Lo Stato dell'Arte. Note a margine sulle arti e la comunicazione politica

The article analyzes three areas that rarely have crossed their path with the scholarship of political communication: contemporary art, architecture and comics. The aim is to understand how these areas can say something interesting about politics and political communication, and how they can be used as a means of political communication, with their unique codes and their specific expressive characteristics. The article starts from general considerations relating to each area, and eventually focuses on the analysis of some publications of the last decade (one for each of the artistic-expressive forms chosen) that have focused on the role played by art, architecture and comics in the understanding of political communication. What emerges is that the relationship between the arts and political communication shows the fulfillment of the process of both the spectacularization of politics and the politicization of the spectacle (in the forms of “pop politics”); besides, the field of the arts can say something about the contemporary forms of “anti-politics” and political satire.