Aesthetic Consumptions and Anthropological Needs

By considering the crucial assumption that the modern art system constitutes as an autonomous realm, Jean-Pierre Cometti rightly noted that this claim has been nourishing a form of false consciousness, leading to the political and practical marginalization of the arts. In the meantime, this autonomist claim has made the arts almost completely subservient to market logic. Nevertheless, the field of artistic production strictu sensu is far from covering the whole present situation, which involves multiple varieties of aesthetic practices, generally disregarded by professional philosophers. A short survey of philosophical and sociological analyses shows that most approaches tend to interpret these phenomena – ranging from listening to rock music and watching TV series to decorating one's apartment – like the transfer of needs coming from different sources and to understand them as being always socially and culturally constructed. However, an analysis focusing on modes of fruition rather than on their objects reveals possible alternatives – from the envisaging of new uses and practices for mass art products to forms of cultural or social resistance. At a more basic level, the paper presents the thesis – inspired by John Dewey’s thought – that aesthetic needs are related to the human structural dependence on a natural, and naturally social, environment. In this perspective, forms of consumption do not always appear to be dissipative. Sometimes they can lead to an enhancement of life and to the shared enjoyment of our interactions with the different contexts we belong to, as well as to a fruitful questioning of the present customary division of life into strict compartments – and especially of those distinctions drawn between work, pleasure, politics and ethics on the one hand and 'mere' aesthetics on the other.