Il Discobolo e la Brillo Box

Abstract

The idea that the Avant-garde and Classicism are placed at the antipodes of art history is a commonly accepted opinion. However, a deeper analysis proves it to be inconsistent and superficial. The key features of the contemporary artwork are normally taken to be the “dogma of aesthetic indifference” – that is, the decision to abandon the canon of ideal beauty – and the centrality of the artwork’s conceptual meaning at the expense of form and technique. Yet, these categories turn out to be familiar even to the classical world – no stranger to the interest towards the bad and the grotesque – and to ancient art, which was radically conceptual (think of the pyramids or Stonehenge). So the classical approach reveals its closeness to the modern, and the latter – in its sacral seriality, in its transfiguration of the common object into art and in its consecration of the museum – reveals its closeness to Classicism. Classicism (it turns out) is very hard to be actually done away with.

Keywords

• avant-garde
• Classicism
• conceptual art