“The painters, the sculptors, that is, these exceptional people who do incredible things, what chance do they have of reaching people? Once they were known, the public knew poets and contemporary artists in the 1800s, and it was like this until more or less the 1970s. Then suddenly only television matters. This is a worrying world. "
Elio Germano
I was inspired by this reflection by Elio Germano, a well-known and talented Italian actor, who has distinguished himself more than others, as an Artist, to make people understand how Art, and more generally Italian culture, are going through an alarming period of drift. both for those who produce it and for those who can enjoy it with their senses.
For me it is of fundamental importance to arrive at expressing a founding concept: Art cannot be just a market.
An Art has its roots, its identities that distinguish it, it speaks to certain audiences and cannot have a global, stereotyped and equal language for everyone. When they made you believe that with globalization, art and culture would also globalize, they told you half the truth. Probably the truth lies in the possibility, unique today, of spreading the artist's message in a wider context than what could have been had up to twenty or thirty years ago, but this is currently true only in relation to the relationship of the works with market. For the rest, globalization has proceeded to a deliberate flattening of the artistic and cultural world in general. The work, with the enlargement of the public audience, also constantly loses its link with the culture that generated it, and as these bonds unravel, it also degenerates the cultural variety itself with the values and instances that these varieties have protected. and conveyed over the centuries, generating an unprecedented flattening. Art is victim of the market mechanism in spite of itself, that is, it is immersed in it, as the artist has the sacrosanct need to remain within an economic system like the one we have now, but it is not born as a language [1 ] originally to sell and support the artist and the seller, but rather to allow those who create to communicate. The gain was a consequence of the good work done and the intent that he achieved for himself in relation to the observer who created a "unique and unrepeatable" bond with the work, or according to the needs of the client who desired the work. I wonder: can this communication be sold? Is the message important in proportion to how much the patron / producer / gallery owner who spreads the work of art earns? Or to such an extent how much can the person who bought it strut just because it is "trendy" to own the work of a specific (and highly rated) artist, without perhaps even fully understanding its essence? I believe that this system has made us lose sight of the concept of Value as such, flattening the idea of the evolutionary and cultural value and the use value conveyed by the work, based on consideration of the exchange value alone. But how can an artist try to speak freely to his audience that is reflected in his creations, or narrate the vision of his client with words, music or painting, if he is constantly submerged during his creative and expressive process by the weight of a market of the art that transforms his works into commodities, and places him repeatedly in competition with other artists, who may also have similar styles, but who actually convey totally different messages, as different soul expressions?
In my opinion, on the contrary, it would be necessary to re-update and re-educate the concept of the artist and his work as tools for conveying a message, one's own or that of others, as a function of a service for oneself and for the community that has the tools to read that message. We need to re-educate young people in Art, who will be future artists and entrepreneurs, but also current artists and entrepreneurs, so that they can reacquire a system of reading the world in which the money earned from the exchange of a work is the consequence of a service of value, and not the ultimate goal.
It is necessary to rehabilitate the artist as a key figure that allows the projection of the essence of Man and his founding myths, and the financiers as those who invest not only in the object or in the performance as elements of sale and increase in earnings, but also in evolutionary well-being that this generates in humanity, otherwise we will remain bound to admire the alleged stereotyped art that sterile repeats itself speaking to an audience without ties to it (if not that of uncritical homologation to a group) and generating banal entertainment devoid of the slightest evolutionary function, just as we can see today, in which alleged "winning" schemes are repeated on a banal score and with few variations in which every mainstream "artist" seems a clone of the one next to him, and constantly repeats the the same propaganda messages desired by some speculator, certainly not illuminated by the brilliant light of art and culture, but by that green and red money and domain.
On the other hand, artists as such should evolve to overcome competitive methods to try to tell and tell about themselves in more collaborative and respectful ways of their own figure and their uniqueness, creating together with other "colleagues" a world where they can tell with their own language. authentic, and not forced, one's Soul and the common mythologies on which man is founded.
P.S. I will reserve one of the next articles on the refounding of modern mythology through art
[1] I love to define art as the language that allows the translation of the communicative instances of the Soul and that is expressed with the most disparate techniques, such as painting, writing, sculpture, acting, music, etc ...