Signata (Dec 2011)
Actualités esthétiques, questions sémiotiques. Quelques controverses autour du domaine de l’art
Abstract
Esthetics seems to mistrust semiotics contributions due to the centrality of perceptual relationships in esthetic experience, as well to the crucial role played by the institutions of the world of art. On the contrary, semiotics often prefers to free itself from evaluative perspectives and from ambitions to define, that concern art theory, in order to focus on textual analysis. Contemporary esthetics seems to privilege the dialogue with neurosciences while semiotics, on the contrary, seems to be the discipline more adverse against projects of naturalization that traverse social sciences. Nevertheless, esthetics and semiotics could find today new motivations for crossing their disciplinary destinies. This article aims at rebuilding the axis for potentially present-day debates around classic questions as interpretation, intentionality, esthetics categories, creativity, style and even ethic judgment of artworks. In order to have a useful dialogue, we need to free the ground of confrontation from the old dull images of the enemy and from the answers that reply only theoretical positions of the past. Disciplinary taboos have to be broken down but the contributions of the esthetical tradition and of the semiotic one cannot be forgotten, since they are still able of functioning as front-places in relation to the difficult mission of offering a characterization of the art domain. Semiotics constraints esthetics to defend theoretical positions that can find a methodological exploitation; esthetics imposes to semiotics a methodological confrontation with real productive and reception practices, and above all with perspectives of valorization of works that have always a rootedness in the form of life of subjects.If the article proceeds by thematic items, it aims to reveal a leading thread among these last and to progressively sort out in the constitution of a new explaining web of semiotic order among the big topoi of contemporary esthetics.
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