Che cosa documenta un’opera d’arte?

Abstract

We normally suppose that any artwork “is about” something. The aim of this paper is to show that, even if we can often successfully treat artworks like (historical, sociological, biographical, economical, psychological…) documents, such a circumstance isn’t essential in order to make of an object (a building, a photo…) an artwork (nor it is, parenthetically, the fact that the object in question can be judged as a “beautiful” object, in any sense of this word). The only important circumstance is that an object is adequately documented to be an artwork.