Contributions to an idea of destruction in Contemporary Artistic Culture

Abstract

What historical situations, thoughts, attitudes, will be at the genesis of a negative, pessimistic and reductive dimension of contemporary art? There may be multiple answers. We will try to present them in two main aspects: defining the philosophical thought of the nineteenth century, which contributed to the idea of a progressive overthrow of Western values, with the contributions of Hegel’s “death of art” and nihilism in Nietzsche’s thinking; and demonstrating an existential uneasiness in the twentieth century, with the modernist vanguards, subsidiaries of the two world wars and the Nazi holocaust, with the notions of dehumanization and decadence of the Western world, with Situationism and the Cold War, and, nowadays, with Postmodernity and the reality reduced to media assumptions.