In the beginning was the name. Not in a theological sense, but in a linguistic one. The act of naming a thing imposes upon it a boundary—the definition—and thus the limits of the name itself. Ti estì? Socrates asks: what is something, what is this thing? The paradigm of the Indo-European language system colonizes the object, which appears within the jurisdiction of the concept rather than in the materiality of its causality. Therefore, the question what is art? is a poorly formulated one. Before proposing a more appropriate question, it is necessary to reflect on certain entrenched cultural misconceptions.
Strictly speaking, even the expression history of art is misleading: we generally conceive of history according to the Greek concept of Kronos. The essence of Kronos is surpassing, rendering the past obsolete in terms of its relevance to the present. Consequently, a more appropriate alternative to history of art would be history of artistic phenomena or history of artworks, because art does not exist within the time of Kronos, but rather within what the Greeks called Aiòn—an eternal present.
The eternal present of art raises the question of its meaning and significance. In a chapter of his Philosophical Investigations titled Meaning in an Extralinguistic Sense, Ludwig Wittgenstein offers a way to frame the problem of art that bypasses the Socratic question of what is it?. He suggests that we conceive the meaning of art in terms of the quantity and quality of stories that a work generates—where quality refers to the multitude of emotions, reflections, reactions, identifications, imitations, imaginations, and so forth. Thus, in accordance with this perspective, the fundamental question about art does not concern its nature, but rather its potency—that is, its generative capacity for vital experiences.
If it is absurd to think that the meaning of Van Gogh’s painting The Chair lies in its referent—the depicted chair—one must conclude that its actual significance coincides with the sequence of stories it has elicited over time, on both an individual and collective level, whose effects persist and are renewed within the eternal present.
Starting from these simple yet profound reflections, Andrea Benetti’s work reveals with equal clarity the stakes of his artistic practice: the persistence of the primitive power of representation, echoed in the analogous experience of recording the forms of the modern environment, while preserving the original sense of wonder at their appearance. It is from the enduring presence of Aiòn in art that perspective both recedes and advances without temporal boundaries, within the pure arbitrariness of aesthetic decision.