Paradoxes of Mimesis and the Value of Display

The decisive practical question of contemporary aesthetic experience is the paradoxical relation between the growth of mimetic attitudes and the arise of increasing need of active relationships and creative distinctive practices. Aesthetic reflection upon such a question, together with contemporary aesthetic and artistic praxis can investigate it in two main directions. First, it can consider how the being of mimesis and the being of action – though well matched in inhabiting the domain of semblance – appear in a internally opposed and contradictory way. As a second direction a theory and a praxis of aesthetics can show how a trite ‘participatory value’ in contemporary art practices and interactive devices can be usefully replaced by a renewed display-value, focused in its inherent capacity to disclose new active (and engaged) ways of life and group-being.