The Work of Art in the Age of «Artistic Capitalism»: Arguments in Favor of Transaesthetics

Abstract

This work presents a defense of transesthetics as a heuristic perspective against the limitations of any theoretical and/or methodological approach based on the art-life separation. On the basis of a brief historical contextualization of such separation, a diagnosis of the current sociocultural reality is presented through a number of examples showing the close connections established today between aesthetics and politics, and articulating a new production system called «artistic capitalism» by Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy. Jean Baudrillard’s concept of «transesthetics» is taken into account with its capacity to demistify a vision of contemporary art, thus allowing a displacement of the traditional interest in the art work and the artist in favor of a notion pointing to everyone’s responsibility towards the creation of the kind of society Friedrich Schiller advocated for.