Art and terrorism

Dostęp do publikacji jest możliwy w Archiwum UJ

The contemporary art seems to transform violence into kind of a critical gesture that engages aesthetic relations. In this text, we will try to explore - based on the example of the key representative of contemporary British art: Damien Hirst - how contemporary art re-assimilates this debate by forcing the viewer to a radical experience in which the shock, sensation becomes the moment of a certain critical intelligence. Confrontation with the work of art thus opens the space of a "productive paradox" in which the sensation becomes intelligence. Contemporary artists, must confront with this paradox of contemporary art. At the same time, it is more and more clearly visible that the category of violence gained a privileged place in contemporary aesthetics. The aestheticization of violence carried out mainly by the media is thus a challenge to the autonomy of art and the function of the work of art itself. In the presented work, we try to reconstruct the representation of violence in the mainstream art. We decided to do this by analyzing the works of the British artist Damien Hirst, representative of the movement referred to as Young British Artists. The choice of Hirst is motivated not only by the fact that at least once he publicly drew attention to the visual nature of terrorism, but also because of the way in which Hirst has transformed violence into the basic modus operandi of his work; his theory as well as artistic praxis.