First and foremost, it should be underlined that the Ueberlieferung, the handing down,
does not issue only from the past, but from all the communities that have found a voice
in, to use Ricoeur’s expression, the conflict of interpretations in which we live. In this
sense, moreover, the legitimation of the project—and I use the term legitimation not only
in a critical sense, but also to mean that which can guide and orient the one who plans
and carries out the project—issues not from a strong metaphysical ‘foundation’, but from
the voices of different communities, speaking not only from the past, but from the present
too. At this point the difference emerges between the viewpoint that I am putting forward
and the criterion of the ‘beautiful’ work. The idea of an aesthetic value to the
architectonic work as such, which can coexist with the conception of planning as
contractual and mediatory, leads back to a choice, to a historically enrooted taste. In other
words, to construct a good building, one has to refer to a determinate community amongst
the multiplicity of communities that speak in our society, and one has to represent it in a
definite way, for example, by building a beautiful mosque in Rome, recalling the Arab
culture, whether the Arabs from Rome (of whom there are only a few), or the Arabs of
the Arab world (who are more numerous), etc. As a possible criterion, it derives from the
metaphysical aesthetic tradition of the West, and in particular from Hegel, yet is
applicable at the level of proliferation. In Hegel, the work of art represents absolute spirit
in the form of the historical spirit of a people, which is to say, of a historical community.
The work of art is classic—that is, valid when it is an accomplished expression of the
world-view of a community which recognizes itself in it. But would Hegel have said this
if he had lived in a world of proliferating communities? At bottom, Hegel identified the
most evolved human community with the community of nineteenth-century Europe. The
idea of a value, of a valid aesthetic linked to the complete representation of an historical
community in a true or accomplished fashion, necessarily implies the idea that this
historical community represents the highest point of evolutionary development. Hegel
would never have maintained that a work of art could be perfect if it represented, for
example, a bunch of criminals, in however accomplished a fashion it did so. He could not
say this because a bunch of criminals does not have sufficient inner freedom to give
themselves an accomplished representation. Hegel’s judgment on the symbolic art of the
Asiatic peoples reached the same diagnosis. The symbolic art of which Hegel speaks
precedes classic art and is imperfect insofar as spirit’s inner freedom has not reached a
degree such that it could achieve adequate expression in an image. This means that the
criterion of recognizing aesthetic value in the ability to represent perfectly a living
historical community necessarily implies a vision of history that comes back to
historicism, or if one prefers, to an evolutionary view of history. In the context of the
proliferation of communities, can we be satisfied with this criterion of representation
typical of a world-view that lays out the other world-views and considers them from an
external and privileged point of view? In my opinion, this has become problematic. I
believe, rather, that the criterion of aesthetic value, in this world of multiple models of
existence, cannot be legitimated except via the multiplicity, a multiplicity lived explicitly
as such, without any realist reservations. Nowadays, it could be said that what is kitsch is
precisely the work presented as classic, which naively readvances a ‘natural’ or objective
criterion; it has the look of certain very formal rules of dress that are only observed now
in marginal communities. Kitsch is nothing but that which has pretensions to classic
status in the context of a proliferation of voices and tastes. The problem, therefore, is one
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