Making Sense, Making Science

8The Roles of a Semiotics of the Arts: Working Hypotheses for Overcoming the Shortcomings of the Past

8.1. Some remedies for previous theoretical abuses

8.1.1 Partial approaches, all powerful

The study of works of art has historically unfolded all its complexity, which is paradoxically reflected in both the reductionism of approaches and the use of a thaumaturgic idealism. Indeed, on the one hand, a specific aspect of the work has been emphasized while forgetting the others: (1) its independent, even autotelic nature, homologated on the basis of the model of the allographic arts, and therefore of a notational score dissociated from the historical context of production; (2) its establishment on the basis of a technè and an executive performance, which links it indissolubly to a biography and a sociocultural environment; (3) its expressive capacity to shape what was not yet one on the cognitive and emotional level; this would guarantee art an unrivalled communicational potential.

On the other hand, a kind of Aufhebung (therefore conciliation and elevation) of its multiple and contradictory aspects was carried out in order to exalt alleged contents of truth: here is then the opening of the worlds capable of rooting values of the absolute, the guaranteed manifestation of beauty or harmony. To this can be added the most formal version of idealism, namely the institutional theory of art. Through the observation that an object’s access to artistic status is a performative act in ...