Contemporary Art and climate change: aesthetics toward sustainability

In the face of the climate crisis, sustainability has been challenged at multiple levels within the art field, from contemporary art to art education and arts management. In art institutions curators began to investigate how aesthetics could respond to the issue of sustainability, and more specifically to that of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The rising convergence of aesthetics and sustainability in the past ten years show this is a growing research field that saw responses from artists, art institutions, curators and ecomuseums protagonists. This chapter aims to investigate how contemporary art is used as a vehicle for sustainability in Italian ecomuseums, but also explores other European ecomuseum examples. The study is based on the ecomuseums’ approach to contemporary art –especially since the UN adoption of the 2030 SDGs agenda in 2016– which has shown two different ways of addressing the contemporary art aesthetic: 1) From a conceptual viewpoint, by focusing the artistic operation on different goals of the SDGs, in particular on climate change, responsible consumption, reduced inequality, life of land, diversity, peace and migration; and 2) From the aesthetic beauty of the art itself, as beauty impacts on the sense of a place, the participatory inventory of heritage, the improvement of suburbs, and the participation of citizens, especially in youth groups. This approach shows how beauty produces impacts external to the cultural institution and can lead to the achievement of integrated development on a local scale, that contributes to saving the planet on a global scale.