The (Old) Myth of Dematerialization and its Overestimation in Contemporary Arts

Dematerialization was pivotal for the spread of new artistic practices since the 60s and 70s as well as for the theoretical debate concerning the renewal of contemporary arts. What we usually call ‘dematerialization’ could be considered a long-standing myth invoked to highlight our role as producers of thought. This narrative is determined by an overestimation, that is, by what we could describe as a substitution of fetishes: the fetishized commodity (the reference to the material bodies of works of art and bul- wark of the modernist discourse on the arts) is replaced by the fetishized thought (the reference to the immaterial nature of the works and cornerstone of the contemporary discourse on the arts and their transformations today). In the critical discourse about the arts, every time the thesis of dematerialization is defended, this substitution takes place with the primary motive being the attempt to give importance not so much to what we do – since that would already imply a materialist inclination – but, above all, to what we think and say. In this essay, after having illustrated the assumptions and the theme of dematerialization, I evaluate the hypothesis of overestimation and some of its consequences on our ways to explain novelty in the arts.