European Museums: A Common Idiom for the Contemporary

Art is fashionable and is fashion, too. Over the last ten years, more than 250 museums and art centers have opened in Europe. Often set in costly and flashy buildings, these sites tell of overarching political, cultural, and urban ambitions. Art is being overexposed. It is often seen as a taumaturgic remedy vis-à-vis contemporary demoralization, as well as spur to economic recovery. Art is supposed to mend social illnesses and provide incentives to cognitive advancement. It is symbol and trait of an economy where wealth and beauty almost magically merge. At the same time, art is known extremely superficially. It is all too often treated as luxury and trophy to advance pitiless patterns of social competition and political dominance. But one should not be moralistic about this: the essential transformation of art into commodity is a problematic trait of modernity, that has been part of European society since the late 19th century. It is very important to investigate why such an ancient and risky expressive activity has undergone such a transformation. Whenever art mutates, this is a signal of far-reaching processes of social change. Social sciences can play an important role in acknowledging and conceptualizing this process, and in setting templates for art institutions and cultural policy. It is not a foregone conclusion, but a patient process of constructing a common research field. Engaging with art has been part of the intellectual history of economics, sociology and anthropology. At the same time, the complexity of the creative act and the structuring of dominant paradigms have led to a certain reductionism and consequent marginalization of the issue. This is the reason a major thread of debate has been started revolving around "Arts and social sciences" why at the Bocconi Art Science Knowledge (ASK) research center. It attracts geographers, urban planners and sociologists, economists, art historians and economic historians to the problem of finding a common ground around questions such as: how do arts change? What determines their transformation? What are the conditions for their development or decadence? A central point is to consider the difference of art with respect to other forms of production and exchange. This is a distinction that tends to be underplayed in social science, but which is strongly emphasized in critical studies. It's not about the subjectivity of perception. On the contrary, investigating what is specific about art could help art transcend subjectivity and overcome paradigmatic constraints separating the various social disciplines, so that a common language can be found to do research on the contemporary.