«La morte non richiede un giorno libero : dialettica della dissoluzione e nuove forme dell’avanguardia artistica : il caso Damien Hirst

The relationship between death and artistic creativity has always been an interesting and important point of view from which to understand the development of Western (but not only) art in its capacity to represent the spirit of the ages and of the history, the relationship between subject and object, between artist and reality around him. Within this perspective the German Romantic thought, which is at the beginning of the Western aesthetic modernity, has a particularly significant meaning: the concept of “negative” represents in the poetic of one of the most important exponents of this tradition, Friedrich Hölderlin, the essential dynamic of the thought, i.e. the tragic dialectic, the power of dissolution and of the death. The romantic philosophical tradition is, in the context of the artistic avant-garde of the early twentieth century, a moment of extraordinary and, often controversial, symbolic meaning. The concept of abstraction is the feature of the much-celebrated modern art revolution and in the development of the so called “post-auratic art” it is involved in a very intense dialogue with the life, with its dynamics and contradictions. The British artist Damien Hirst, one of the most celebrated in the contemporary art, relating to the theme of death and of flesh decay develops one of the most interesting and challenging phases of its production, in which the same desecration of the taboo of death becomes powerful communicative gesture and pure artistic transfiguration act.