"The Work of Art in the Age of its Sanitized Fruition: Notes for a pandemic aesthetics"

For almost two years now the COVID-19 pandemic impacted in most different forms habits, models of organization, socio-political dynamics and economic assets. Arrangements and orders taking decades to reach stabilization have demonstrated an unsuspected precarity, demanding a profound reorganization of dynamics we had been long accustomed to. As the distant, sanitized character of interaction, transmission, fruition and creation processes has turned from a contingent measure into the unamenable norm of these days’ routine, every aspect of social interaction is changing accordingly. “Contact”, “contagion”, “proximity” and “distance” are not features of a transient period anymore: they are keywords of today’s experience. Indeed, while these concepts were already at stake in masscommunication and social media, it was not before nowadays that their precipitate on art forms could be taken into account more pristinely, for especially performative arts never had to amend their “familiar ground” in order to pursue their goals. Hence, how did artforms adjust themselves to wholly new forms of participation? What are we supposed to expect next? The main aim of this paper is to sketch out, relying on some classical loci of the history of Western aesthetics such as Plato, Aloïs Riegl, Walter Benjamin, this new, re-configured notion of aesthetic and artistic experience in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic.