Art and Aesthetics in the Paradigm of Communication

The present text aims at evoking some of the recent aesthetic theories, engaged in a reflection process upon the conjunctions between art and communication. The new aesthetics bring up the nature of the 'artistic' interest, but also the condition of the art 'work', as an answer to the proliferation of the agonic or catastrophic thesis announcing either the 'crisis or the 'death' of the classical art. Similar theories denounce the 'utopia' or even the 'tyranny' of communication, as pendant of deeply felt excesses, on the background of the transformation of the nowadays world in a media show - superficial and frivolous. The programmes of the "sociological art" (Herve Fischer, Fred Forest, Jean-Paul Thenot), of the, aesthetics of communication" (Fred Forest, Mario Costa) or of the "relational aesthetics" conceive the work of art as an unpredictable open structure, requesting the public's participation in interactive communication networks. The message and the relation replace the traditional artistic object; and this object dematerializes itself completely, becoming information disseminated in the rhizomatic, labyrinthine networks of the Internet - genuine on-line territory. The communicator artist is a creator of subversive, challenging messages, hostile both to the dominant ideologies and to the stereotypical reflexes of the society obsessed by the mirage of consumerism; his art becomes emission, reception and defalcation of messages.