Lorenzo De Donato

(Tutor: Prof. Vinicio Busacchi – Università di Cagliari, Prof. Joahn Frederik Hartle, Akademie der bildenden Künste, Wien (Austria)

The research project “Teratologia, ovvero il potere del negativo nell’opera d’arte: indagini sulla rilevanza della teoria estetica di T. W. Adorno” aims to: (A) explore the possibility of updating Adorno’s critical-aesthetic teachings by analyzing developments within postmodern society through emerging forms of artistic expression and aesthetic conceptualization and the new dialectic currently established between art, aesthetics and society; (B) redefine the concept of art, taking into account the transformations of the last fifty years (since the publication of Adorno’s “Aesthetic Theory”) – this will involve examining new art forms and new modes of artistic production; (C) redefine the concept of aesthetics by incorporating the most current approaches and recent trends in the discipline; (D) reconceptualize the relationship between art and aesthetics, evaluating all possible connections and interrelations between the so-called new art forms and their interpretation by contemporary aesthetic philosophical currents; (E) investigate the conditions of possibility of the teratological, the anti-aesthetic and the formless as explanatory categories of the characteristics and interpretations that Adorno attributes to the work of art – this will involve examining the hypothesis that art no longer rejects traits of ugliness, deformity, asymmetry, disorder or disharmony, but rather tends to assimilate, incorporate and normalize them (not simply as representational content or mere figuration, but as intrinsic elements and techniques within the making of the work of art).