CONTRIBUTI / 19 / Francesco Lesce
The Museum of Ethics. Collective Memory and the End of Art
The essay aims to investigate in an ethical-aesthetic perspective the link between collective memory and the historicity of experience. The hypothesis is that museum represents the essential point of reference for the construction of a new memorial model which breaks the bond of mutual presupposition between identity and memory, to the advantage of a «reflective» type of relationship with tradition, alienating in many respects. The paradigmatic character of art museum will be particularly highlighted. Here the exposition and transmission of ancient artworks are based on the loss of the link with the spiritual life that had generated them. Indeed, this loss presupposes the separation between the work of art and the ethical sphere of which Hegel’s Aesthetics offered us a crucial reading key. In this horizon, if the philosopher Ernesto De Martino identified the characteristic sign of the contemporary crisis in the rift between memory, ethics and history, it is through Hegel’s analysis of the «past character» of classical art that it is possible to discern the spiritual genesis of this crisis. The extreme outcome of this nihilistic path is represented by the «angel of art», whose gaze – in the image conceived by Giorgio Agamben – points towards the present seeing as the past no longer belongs to him.
