An Immaterial Artwork: the Stylistics of Everyday Life and the Creative Waste

Résumé

Abstract: My presentation focuses on a matrix of literary-artistic creativity, namely the writer’s bohemia, a form of art and life (a live art, or an art as life) that is on the verge of extinction in today’s era of digital art and communication. The concept of creativity will be discussed in parallel with notions such as relational aesthetics (N. Bourriaud) and the aesthetics of everyday life, in a critical approach on the functionality and analytical boundaries of these terms. The bohemian ethos exposes a symptomatic self-exhaustion and a creative waste of the artist, all of these being situated at the antipode of creative efficacy or “accelerated” productivity. It is a way of aestheticizing everyday life, or of performing an artified kind of self within a community of shared aesthetic experiences. The manners of being that combine private lives with lived fictions amount to a process of co-fictionalization which generates a collective immaterial artwork.