“La morte non richiede un giorno libero”. Dialettica della dissoluzione e nuove forme dell’avanguardia artistica: il caso di 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 Western) art in its capacity to represent the spirit of the ages and of history, the relationship between subject and object, between artist and the reality around him. Within this perspective, German Romantic thought, which is at the beginning of Western aesthetic modernity, has a particularly significant meaning: in the poetics of one of the most important exponents of this tradition, Friedrich Hölderlin, the concept of “negative” represents the essential dynamic of thought, i.e. tragic dialectic, the power of dissolution and of death. In the context of the artistic avant-garde of the early twentieth century, the Romantic philosophical tradition is a moment of extraordinary and often controversial symbolic meaning. The concept of abstraction is the main 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 life, with its dynamics and contradictions. With regards to the theme of death and of flesh decay, the British artist Damien Hirst, one of the most celebrated in contemporary art, develops one of the most interesting and challenging phases of its production, in which the same desecration of the taboo of death becomes a powerful communicative gesture and a pure artistic transfiguration act