What 20th century? Giovanni Piana's phenomenological reflections on twentieth-century art, Translated by Arcangelo Tomasella

The scope and intensity of Giovanni Piana's philosophical reflections on the arts, and especially on the vicissitudes of twentieth-century art in the whole of his theoretical production are not limited to the project of delineating a philosophy of music that has effectively become, since the 1990s, the center of his theoretical interests. The art of the 20th century and its avant-gardes represented for Piana an argument full of suggestion and interest. The aim of the paper is to indicate the reason why in the course of his studies, Piana feels a growing need to discuss contemporary art. Reflecting on twentieth-century art not only means shedding light on the expressive values of the elemental forms of experience, but for Piana it also meant questioning the nexus that joins the material structure of sound and, in general, of the materials of the experience with the forms in which they are coded linguistically.