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to designate both the performance of a barber, or a shipbuilder, and the work of a painter or poet. The classical aesthetics was not so anxious for innovation at any cost: on the contrary, it frequently appreciated as "beautiful" the good tokens of an everlasting type. Even in those cases in which modern sensitivity enjoys the "revolution" performed by a classical artist, his contemporaries enjoyed the opposite aspect of his work, that is, his respect for previous models. |
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This is the reason for which modern aesthetics was so severe apropos of the industrial-like products of the mass media. A popular song, a TV commercial, a comic strip, a detective novel, a western movie were seen as more or less successful tokens of a given model or type. As such, they were judged as pleasurable but nonartistic. Furthermore, this excess of pleasurability and repetition, and this lack of innovation, were felt to be a commercial trick (the product had to meet the expectations of its audience), not the provocative proposal of a new (and difficult to accept) world vision. The products of mass media were equated with the products of industry, insofar as they were produced in series, and the "serial" production was considered alien to the artistic invention. |
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I would like to consider now the case of a historical period (our own) when iteration and repetition seem to dominate the whole world of artistic creativity, and in which it is difficult to distinguish between the repetition of the media and the repetition of the so-called major arts. In this period one is facing the postmodern aesthetics, which is revisiting the very concepts of repetition and iteration with a different profile. Recently in Italy such a debate has flourished under the standard of a "new aesthetics of seriality" (sec Costa 1983; Russo 1984; Casetti 1984; and Calabrese 1987). I recommend that readers take, in this case, "seriality" as a very wide category or, if one wishes, as another term for repetitive art. |
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Seriality and repetition are largely inflated concepts. Both philosophy and art have accustomed us to some technical meanings of these terms that would do well to be eliminated. I shall not speak of repetition in the sense of Kierkegaard, nor of "répétition différente" in the sense of Deleuze. In the history of contemporary music, series and seriality have been understood in a sense more or less opposite to what we are discussing here. The dodecaphonic "series" is the opposite of the repetitive seriality typical of all the media, because there a given succession of twelve sounds is used once and only once, within a single composition. |
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If you open a current dictionary, you will find that to repeat means |
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