Da estética da vida à estetização generalizada: uma introdução ao pensamento de Jean Galard

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to outline an introduction to the aesthetic thinking of Jean Galard, philosopher and art historian who taught Aesthetics in the Philosophy department of the University of São Paulo between 1968 and 1971, and who was for decades connected to France’s artistic institutional milieu, heaving created, in 1987, the Cultural Service of the Louvre Museum. To do so, we will make a synthetic journey through four different works by Galard that deal with the issue of the aestheticization of life, an issue that runs through all of his reflection and undergoes circumstantial transformations over the decades: those are the books Mort des Beaux-Arts (1971), La beauté du geste (1984) e La beauté à outrance (2012), and the article “L’art sans oeuvre” (2003). Through this movement, we intend to show how, under the same concept of “aestheticism”, Galard seeks to reject an ideal of distanced, regressive and abusive beauty, which “unrealizes” the real, either through the containment of the “unfolded” powers of art on the part of the system of Beaux-Arts, either through the empathic dismissal of the lived experience in the images of the media and advertising, at the same time that it seeks to consider the possibility of a disturbing power in certain moments of life, in certain gestures and events, which simultaneously contain the beautiful and the terrible.