زیباشناسی فضای عمومی؛ هنر به مثابه ابزار

Today, the output of the arts outside of the aesthetics has become widespread and even globalized. The art “serves” in one way or another to make visible the urban and territorial development projects, and by involving artists in cultural features, it helps to mobilize attractor crowds and investors. But in return, the territory, the city, the public space are transformed by the arts, aestheticized in contact with public art, in situ art, contextual art, and through them, the user’s relation to public space is transformed and enriched with dimensions other than functional. The exchange between art and other domains may have an impact on the art, the one that Adorno was the first to identify as a possible "un-aestheticization of arts" phenomenon that occurs when they submit to the influence of an externality. They would lose their aesthetic dimension by losing their autonomy. Taking the first definition of aesthetics as a field devoted to the art and its theories, understanding the aestheticization of public space means focusing to the qualitative addition that art brings to public space through the careful treatment of the space, but also to consider the symbolic practices, including moves that reveal other dimensions of space more poetic, critical, ethical or political. Just as art can transform and produce new forms or new spatiality, reversibility transfers suggests that any area invested in the arts can be aestheticized from them. Lying to the public space, this principle of interaction generates new representations of the city and leads to more sensitive or emotional practices. It is difficult to separate today the temporary aestheticization of the city of a dual process affecting the urban space: the industrialization and commodification. Urban cultural events mobilizing the crowd fall indeed a cultural industrialization process of the visual arts that combines itself to the urban marketing process. The visual arts are now the subject of a lucrative market and artists are used to convey a message, to build a story which identifies itself as a public increasingly many. Whether urban or territorial, the aestheticization process of public space (whatever their temporality and scale) shows the stakes of what is at the heart of the overall aesthetic phenomenon: a political economy making use of the democratization culture, the show-up of the crowd and the public space. The passage of art of an essentially aesthetic role towards economic and political role makes visible and audible that Manfredo Tafuri described in 1979: "The city is regarded as a superstructure, and art is now responsible for giving a superstructural image of it. Pop Art, Op Art, analyzes on urban imageability, prospective aesthetics, towards the same goal: hide the contradictions of the contemporary city by their versatile resolution images; the exaltation of a figurative formal complexity (...) the recovery of the concept of art plays a specific function in the hedge".