by Jon Lackman | 2 April 2009 | Theory
In the Jan/Feb ‘09 Architectural Design, guest editor Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi writes on and interviews Yves Michaud:
In 2003, Yves Michaud wrote a book that met with considerable success in France. In L’art à l’état gazeux. Essai sur le triomphe de l’esthétique he claims that it is now almost impossible to identify a demaracation line between the examples of high art on display in museums and supported by large cultural institutions, and the various products with strong aesthetic impacts produced by advertising and fashion … Art leaves its defined domain and extends itself in a gaseous manner or like an aesthetic vapour that colours or tints other domains and other practices: fashion, design, politics, entrepreneurship, humanitarianism, the environment … “I don’t say that art is dead, but that a certain form of art, the modern form, is dead … fetishism of works, an avant-garde position of the artist, formal preoccupations in the artist or in the spectator, a great seriousness in the aesthetic attitude. All this has been replaced by other things: hedonism, spectacle, and emotions.”
