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Accepted Paper:

Anthropological specificities in the study of the aesthetics of an artistic object: the problem of movement  
Viviana Lebedinsky (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) Paris, France)

Paper short abstract:

What would the anthropological specificity be in the study of the aesthetics of an artistic object? We examine the insignia, later called emblem, of the General Federation of Italian Industry, an artistic object conceptualized as a sign of social relationships considering Alfred Gell’s proposals.

Paper long abstract:

To examine the anthropological specificity in the study of the aesthetics of an artistic object, we concentrate on some research in the General Federation of Italian Industry in Bologna, Milan and Rome (1996-1997), whose findings contributed to elaborate a personal doctorate thesis in social anthropology at l'EHESS, Paris, France (2002).

The artistic object focalized is the insignia, later called emblem, of the CONFINDUSTRIA, whose study led us to conceptualize it as a sign of social relationships.

The thesis findings -empirically increased until now- are related with the anthropological reflection in "Art and Agency" (1998) by Alfred Gell, who argues that even though "the decorated objects please people because they confer aesthetic pleasure", it cannot explain "the types of social relationships mediated by patterned artifacts".

Gell conceptualizes the essence of exchange (Marcel Mauss) "as a binding social force", whose "delay between transactions" if it is to endure, "should never result in perfect reciprocation" and formulates an analogical reasoning about the exchange relation in the cognitive processes regarding the patterns of decorated objects, which is our aim to deepen. In this sense, the artistic object is studied emphasizing the examination of movement in:

- the unity of the design, the order of its motif and patterns, detected by repetitions and symmetries of the motifs: "mathematical properties of forms";

- the relationship between figure and ground and among textures;

- the appearance of animation highlighting the visualization and perception agency and cognitive processes;

- the "enchantment forms" regarding "cognitive obstacle" and "social efficiency".

Panel P08
The aesthetics of craft: explorations in the anthropology of craft production
  Session 1