ABSTRACT
Aesthetics as a philosophical discipline arose in the middle of the 18th century, when art came to be defined as an autonomous field of rules, social practices, and institutions (like museums). For that historical reason, aesthetics is not just “art theory,” as it articulates both more general and more particular issues, for instance: perception through the senses, the definition of beauty, judgment of taste, the truth content of an artwork and its relationship to (physical, psychological, economic etc.) reality, the questions of originality and newness; eventually, the definition and the very possibility of “art” itself, which becomes a serious matter in the course of the 20th century. Such different perspectives involve changing considerations about the very role of aesthetics itself, until its apparent diffraction in many art theories. Here, I will consider aesthetics as a reflexive activity more than a closed “discipline,” and I will follow the particular path of its encounter with the contemporary questioning of the “media.” Media aesthetics is the activity of thinking about our experience of contemporary art, questioning the borders between the notion of “medium” (a means for expression) and “media” (a means for communication), and between art techniques and cultural means.
