration and by imitation, inan intellectual swindle with motivations ofeconomic interest. At its heart there is apowerful intuition. At a time when the nut-cases of the Vittoriano are looking forbeauty in vain and are committed to cover

anything up with an aesthetic patina, thereadymade proposes a radical gesture andsays that the search is useless: anything canbe a work of art.

The first movement, then, is desecration.The artwork has nothing special about it, it

13Bourdieu 1987.

can be anything: at least nominally, it can bea thing without aura or nor art. In reality,

though, it isn t true that anything can be awork of art, because it would be difficult toturn a natural event such as a hurricane intoa work of art. The same goes for an ideal ob-ject such as an equilateral triangle (at most,there would be a concrete object, the designof the equilateral triangle, and that, not thetriangle itself, would be the artwork).14Rather, what Duchamp suggests is some-

thing very reasonable that I personally fullyagree with: the artwork is first and foremost athing, with certain dimensions, features etc.Indeed, it is from time immemorial that mu-seums (and the royal galleries that precededthem) have included all sorts of things thatwere not intended for aesthetic contempla-tion: weapons, buckles, tombstones, and ofcourse human bodies (such as in Egyptian

museums, which show how body art has anancient soul).

The real desecration, therefore, lies not somuch in the idea that anything can be a workof art, but rather in saying that, whatever itis, the work of art can afford to be ugly, i.e.not to aspire to beauty, to the status of whatDuchamp called retinal art.15Besides, thisdoes not apply to other things of supposed

aesthetic value, such as design objects.Therefore, Duchamp s real stroke of gen-ius, much more than the readymade, was thepractical elaboration of the thesis of aestheticindifference as auratic omnipotence. This

14I have developed this point in Ferraris 2007.15Cabanne 1967.


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thesis proves to be valuable and salvific in anage of aesthetic confusion, in which the

eclecticism of many traditions generates thesituation described by Gadda in Acquaintedwith Grief : the villas in Brianza had some-thing of the pagoda and something of thespinning mill, and they were also a compro-mise between the Alhambra and the Krem-lin.16 In this grab-bag of styles, classes,tastes and cultures, no one could be sure ofone s own taste, and everyone had reason-

able grounds to think one was wrong: the es-timators of Impressionism felt insecure be-cause now that taste had been overcome byCubism, the lovers of Art Pompier felt thesame because it was considered poor inspirit by the enthusiasts of Impressionismand Cubism, and so forth. On the one hand,therefore, there is the path that leads fromthe Vittoriale to the Vittoriano: that is, the

inclusive and syncretic path which collectsall kinds of horrors in a museum. On theother hand, there is Duchamp s break withthe past: what matters is not the beauty, butthe concept of a work. Once this is clear,with a radical Copernican revolution, onecan stop worrying.

However, this apparent desecration fullycapitalizes on the sacred value of art, and

here lies the crux of intimidation. Just as themoustache drawn on the Mona Lisa derivetheir prestige through transgression and lesemajeste, so the readymade presupposes aconsecration that is inseparable from itsdesecration. Duchamp, in showing its ob-

16Gadda 1969.

jects, exploited the canonical value of art: awhole heritage of respectability and auratic-

ity. Bow down to this ugliness, to the dis-honour of Golgotha (recall that for Hegelromanticism found its fundamental para-digm in the scandal of Christ on the cross),17because through this genuflection you shallburn incense to the god unknown. Once puton a pedestal, the thing becomes an artwork,and the devotee will contemplate urinals andbottle racks with the same tension and aes-

thetically concentrated attitude dedicated toromantic art. In fact, people at exhibitionsbehave exactly as in church, or at Bayreuth:they are often silent or whispering, andwould never dare to act as was common inthe eighteenth century, an age in which thetheatre lights were on and people ate whilewatching the show. Even the Chardonnayand cheddar that they give you at inaugura-

tions somehow have the function of theEucharist rather than that of party food -as this would reduce the works to a mere or-nament and accompaniment.

Surprisingly, then, while the artist dese-crates (at least in appearance), the user con-secrates and feels bestowed with a decisivetask: making art valuable, auratizing it withher faith just like a meteorite in the desert

can be transformed by the faithful into thesymbol of God. The two experiences therite in the gallery and the one in the desert have a common element: the mystery. It isnot clear what is expected from the artwork,but it s a kind of redemption. This is a strik-

17Hegel 1975.


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ing confirmation of the fact that if technicalreproducibility produced a loss of the aura of

uniqueness, the aura was promptly (andmuch more abundantly) reconstructed bythe faith of the users. The outward manifes-tation of devotion is often inadequate, andtherefore people s saying beautiful, beauti-ful is an invocation rather than an apprecia-tion. Theirs is a strategy of the sublime,which not coincidentally was extensively re-habilitated in the critical discourse on the

avant-garde. Beauty becomes conspicuousby its absence where there s nothing beauti-ful and one is deliberately seeking the com-mon and the ugly. But this lack, this mis-match between the concept and the object(this is essentially the sublime, especially themathematical one, as Kant theorizes it in theCritique of Judgment)18 gives the impressionto go far beyond the beautiful, because what

matters are the intentions and thoughts, notthe sensible appearance as suggested, withterrifying machismo, again by Kant, whenhe said that a woman can be beautiful, butonly man is sublime.19

Like all forms of asceticism, intimidationinvolves more than an indulgence: it impliesspaces in which pleasure is returned and de-votion is rewarded. It is no coincidence that

the era of Great Conceptual Art, as that ofthe romantic spirit, is the only one in the his-tory of taste that has come up with compen-satory sub-categories: Kitsch, Camp, Pop(Pop was assumed by Great Conceptual Art

18Kant 1961.19Kant I. 1951: ch. III.

with a stratagem, on which we will returnlater). The situation is that of the Vittoriano

and the Vittoriale: taste is no longer sure ofitself, or cannot confess its predilections. Ifone wants to listen to Madonna, much pre-ferring her to Stockhausen, or if one likesCampbell s soup cans and understandsnothing of Picasso, and above all if one isbored to death watching Duchamp s urinalfor the millionth time, there is a way out:one can claim that one likes Kitsch, Camp,

and Pop and will make a great impressiontoo. This suggests that the common elementin the compensatory triad Kitsch-Camp-Popis the fear of being judged and (even more)of judging, due to an uncertainty of taste.

For a full acceptance of the phenome-non, one has to wait for its outcome andnatural development: postmodernism, whichfollows from it in an explicit form, as one

can read, for example, in a meaningful con-versation between Charles Jencks and SusanSontag.20 Jencks idea is that people ruintheir lives for the sake of principles and thatit is better to be nihilists that is, amongother things, not to care about those whojudge us Kitsch or Camp or Pop. The gene-alogy of postmodern taste is the following. Itbegins with Camp (first English and then

global), it continues with Kitsch and Pop,and culminates with postmodernism andweak thought, which returns Camp, Kitschand Pop aficionados (that is, the greater partof humanity) some kind of good conscience:a kind of absolution or indulgence. Don t

20The conversation appears in Cleto 2008 (ed).


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worry, yours is not bad taste Or rather,even bad taste has a space and a social dig-

nity: there are essays, handbooks, confer-ences and conventions about it.Like all indulgences, of course, it leaves

some doubts: does this forgiveness extend toDolce and Gabbana and Lady Gaga? But thecore of the matter is clear. The Romanticswanted a synthesis between philosophy andart, they pursued a new mythology. Twooutcomes were produced by this dream: as-

cetic art, which took its first steps in Beetho-ven s late style, and Kitsch, which originallydesignated the taste of the new bourgeoisieof Monaco, who could not suffer Beethovenquartets but much enjoyed Loden capes.With time and industry, with capitalism andimperialism, the phenomenon was universal-ized, reaching stronger cultural circuits andmore important industrial circuits. This is

how Friedrich Hlderlin s solitary Kitsch(leading to the saying that that man dwellspoetically) was replaced by a Swinging Lon-don Brian Jones, Gina Lollobrigida, VictorMature, Flash Gordon and the double-breasted Gianni Agnelli.

In this context Nietzsche s words wouldfit perfectly: I am all the names in history,as he wrote to Burckhardt.21Or, as Alberto

Arbasino wrote in Super Eliogabalo [SuperHeliogabalus], Nietzsche, Adorno, Lacan,Toto . All camp, no doubt. If this is thecase, the campest of all is Martin Heidegger,in his Tyrolean jacket and a nightcap on hishead (this was very well grasped in Old

21Nietzsche 1885/1889, letter dated 6 January 1889.

Masters by Thomas Bernhard, who is alsocamp),22proclaiming that the work of art is

no less than truth s setting-itself-to-work,illustrating his thesis with the temple ofPaestum (originally the Nuremberg Zeppe-lin Field set up on the pattern of the altar ofPergamon to accommodate Hitler sspeeches), the shoes painted by Van Gogh,and a poem by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer.23

5. Matter Matters

o, this is the crime scene. What to do?First of all, against the totalitarianismof the concept, it is worth noting that

there is no art without appeal to perception,namely something that is not thought; there-fore, the artwork is not simply the reminderof the ideas of a guy who, for some reason,

chose to be an artist rather than a philoso-pher. This is about learning from Hegel, notwhen he speaks of romanticism and thedeath of art, but where he says that senseis a wonderful word, because it has two op-posite meanings. On the one hand, it refersto the senses vision, hearing, touch, smell,taste and everything that has to do withperception. On the other hand, it indicates

the meaning, related to thought, as when wesay the sense of life. It is not surprisingthat aesthetics the study of art derives itsname from sense perception (aisthesis inGreek).24 Trying to prevent the solidarity

22Bernhard 1985.23Heidegger 2002.24I have developed this point in Ferraris 1997.

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between these two poles, not consideringthat matter matters and thinking that art is

the greater the more it deviates from percep-tion: these were the first mistakes that led tothe dead-end of Great Conceptual Art. Andyet, it is by never breaking with the sensesand with perception that one can keep theway open for beauty.

But there s more. As Jane Austen notedin her Sense and Sensibility, there is anotherduality similar to the wonderful duplicity

of sense and the senses. The concept mustalways be accompanied by feeling, becausethose who reject feeling in art do so only be-cause they confuse feeling with sentimental-ity. The idea is very simple. What do welook for when we look at artworks? Mainlyfeelings.25Otherwise, we would read a trea-tise instead. It is not truth that we look for inart: this is why art has always been linked to

beauty. By the same token, one can under-stand why, as we have seen in the case of thehorse-slaughterer, a certain degree of aes-thetic atrophy can go hand in hand withmoral atrophy.

Finally, there is a third element of GreatConceptual Art that we should take into ac-count. It is the search for a style that is im-mediately recognizable, even through the

wide variety of realizations, media, issues.They say the style is the man himself. But itis also the artwork, because what we expectfrom the works is something unique and in-dividual, just like people.26

25I have developed this point in Ferraris 2007.26I have developed this notion in Ferraris 2009.

6. Ten, Eleven, Twelve Muses

fter the recovery of perception,feeling and style, we can move fur-ther. Very often philosophers,

when elaborating theories on art, only referto visual art, as if it were paradigmatic. Andyet, this is not the case. Contemporary visualart and its church-like museums leads to aform of consecration, rite and admirationgoverned by the theory of aesthetic indiffer-

ence. But there is a great deal of artistic ob-jects (think of videoclips, movies, comicbooks, songs) that occupy our lives muchmore intensely than visual art. Such objectsfollow completely different cults, trying tocapture the user with the most profanethings, without being able to afford the lux-ury of aesthetic indifference. Given thatgood will is not enough, it can often happen

that these objects are ugly or nothing spe-cial, but the point is that the user can say, Ilike that or I do not like that, while withvisual art things are different. So the death ofart prophesied by Hegel two centuries agowas perfectly realized. At least it was per-fectly realized in visual art, or rather, in thatpart of visual art that understands itself asGreat Conceptual Art. The other kinds of

art are doing well, and new ones emerge(think of video clips, or graphic novels). It isnot the first time that new forms of art re-place old ones (for example, at some pointepic poems disappeared and novels ap-peared) and the really interesting thing iswondering what will be next.

Returning to the issue of aura, we realizethat perhaps things have gone very differ-

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ently from what we expected. Almost a hun-dred years ago, Benjamin had argued that

technical reproducibility would lead to a lossof aura. He was referring to the fact thatpaintings were being replaced by photo-graphs, and the single work was substitutedby many identical copies. Fifty years agoAndy Warhol began to take pictures withthe Polaroid signing the shots, because thosephotos without negative were unique pieces.But, of course, they were also anomalies, be-

cause the ordinary photo has a negative, so itis infinitely reproducible even more so inthe case of digital photos. I wonder whatBenjamin (who died in 1940) and Warhol(who died in 1987) would have said if theyhad predicted that this reproducibility wasgoing to grow enormously, thanks to the In-ternet. Concretely, if I type Brillo Box +Warhol I will get almost nine thousand

hits on Google, and if I select the imagesearch I will find almost three thousand re-productions of the Brillo Box, the box ofsteel wool exhibited by Warhol in 1964 andconsidered a pop icon. But if I do this re-search on my tablet I will have three thou-sand images available in another place, andthe same happens if I do the same thing onmy smartphone. As a result, on the same ta-

ble, I will have virtually nine thousand im-ages of the Brillo Box and twenty-sevenwebsites that talk about it or reproduce it.

Now, the question is: has this infinite re-producibility led to the disappearance of art?Of course not. In a sense, there is too muchof it. There are countless works of pop art,countless forms of art. The only thing thatdisappeared, or that has dropped drastically

in the case of reproduced works of art, is theprice. But it is precisely to remedy this prob-

lem that the work of aura was devised, thatis, the most spiteful and intractable creationof the last century, the most resolute to dis-please the taste, the most pretentious in de-claring that beauty is not on top of its aspira-tions. I once happened to have a discussionwith a museum director who told me Ofcourse, in order to fully understand theseworks one must be part of the art world. I

pointed out that it was not very differentfrom saying that to understand certain worksone must be Aryan. This is an aspect thatnormally, to my knowledge, is not talkedabout, but I think it is crucial. Why do wecondemn the surplus in industrial productionand blame the financial capital, while pas-sively accepting the very same things whenit comes to art?

Reconsidering the relationship betweenart and social reality does not mean (Godforbid) defending some form of realism.Rather, it means realistically examining whatcan keep up with some puzzling phenomena,which affect not only the production of art-works, but the art world as a whole. How isit possible that an architect such as AlvaroSiza has been able to realize beautiful exhibi-

tion spaces at the Madre in Naples but didnot put outlets and switches in them? Andthe worst is that this great dysfunctionalitywas motivated by aesthetic reasons, muchlike what happened with the infamous Starckjuicer.

The ones I mentioned are the side effectsof the rejection of beauty in art and the fol-lowing genesis of the work of aura. The


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great No to beauty must be followed byother agencies carrying out a supplying

function generating figures that were onceunimaginable, like fashion victims, designmaniacs, or compulsive exhibition visitors.Or strange couples like the one between hy-per-architectural museums and the workscontained in them. The museums are gener-ally all different, except for the name, whichis a variation of Moma. The works con-tained, however, are all the same, all equally

transgressive, all equally decided not to seekbeauty (because if they did, they would berelegated in a more modest space, for exam-ple, a design shop). Hence a paradox onwhich it might be worth pondering. Intimi-dated common sense agrees that anythingcan be a work of art (and not a work of aura,a thing to which some conventionally auraticvalue is usually attached) . But at the same

time design has taught us how difficult it isto produce good objects: it is not true thatany object can be an object of design. As aresult, if it is true that being a work of art is,for an object, something like a sanctification,while being a design object is, so to speak, apromotion of lesser rank, than it seems thatin the twentieth century it was easier to besaints than blessed.

Now, the salt-cellar by Cellini is cumber-some, but it still can contain salt, if neces-sary, while the Starck juicer will neversqueeze a decent juice. What happened be-tween Cellini and Starck? After all, it is agood question. I think the answer is simplerthan it appears. The middle class (not neces-sarily very educated, unlike the courtly andaristocratic patronage that had preceded it)

saw the work of aura as an instrument of so-cial advancement and enrichment. At this

point, the industrial production of works ofaura began, filling the galleries and museumsthat proliferated through the establishmentof public expenditure in which officialsbought with the people s money. And I mnot at all convinced that museum directorswould ever take home many of the works ofaura they expose, nor would they ever buythem if they had to pay out of their pockets.

Mind you: there have always been bad art-works, the Louvre or the Alte Pinakothekare full of them, as anyone can see. Man isnot perfect and, above all, perfection is rare.But what the twentieth century has managedto achieve is the ideological legitimacy ofugliness through the work of aura. I wonderwhat the archaeologists of the future willthink, if and when they find the works of

aura. Maybe they will not even notice, andconsider as works of art those that are cur-rently regarded as minor productions.

7. Future Archaeologists

n this regard I would like to suggest areflection. In George Bernard Shaw s

Pygmalion, a professor (Henry Hig-gins) is committed to transform a simple girl(Eliza Doolittle) into a woman of high soci-ety. The topos is turned upside down byMauro Covacich in L arte contemporaneaspiegata a mio marito[Contemporary art ex-

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plained to my husband],27where an educatedwife or girlfriend takes a wealthy but unruly

man out of the abyss of ignorance and dis-trust of contemporary art, by explainingword by word (but without too much arro-gance) the sense of provocation wished forby Duchamp (urinal in the gallery) , Catte-lan (Pope hit by meteorite) and Manzoni(poop in the box). Or why MarinaAbramovi! has spent her time stripping theflesh off some bones at the Venice Biennale.

Or what is beautiful in Koons Kitsch.Covacich beautifully explains thirty art-ists starting from a paradigmatic work, anddoes so with clarity and without technicaljargon, as a good professor of art historywould (even though he is trained as a phi-losopher and is a professional writer). InCovacich s book, the husband is finally re-deemed by the wife, and eventually under-

stands. A happy ending, then. According tome, however, even if she wins almost all herbattles, Eliza loses the war and it s not herfault, but the object s. While the initiationtakes place, Covacich notes over and overagain that Pygmalion, as she explains the art,thinks about his technological gadgets, thatreally fascinate him. What if Pygmalion wasright? In fact, many of the recent works that

Eliza explains to him (from Viola Calle s,still in the pre-digital era, to Barney andHockney s, which concludes the review)hint precisely to those objects he longinglythinks of while she drags him into museums.One is tempted to think that those objects,

27Covacich 2011.

filling advertising and the web as well asPygmalion as Eliza s lives, do not emerge

by contrast, but by association. This bringsan afterthought: why come here to watchvideos and installations when all this isavailable elsewhere, in the form of technolo-gies and innovative objects of which theworks displayed here are often the verboseecho? So, while listening to Eliza s explana-tions, Pygmalion could bring out anotherbook: Parole chiave della nuova estetica

[Keywords of the new aesthetics], edited byRichard Fennel and Daniel Guastini.28 Inthis book there are 82 entries written by 38authors, and at least fifty of them concernprecisely the age of technology: the smart-phone, the camera, the flash memory and soon, while a significant minority regards thesenses, taste, and slow food: the profit, thepleasure, the practical side and the repressed

of the work of aura.Moral of the story: the work of aura does

not prevent the peaceful or even aestheticenjoyment of objects. The Transfiguration ofthe Commonplace29 that Arthur Danto at-taches to Duchamp and Warhol has a spe-cific background in Dutch interior painting,particularly Vermeer s, who successfullyengages in a transfiguration of the every-

day (which becomes acceptance of theeveryday in Edouard Vuillard). In fact, theDutch have taught us long before Pop Artthat there is always a potential artwork in theobject. Nevertheless, this comparison re-

28Finocchi, Guastini 2011.29Danto 1981.


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veals a deep affinity between the inhabitantsof seventeenth century Amsterdam and

those of twentieth century New Amsterdam:they share a deep bourgeois pride of posses-sion of properties. Now, the affinity betweenfurniture and museums, as well as betweenobject and artwork, is greater than one maythink. This is the teaching of Mario Praz sAn Illustrated history in Interior Design30: therepresentation of a chamber of the Prinz-Max-Palais in Dresden dates back to 1776,

one of the first pieces of evidence of a genrethat was extremely successful in the nine-teenth century, that of an interior portrayedby itself without human figures. This issimilar to the watercolour at the Malmaison,started in 1812 and completed twenty yearslater, representing a sitting room with a sofaand an abandoned cashmere shawl on it.From another watercolour made in 1807 it is

inferred that the shawl belongs to Josephine,Napoleon s first wife, who had left thatchair twenty years earlier. A slight shiverruns through these desert interiors perhapsthis is why in furniture catalogues the adver-tisers generally place happy people as well.In the room in which every living thing isabsent, there lies the secret of being, of whatwas there before our birth and will still be

there after our death.In the end, there is a relationship between

the object and the environment on which weshould reflect more. Goethe once wrote thatit is not necessary that the real should take

30Praz 1964.

form: it suffices for it to hover around.31This principle is indecipherable as per the

truth (what would an environmental truthbe?) but it fits perfectly to the museum. Art-ists argue that beauty is not the priority ofartworks. Thus, beauty migrates elsewhere,hovering in the environment, with a transi-tion from the ergonto theparergon, from thework of aura to its frame (already less au-ratic). Then, from the frame, the aestheticappeal may return to the fore, but not in the

works of aura: it re-emerges in the museumshop, where you can find objects that par-ticipate in the ritual and allow you to make itfit in your life in the form of bags, ties, pen-cils and stationery.

8. The Nude Readymade

he work of aura has accustomed us(and I say accustomed to be po-lite, because as we have seen, there

is also a bit of intimidation) to accepting thethesis that anything can be a work of art(while it is true that, rather, anything canbe a work of aura): buy a coffee-maker, ex-hibit it in a gallery entitling it Melancholyat dawn, and it will be a work of art. How-

ever (this, in my opinion, is the original ex-perience underlying Nespolo s works), ifyou take the same corkscrew and put it in adesign shop, saying it is a work of design,the users will not agree to consider it assuch, unless it actually works. Is it not

31Quoted in Heidegger 1969.

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strange? There seems to be a singular an-tithesis between the design object and the

ready-made.In the case of ready-made, in fact, theidea is that anything taken from a standard-ized production environment can be a workof art if it receives the blessing of the artworld. In the case of design there is rather asearch with the purpose of producing a goodobject, for which (unlike in the case of art)the consent of the critics and a gallery is not

enough. You have to deal with the needs offunctionality, technical reproducibility, in-dustrial feasibility and so forth. Design, un-like Great Conceptual Art, cannot afford theromanticism, the surplus of meaning andaesthetic indifference. No, it must retainsome classical balance between inside andoutside, as well as between form and func-tion. This highlights the unsaid of ready-

made, its dark side and its truth. As sug-gested by the example of the museum, thereis a relationship between the object and theenvironment. The urinal out of a museum,for example in a landfill, would not generateany kind of conflict which shows thatDuchamp was not fully sincere when he de-clared his indifference of retinal art . Onthe contrary, he was very sensitive to this

fact , but kept it to himself.Now let s come to the unique transfigu-

ration of the ready-made known as BrilloBox. It would be wrong to think that such athing as a Brillo Box resumes Duchamp surinal. Strictly speaking, the former hasnothing in common with the latter. First ofall, it is not a ready-made: it was manufac-tured, with no practical purpose, especially

for an exhibition, and inside there is no steelwool, because the box is much larger than

the original, and if it contained steel woolwould it weigh a ton. Just like the Piet byMichelangelo (and unlike Duchamp s urinalor bottle rack) the Brillo Boxwas manufac-tured to be an artwork. Far from being foundand exhibited with a nihilistic gesture, it isliterally (given its increased size) the magni-fication of aspects of our lives, the life ofmass society and advertising (with the

soups, the divas, the powerful television)that is to say, look at how beautiful yourworld is, look at that glow, look at the beau-tiful women, look at the powerful men.Warhol gives his works a strong aestheticdimension: he literally magnifies (i.e. makesbigger and more obvious) Campbell ssoups, Brillo Boxes and, of course, MarilynMonroe and Liz Taylor. He does so for a

simple and decisive reason, namely, thatthey are beautiful which , again, can not besaid of the urinal, or the bottle rack , nor ofDuchamp s marie. One might almost thinkthat is the only similarity between Duchampand Warhol consisted in having worked inNew York.

Brillo Box metaphorically refers to theready-made only because it reproduces

things that belong to the world of consumeritems. So, it makes aesthetically pleasingwhat was just bad or insignificant in the realready-made, that is, in Great ConceptualArt. More than a transfiguration of thecommonplace promoted to art, Brillo Boxappears as a secularization of the ready-made, which limits the harsh and ugly pro-vocations of Great Conceptual Art to the


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welcoming land of Pop. This process has thesame dynamics and the same motivations as

the relationship between haute couture andprt--porter: take a abstruse phenomenon,an intellectual game without any aestheticappeal and re-propose it in an infinitelymore attractive and sensual frame (sensualand attractive at least as the boxes). Very lit-tle remains of the original phenomenon: es-sentially nothing, because Warhol s are notreal ready-mades, no more than Lichten-

stein s are real comics. However, their col-ourful and ornamental pleasantness is enno-bled by a metaphorical call for the big game:the game of Great Conceptual Art.

Here is the secret that makes the work ofaura tolerable. The public bears vexations(in the sense in which, with lucid humour,Eric Satie s titled his piano piece to be per-formed eight-hundred times in a row Vexa-

tions) because beauty has taken refuge else-where, away from the intimidation of GreatConceptual Art and the indulgence ofKitsch-Camp-Pop. It is in the elegant wallsof the gallery, in the design of furniture, ho-tels and restaurants, and especially in theamount of wonderful items that are pro-duced industrially: things like the Olivettilettera 32, smartphones and tablets, Japanese

cars and markers, Moleskine diaries, jukeboxes and Mont Blanc pens. These thingsare beautiful, and of course they are: theirbeauty makes them likelier to be purchased.They have a culturally recognized aestheticdignity, so that at the MOMA and elsewherethey are exposed in the Design section.

But wasn t this the best kept secret ofready-mades, namely the fact that the object

has its own character, its own hiddenbeauty? In these objects, which are hastily

called minor art, there is now the basis forthe major art, for something that can over-come the era of Great Conceptual Art. Thisbeauty has always been there, waiting wher-ever these objects are: in attics, flea markets,or in those wonderful archives of objectsthat are hardware stores. There, betweennails, pliers, hammers, keys, screws andthousands of other objects classified in detail

(how would you find them otherwise?) thereis an inventory of worlds and therefore ofpossible stories, from which to draw hun-dreds of novels (such as the couple buyinghammer and nails to hang paintings in thenew house, where he or she returns a fewyears later to get the locks changed) and es-pecially of potential shapes whose aestheticresources are under the eyes of all, and in a

much less intimidating way than the worksof aura.

Let me make an easy prediction. It is hardto think that many of the works of the twen-tieth century will remain, the priority ofwhich was not beauty. Maybe a few will besaved for documentary and ethnographicreasons, or as a somehow sadistic curiosity,just as there are museums of torture or of the

Inquisition. But objects will certainly re-main. Designer ones, probably. But mostcertainly, more profoundly, objects toutcourt: they are the ones that remain by defi-nition. Duchamp thought he showed thatanything can be a work of art, but what hereally showed is (thankfully) somethingcompletely different. On the one hand, as wehave seen so far, he expressed a tautological


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argument: anything can be a work of aura, itsuffices that we come to an agreement as

with the emperor s new clothes. On theother hand, however, he brought attentionto a condition that was far from obvious andyet is crucial, as well as antithetical to thehyper-conceptualism of the work of aura:namely the fact that the work of art is aboveall a thing.

Many artists have followed Duchamp onthe first path, that is, on the track of the

work of aura, in a pursuit of gimmicks andwonders increasingly less surprising andmore repetitive, in which the basic rule is theidea worthy of the worst bureaucrat thata certificate is enough for a toothache to be-come a masterpiece. Far fewer have fol-lowed him (or rather, contradicted and per-fected him) on the second path, that is, onthe thesis that the artwork is first of all a

thing. But it is not too important, because inthis struggle of concepts the big winner isalways the object, with the Egyptian charmof its survival.

Bibliography

Ajani, G. M. Donati, A.

- 2011, I diritti dell arte contemporanea,Torino, Allemandi

Austin, J. L.- 1962, How To Do Things With Words,

Cambridge (MA), Harvard UniversityPress

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(ed.),Illuminations

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Judgement of Taste, Cambridge (MA),Harvard University Press.

Cleto, F. (a cura di)- 2008, Riga, numero monografico di

PopCamp, Marcos y Marcos, MilanoBernhard, T.

- 1985, Old Masters. A comedy, Chicago,Chicago University PressCabanne, P.- 1967,Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp,

Paris, BelfondClair, J.- 2011,L Hiver de la culture, Paris, Flam-

marionCovacich, M.

- 2011,L arte contemporanea spiegata a miomarito, Roma Bari, Laterza

Dal Lago, A., Giordano, S.- 2006,Mercanti d aura. Logiche dell arte

contemporanea, Bologna, il MulinoDanto, A.C.- 1981, The Transfiguration of the Common-

place. A Philosophy of Art, Cambridge(MA), Harvard University Press

Donati, A.- 2012,Law and Art. Diritto e arte contempo-

ranea, Milano,Giuffr 2012Dossi, C.- 1884, I mattoidi al primo concorso pel monu-

mento in Roma a Vittorio Emanuele II,Lampi di stampa, Milano, 2003

Eco, U.- 1979,Lector in fabula, Milano, Bompiani


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Ferraris, M.- 1997,Estetica razionale, Raffaello Cortina,

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2011)- 2007,La fidanzata automatica, Bompiani,Milano

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Finocchi, R., Guastini, D.2011, Parole chiave della nuova estetica,

Roma, Carocci

Fumaroli M.- 2009, Discours de rception de Jean Clair lAcadmie Franaise et rponse de MarcFumaroli, Paris, GallimardGadda, C.E.

- 1969,Acquainted with Grief, Brazilier, NewYork

Hegel, G.W.F.1975,Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, Ox-

ford, Clarendon PressHeidegger, M.- 1969,Art and space,

http://pdflibrary.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/art-and-space.pdf

- 2002, The Origin of the Work of Art inOff the Beaten Track, Cambridge, Cam-bridge University Press

Kant, I.

- 1961, Observations on the Feeling of theBeautiful and Sublime, Berkeley, Univer-sity of California Press

- 1951, Critique of Judgment, New York:Hafner Publishing

Marangoni, M.1933, Saper vedere, Roma, Tumminelli Edi-

toreNietzsche, F.

- Letters 1885-1889,nietzsche-source.org/#eKGWB/BVN-1885

(1886/1887/1888/1889)Paglia, C.,- 2012, Glittering Images: A Journey Through

Art from Egypt to Star Wars, New York,Pantheon Books

Praz, M.- 1964,An Illustrated History of Interior Deco-

ration from Pompeii to Art Bouveau, Lon-don, Thames and Hudson

Rosenkranz, J.K.F.- 1853,sthetik des Hlichen, Knigsberg,Borntrger

Scruton, R.- 2009,Beauty, Oxford, Oxford University

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Harman and Meillassouxs speculation is theeffort to overcome correlationism in order to

access the subject independent reality ofthings in themselves, beyond representation,beyond the way they are given within the re-lation with human subjects. This does notmean to go back to a pre-critical metaphysi-cal thinking, rather the project aims to de-velop a new metaphysics embracing the ra-tional anti-dogmatic achievements of criti-cism. In this paper I will outline the different

strategies proposed by the Goldsmithsworkshops participants , then I will offer anoverview of the more recent developmentsof Speculative realism by introducing morerecent tendencies like Object Oriented Ontol-ogyandAccelerationism.

2. Quentin Meil lassoux: After Fini-

tude

uentin Meillassouxs Aprs la fini-tude, translated in English by RayBrassier asAfter finitude3provoqued

the wave of anti-correlationist awarenessthat brought about the meeting of the Gold-smiths. The book presents a brilliant ration-alistic demonstration of the absolute contin-

gency of reality which is attained by over-coming correlationism from the inside. Con-tingency is assumed to be an absolute featureof any possible fact that can be affirmed in-dependently of experience. Moreover, it al-

3Q. Meillassoux, After Finitude. Essay on the neces-sity of contingency, Continuum, London 2008.

lows to dismiss the metaphysical belief in thenecessity of this worlds order and in God as

the reason for the world being like thisrather than otherwise. To reach this absoluteand subject independent truth about any vir-tually possible fact, Meillassoux starts ques-tioning correlationism and its anti-dogmaticachievements. Since correlationist philoso-phers have to admit that the correlationcould be destroyed and that there is no wayof demonstrating the necessity of a specific a

priori organization, Meillassoux claims thatthe correlation must be assumed as contin-gent. This implies that it is not possible toprove the necessity of the causal connectionthat we apply to link the impressions in or-der to predict future effects. Thus, from acorrelationist point of view, it is not possibleto prove the necessity of natural laws, likeHume already knew. The question, then,

becomes: why has nobody claimed that thelaws are contingent, although nobody suc-ceeded in demonstrating their necessity? It isbecause we experience the stability of thelaws of physics, because we see that the samecauses are regularly followed by the same ef-fects. Accordingly, we have the tendency tobelieve that laws cannot change and thatthere is reason making them to be thus

rather than otherwise. If laws were contin-gent, in fact, we would expect to see themchange frequently, thus the evidence of theirstability is assumed to prove their necessityand to support the idea of a transcendentreason for the order of the world. But, Meil-lassoux claims, there is a mistake in this rea-soning which consists in thinking that con-tingent laws must change frequently. Refer-

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ring to the set theory, in fact, he explainsthat the mistake derives from an erroneous

application of the probability calculus to anon-totalizable set, like the set of all theimaginable mathematical functions describ-ing possible laws of physics. Actually, weare allowed to apply probability only to to-talizable sets, like the set of the six sides of adice. If a dice fell always on the same of itssix sides, we are driven to think that there isa trick, a reason for the same number to be

drawn at every throw. But it is not possibleto calculate the probability of something in-cluded in a non-totalizable set, like the set ofthe rationally acceptable physical laws: weshould not be surprised if a hypothetical dicewith a non-totalizable number of faces fallsalways on the same side. In this way, the ob-served stability of laws does not excludetheir contingency: the fact that they do not

change frequently does not imply their ne-cessity. Thus Meillassoux can declare that,although we do not observe them changing,natural laws are contingent: the fact that wecannot prove their necessity is not due to thelimitation of our understanding regardingthe metaphysical reason for their stability,but to their absolute contingency, to the ac-tual absence of a reason for them to be in a

certain way or otherwise. Contingency be-ing the only rational necessity that we mustacknowledge to laws, we have to state thatthey can change at any time but also thatthey do not have to change. This means thatwe do not need a God to be the origin of theorder of the world because the world wemake experience of is just one of the virtu-ally infinite possible that can be actualized in

an absolutely contingent way: everythingcan happen at any time, even nothing. Since

the laws of this and all the other possibleworlds can be exactly mathematically for-malized, reality is absolutely contingent buttotally rational. This implies that we canmathematically describe all the virtually pos-sible facts even if nobody is there to perceivethem.

3. Iain Hamilton Grant: Philosophy

of Nature after Shell ing

ain Hamilton Grants subject independ-ent reality has almost nothing in com-mon with Meillassouxs, as every specu-

lative realist elaborated his anti-correlationiststrategy from a very different starting point.Meillassouxs references are Descartes,

Hume, Kant and Badiou, by contrast Grantswork is based on Shelling, Plato and Deleuzeand it aims to create a new realist philosophyof nature inspired by Idealism. In Philosophyof nature after Shelling4,Schelling is presentedas the philosopher who first understood na-ture as having its own history that extends fardeeper into the past than was ever before ac-knowledged, while even now producing

forms in excess of what human understandingmight make of them. Dispensing with thesharp separation between organic and inor-ganic, Schelling unveiled in nature a materialvitalism that rescues matter from the category

4 I.H.Grant, Philosophy of Nature after Shelling,London: Continuum 2008.

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of the inert and mechanical to which Kant andFichte had relegated it. For Grant, Ideas per-

tain to nature and must be considered as actu-alities rather than mental subjective principles:they are the natural tendencies driving theflux of becoming whose thought and subjectare nothing but products. Since there is onlyone process always becoming according toimmanent natures ideas, thinking must be ac-knowledged as a natural production takingpart into the production. That is the reason

why Deleuze is considered by Grant one ofthe few contemporary philosophers who de-veloped Shellings philosophy of nature. Toexplain natural production, Grant introducesa special sort of causality, that cannot beequated to a teleological one, nor to an effi-cient cause. The becoming of being, in fact,is the becoming that being undergoes pre-cisely because becoming is dependent on an

end that it cannot attain, this end is the Idea,whose function is similar to that of the attrac-tors of dynamical systems. Grants philoso-phy of nature is neither pulled by ends norpushed by beginnings, so that the becomingof being must be considered as the being of be-coming. Grants surprising move is that he notonly pits Schelling against both Kant and Ar-istotle, but he does so in the name of Plato.

His evidence is a commentary on Platos Ti-maeus written by a very young Schelling.Central to the text is the idea that the worldhad not only primal matter at its base, butmatter in movement, which indicates the exis-tence of a world soul. Indeed, the entire earthcan be understood as arising out of andthrough the force of its own inner magnetism.What Schelling offers, and what Grant devel-

ops, is not simply a speculative physics but aspecifically Platonicphysics that endeavors to

understand that which is darkest and most ob-scure: matter itself as the last instance of thereal. For Grant reality is nature as conditionfor production of everything, thought in-cluded, for this reason nature always exceedsour knowledge. The thinking subject is just aproduct of the nature and he is part of theprocess of becoming of everything, thus con-cepts are considered to be determined by na-

tures ideas rather that by subjective a-prioristructures.

4. Ray Brassier : Nihil Unbound

his inversion of the position of thetranscendental, that becomes thereals determinant for the concept, is

shared by Ray Brassiers transcendental real-ism that aims to explain how concepts differ-entiates from the real and how it is possible toknow the real despite its being the non-conceptualizable condition of conceptualiza-tion. In other words, the question is: how is itpossible to think what cannot be an object ofthought, the last instance of the real as nonobjectifiable condition of objectification?

How is it possible to think the immanent de-terminant of the correlation allowing the de-termination of objects in thought? As Brassierexplains in Nihil Unbound,5 the question canbe answered only by a radicalization of nihil-

5 R. Brassier, Unbound. Enlightenment and Extinc-tion, Palgrave Macmillan, London 2007.

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ism, which to him is the highest point attainedby the rationalistic project of Enlightenment.

Nihilism is not just a skeptical attitude to-ward values, but the idea that truth does notcorrespond to the meaning that humans pre-tend to find in the world. Nihilism leads to as-sume the indifference of the reality to anysubjective need and pushes reason to followits own interests. In another words, a con-tinuation must be given to nihilism in order toaccomplish the program of disenchantment

which is the authentic rational aim accompa-nying the understanding of the absolute inde-pendency of the real from any relation to hu-man subjects. That implies to reshape the im-age of man built by philosophy within theframe of a meaningful world. Thus, followingWilfrid Sellars, Brassier claims that philoso-phy should stop to contribute only to the con-struction of the manifest image of man to take

into account the scientific image, where hu-man cognition can be analyzed like an objectindependent of the pursuit of meaning.

Only this analysis would allow to under-stand how cognition actually works and howit is determined by the absolute indifference ofthe real. But what is the real as subject inde-pendent? To answer this question Brassierfollows Franois Laruelles Non-philosophy

which defines the real as what is situated out-side the circle of philosophical decision, thatestablishes the relation between subjectiveconditioning and conditioned objects. Thus,the real is the non-determined allowing everydetermination, the non-conceptualizable al-lowing any conceptualization. Since it is situ-ated beyond the circle of determination, thereal cannot be determined like a being by the

subject and it must be conceived as being-nothing. Being-nothing, as the last instance of

the real, is the zero degree of being whichdoes not correspond to a negative non-beingopposed to a positive being, but it is the im-manent condition of being from which anydetermined being differentiate, without theformer differentiates from the latter in retour.It is what Laruelle calls non-dialectical uni-lateral determination in the last instance.Then, thinking cannot objectify the real, so it

cannot actually know it, but it can recog-nize that objects in thought are effectuated inthe same way as objects differentiate from thereal as being-nothing. In other words,thought effectuates the objectification of ob-jects without differentiating from these ob-jects, it is like the zero degree of objectifica-tion of objects in thought.

Therefore, it is not possible to represent

the real by objectifying it, but it is possible tothink according to the real: that means to imi-tate it in effectuating determinations withoutdifferentiating from said determinations; itmeans to be the immanent non-determinedcondition of determination. Thus, thinkingcan grasp the real only thinking according toit, recognizing itself essentially as being-nothing, as the zero degree of being. Thus,

thinking according to the real consists in rec-ognizing that the will to know is actually awill to nothing, the will of equating the real asbeing-nothing: what Freud called Death drive.Thats why in Nihil unbound,Brassier claimsthat Thinking has interests that do not coin-cide with those of the living, indeed they can


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and have been pitted against the latter6 andthat Philosophers would do well to desist

from issuing any further injunctions about theneed to re-establish the meaningfulness of ex-istence, the purposefulness of life, or mend theshattered concord between man and nature.Philosophy should be more than a sop to thepathetic twinge of human self-esteem7. Be-cause he states that traditional projectionslooking for a meaningful interpretation of theworld should be dismissed as well as what Sel-

lars defined Folk Psychology, Brassier is anallied of eliminativism, a reductionist positionclaiming that the manifest image of man canbe explained analyzing the functioning of thebrain and that many complex effects can beaccounted for considering simpler and lowerlevels of material organization. In otherwords, cognition must be explained as deter-mined by the real in a non-dialectical way as

differentiating unilaterally from being-nothing.

5. Graham Harman : Guerri l la Meta-physics

haracterizing Brassiers speculativestrategy, eliminativism and reduc-

tionism are refused by GrahamHarman, whose Object Oriented Philosophy(OOP) affirms that no entity can be ex-plained by reducing it to its simplest partsbecause any object has a specific character

6Brassier, op. cit., p. XI.7Ibidem.

that can be understood only by consideringit as a special whole, as a specific being. In

Harmans ontology, which is populated onlyby objects and where everything is an ob-ject, any object has the same rights as anyother and the same degree of reality: anatom, a cat, a stone, a mailbox, a tree, SantaClaus, a cloud, 10 Euros and Mona Lisa. InHarmans ontology all the objects, inor-ganic, organic, big, small, visible, invisible,simple, composed, concrete, abstract, living

or dead, are on an equal footing. Not onlydoes Harman refuse the scientific idea thatobjects can be reduced to the simpler objectscomposing them, like it happens in physics,but he also refuses to consider objects asthey appear to human subjects, or as they aregiven within their relation to human sub-jects, like it happens in phenomenology.Realism, here, means to understand the

specific way of being of any objectindependently from its composition andfrom any relation that can be establishedwith human subjects and any other non-human object. From this point of view,Harman considers that the first objectoriented philosopher was Heidegger, as itwould be clear from his interpretation of thefamous tool analysis of Being and Time.

Despite the fact that the Germanphilosopher was mostly interested in theDaseins existential condition, he stated thatobjects are different from the relations theycan enter in: objects are in themselves whatwithdraw from all relations. This splitsbetween the object and its relations, or be-tween the object as it appears in any interac-tion (with humans and non humans) and the

object as it is in its secret inaccessible inti-

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m