Preface

The theme of the essays collected here – Caring for the Future. The Social Value of Artistic Practices – was proposed before the great trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic. There is no doubt that this global trauma, which is affecting all the inhabitants of the planet in different ways, marks a break, not a parenthesis to be reabsorbed into “normality”. However, the pandemic has put under the magnifying glass problems that were already very much present in the global public debate before the pandemic manifested itself. The term “care”, proposed in the title of this collection, has become a fashionable term, which risks being emptied of meaning, as has already happened with another term that has become much overused, that of “sustainability”. However, care and sustainability are fundamental issues, which we cannot allow to be emptied, and which aesthetic-philosophical reflection must contribute to articulating and understanding