The Killing Machine. Huellas de la tecnología en el arte

Abstract

This paper reflects on art’s social effects and on the possibility to make up a theoretical discourse about them. Through a dialog with current artworks, we take into account the cognitive and ideological special status of the aesthetic object. Then we put to test the competence and the limits of a post-structuralist theory of art. Our thesis asserts that this theory must be complemented with a phenomenological theory of the aesthetic experience. One of the goals of the paper is to show how the categories of form –or mean– and content –narrative or represented– intertwine into the experience of the artwork, so that the first becomes the responsible of the semantic and ideological charge and the second, of the expressive means. These reflections, since they improve distinctions on the relations between experience, theory and cultural context, can bring something new to the epistemologist (from a heterodox perspective), as much as to the theorist and critic of art.