The artist Joseph Beuys defined art as the science of freedom [What is Art? J.Beuys. Clairview. 2007]. Since freedom is an essential matter for the human being, the artwork and the artistic actions are anthropological primary productions, actually, the underlying production for everything else. The Romantic program resounds in his words, especially, Schiller’s “Uber die Asthetische Erziehung des Menchen” (On the Aesthetic Education of Mankind”). Art is not only the science of freedom but the school o freedom, the place to learn and to practice freedom for oneself and for “the others”, the “I” and the “thou” among “the others”. Freedom is not to be understood in negative terms: we are not talking about freedom from the chains of necessity, the iron chain of “Agnanke”, the goddess “Necessity” of Ancient Times. We are talking about freedom in its positive unstoppable sense of “initial movement” both in the realms of active thinking and active feeling in relation to the developm...
On the symbolic constructions of human identity.