The Tech no-aesthetics of Shock; Mario SironI and Italian Fascism

摘要

"An art of effects, nothing but effects, espressivo at any price": the propaganda art of the Italian painter Mario Sironi might well be seen to exemplify everything that Nietzsche deplored in his famous characterization of Wagner's musical dramas-their grandiloquence, their obsessively repeated leitmotifs, and their use of every available means to maximize the emotional impact of the work on the public. But if Sironi's lifelong passion for Wagner, first pointed out by Mario de Micheli in 1973, deserves the closest critical scrutiny, it is to Walter Benjamin's reflections on shock and the "destruction of experience" that one must turn to understand the working methods and the essential relevance of this unen-dearing but arguably most important Italian artist between the wars.