If contemporary art persists in arouing rejection and misunderstanding, it is, pleads J.-P. Cometti, due to an essentialist prejudice. In truth the work of art is not a closed object, calm block here below, but event and performance, always inscribed in an art world that makes it work.
Contemporary art seems in crisis: “ exposed to his discharges », A generator of quarrels that cleaves professional and general public, art is also an economic market whose escalation and cynicism, sometimes, annoy the good feelings of the defenders of its autonomy and exacerbate the most reactionary Poujadisms. Without denying it quite the observation, the words of Jean-Pierre Cometti is here, between ingenious deplorations and resigning cynisms, to defuse certain embarrassments and blockages which are at the source. It is also to formulate a conception of art which makes it possible to face all the realities and to promote in the matter a lucid and critical consciousness. In short, it is not so much the art that is in crisis, as one of its general conceptions which, as an encrusted that it is, can no longer describe it and do justice effectively. Some adjustments are therefore essential.
The editions Theoretical questionsand their philosophical collection Saggio Casino, offer a framework all the more relevant to this type of reflection that they intend to give way to theoretical experiments likely to think of poetic and artistic practices which emerge in the most contemporary way. Indeed if Jean-Pierre Cometti is in France one of the most eminent representatives of the analytical philosophy of art, one of the major promoters of American pragmatism (and in particular of Dewey) and a end commentator of Wittgenstein, Theoretical questions publish, with The strength of a misunderstandinga more personal work (where all the influences of Cometti are freely combined into an original thesis), less academic and scholastic (the test of the test is indeed adapted) and which, defended with as many consequences as method , comes to complete and radicalize a cycle of reflections started for several years. The master argument is simple: the matrix idea of an autonomy of art has been encrusted in our discourse and in our institutions of art, with all the power of an illusion ; In reverse, it is a question of defending a pragmatist aesthetic philosophy more interested in the contextual and heteronomous operations of art, than by qualifications of art in terms of essentialist properties which are generated by this reserved conception of the art.
A war machine against essentialism
The strength of a misunderstanding is first of all a war machine launched against essentialism. The different essays gathered in this volume make common front against all the speeches which tend to grant an exceptional status to art and to remove it from the ordinary course of life. If we have to find its origins go back to German romanticism and its defense of access to an absolute by this other language that would be art, it is clear that it found in the avant-garde of the beginning of XXe century of majority and important relays. One of the major drawbacks of these theses inherited from romanticism is a certain internalism, tendentiously tautological: art is art, and nothing can be said more. Should we still consent to immerse yourself in art idiisms to understand it and further neglect its pragmatic dimension ? It would be much more beneficial to reconnect art to ordinary experience and no longer elude the multiple reconfigurations that works of art continue to operate on it.
It goes through a strong statement: Art is without qualities. Works of art do not are not works of art, but work as works of art. If the work of art does not speak of specific language, it is because it is always part of a world of art which makes it work thus. Nelson Goodman’s formula, “ When is there art ? “(And not” What is art ? ) In this respect, constitutes a primordial milestone of Cometti’s demonstration: we cannot isolate the intrinsic properties of works of art outside the context which recognizes and makes them work as such ; The work of art is to be placed on the side of the event and performance, rather than that of the stable, isolated and closed object. However, this attention to the institutional methods of activating works of art does not automatically lead to subscribe to the famous “ Institutional theories of art “, That Arthur Danto or Georges Dickie defended. Without dwelling on their demonstrative refinements, the institutional theories of art argue that to understand a given work of art, it is necessary to cultivate a certain attention to the institutional context that it occupies (“ The world of art »). The main complaint that could be sent to them in the wake of Cometti would be to be too narrow and too nominalist (art is what is declared as such): by recognizing a primordial role in the institution of the ‘Art, to its actors and its power of approval, they renew this even that they try to dismiss, namely a separate conception of art. What is more, they neglect the very fact that art is constantly open and connected to a diversity of uses however irreducible to the only world of art. From there comes the approach of Cometti, known as “ external ” Or “ pragmatic », More sensitive to the practical and cognitive influence of art.
Aesthetic essentialism has generated a fetish -me -by -object mythology of a mythology of aesthetic property: a work of art should be reduced to a small bibelot perfectly reducible to unsolable characteristics in all circumstances. Nothing is probably less relevant, the bright boxes of Warhol or Fountain De Duchamp should help us understand it. It is then logical to focus a certain suspicion on the Kantian aesthetic judgment which tends to establish a face-to-face between a subject and an object all the more damaging as it tends to reify the properties of the work of Art: This would really have the properties attributed to it, even though the aesthetic adjectives used, empty of content, would be precisely for nothing. Because the Kantian subject finds himself very poor in evidence to defend his sensitive judgment other than arbitrarily. It is hard to imagine a world of art composed of Kantian subjects: it should be reduced to a juxtaposition of objective pretension judgments, however reclusive in their solipsism, and thus unable to get along. The alternative, very pragmatist, would be to prefer to see the work less as a opus that as a modus operandi : Like a contextually diluted process, constantly interacting with a community of judgments, assessments and uses. In a few fatal lines at the Kantian Doxa, Cometti invites both to mourn the artistic object (too narrow) to expand our understanding frames, beyond any privatization of the aesthetic experience.
A therapeutic and anthropological approach of art
The philosopher must mingle with what looks at him: far from a confusion of genres between philosophy of art and criticism, he does not have to legislate, nor to rule on what is artistic and what is Not, even less to interfere in the affairs of the actors of the art world. The positioning is resolutely non -normative and non -prescriptive. Its modesty is due to its descriptive and therapeutic ambition. Heir to analytical philosophy, he also borrows much from the Wittgensteinian gesture: the philosopher has a role to play, not in the discovery of a foundation of what art is, but in clarification about it of our concepts and their uses ; It comes back to him, and it is already a lot, to help us better describe art and our relationship to art. Revision downwards the ambitions of aesthetic philosophy, it will be said at first glance, but which presents in its minimalism the advantage of better focusing on questions where the philosopher is fundamentally required.
The economy of all ontology of art thus shifts aesthetic questioning towards an anthropological aim of art. The preface by Olivier Quintyn allows, among other things, to light what to be understood by that. The philosophical anthropology of art here promoted does not share anything with a social anthropology which strives to exhibit structures and classifications. There is anthropology in Cometti in a Wittgensteinian sense: it is not useful to transcend the immanent point of view of ordinary practices or to seek their hidden meaning, to understand them ; By describing art in a pragmatic way as a non -isolable language game, connected to other language games, and inscribed in life forms, we would give ourselves the means to simply slip into the uses of art for Better to seize (s).
From there comes methodologically a real invitation to redirect the field of aesthetics on the one hand and the field of human sciences on the other hand, against the tide of a reserved vision of aesthetic research: if for sure the anthropological inscription From legitimate art the multiple objectivations that history, sociology and anthropology can do with it, it is also and above all in the opposite sense, that this relationship must be considered. Art is an operator who teaches us to move the disciplinary lines and especially the lineaments of our ordinary experience.
A political statement of pragmatist inspiration undoubtedly works underground this book: against the autarky of artistic institutions and the disjunction of experts and the public, Cometti tries to hold the two ends of the chain, philosophy and the common sense of actors. And he succeeds: the conceptual adjustments to which he proceeds serve a flexible and operational vision of art, because he rid of bulky concepts. In this way, it contributes to resolutely reintroducing art in the city. The cost of such a reading is very thin with regard to the benefits that we withdraw.