La fragilità dell'oggetto estetico

The problematic notion of «aesthetic object» prevents from understanding the real nature of aesthetic dimension. Therefore, a survey of aesthetic relation as cognitive attitude must take the place of the ontology of aesthetic object. This upsetting of perspective has the merit of invalidating the essentialist strategy but it risks to disregard the objectual pole of the relation and to reduce the aesthetic to a psychological purely internal and subjective process or a symbolic-interpretative relation. When an object with economic, ritual, religious or instrumental purpose gets into an aesthetic relation, how does it work? Recently, socio-cultural and evolutionary anthropologists proposed interpretative categories like «agency» or «artification» that engage the question with a praxeological rather semantic approach. This paper aims to integrate this notions in a expressivist theory of aesthetic behavior. Starting from a description of the perception as an expressive activity and the aesthetic attitude as a dynamical interplay between emotion and cognition, the purpose is a theory of how an object works in an aesthetic mode, a theory that must be able to escape both the pansemiotism and the cognitivist and emotivist subjectivism