Insolente belleza. Una propuesta de apreciación del arte contemporáneo

Abstract

López Raso, Pablo. Insolente belleza. Una propuesta de apreciación del arte contemporáneo. Dyckinson. Madrid, 2024. ISBN: 979-13-7006-038-1

In an information society that relies massively on images, we observe how, paradoxically, those created by contemporary artists generally elicit incomprehension or even rejection. A large portion of the public fails when attempting to interpret images encoded by an art of an experimental nature. But the vocation for images expressed by humankind throughout history invites us to consider that perhaps the problem lies not so much in the incomprehensibility of what is created as in the viewer's loss of capacity and interest in unraveling the mystery of what is represented.

Given this panorama, our objective is to stimulate the viewer's lost interest, but also to empower them to appreciate an art that is seemingly incomprehensible and yet offers a suggestive invitation: "Dare to play." Images appeal to us under different guises, exhibiting their different communicative dimensions (monumental, insolent, or domesticated), thus demonstrating that beauty—like being for Aristotle—manifests itself in diverse ways. The hermeneutics of the image we propose establishes a comparative appreciation that, by placing the contemporary in dialogue with the traditional, would demonstrate that beauty is not only felt, but also thought and meditated upon, beyond mere appearances.

In contrast to the traditional position of modern art, which considers the aesthetic experience as an end in itself, we propose that the images in which the being of beauty manifests itself awaken and develop in man the different dimensions that constitute him as such: intelligence, will and affectivity. The scientific essay we present here aims to demonstrate how beauty through art can transform our lives.

The methodology used relates the theory and history of contemporary art with those philosophical schools that have been rejected by certain modern intellectuals, closer to neo-Marxist than personalist postulates; more related to post-structuralism than to philosophical hermeneutics. Our model favours dialogue with all those currents of thought open to rediscovering the metaphysical in art, a Via Pulchritudinis understood as an aesthetic sensitisation that in times of secularisation facilitates the opening to the mystery of the sacred through beauty.

Insolent Beauty is not only a proposal for the appreciation of contemporary art, it aims to demonstrate that in reality the aesthetic experience operates as a hermeneutic of being in the person. It would therefore establish the transfiguring capacity of art to awaken in the spectator his or her facet as homo quarens, as a seeker who, through images, establishes profound contact with transcendental questions that appeal to him or her: the question of their own identity and that of others, of goodness and happiness, of the possibility of knowing the truth, and, in short, of the very meaning of life.