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ANDREA
PAGNEZ
Anatomy
of an Artistic Spirit - Angel Orensanz |
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Today, to identify the
concept of “unity” in art is almost impossible. Actually, the concept of
unity has been progressively corrupted and broken down by a
multiplicity of languages, codes, aspects and
features completely detached from one each to other. Nowadays art seems
to be only a synonymous of a market that imposes those artists committed
to efficient organizations, prepared to invest money to promote and
publicize their own productions, whichever they maybe, without really
caring about the qualitative level or content they have. In such a
situation, it doesn’t matter anymore if an artist is capable of
substantiating his artworks with a high emotional/idealistic intensity.
Those who consider themselves as artists are a confused messy multitude
by now. Even if there is still someone among them who believes to
preserve a pureness and a creative honesty, sooner or later must
inevitably compromise and give into the art market rules to guarantee
himself - at least - a minimum of surviving.
More and more art has become a “job” incapable of communicating to
mankind. It is just a mere business between dealers and collectors: this
is sad, even if it seems inevitably necessary.
We are facing the emptiness of contents and meanings: already known
images and signs are constantly repeated and re-elaborated; copies
increase; means of merely mechanical reproduction are often over
spoiled; a real, proper exchange of ideas is practically extinguished.
If art has always been considered a looking glass of its own times and
society, it is now more than evident that today the obtained results are
just merely conventional.
A crowd of “clone”-artists are often due - if not obliged - to follow
what is up to date and what the art market requires, often without being
aware that is just the market itself the pathos killer. The foolishness
is that the intellectual and conceptual vision that has structured xx°
century art, if from one side has brought to the affirmation that
“everything can be art and everybody can be artists”, from the other
side has pointed out that art is an “objective nothing”.
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Art
no longer carries out the collective ideals as they have really
disappeared from the Western culture. Nowadays, human beings seem to be
united only in one thing: the need - or worse - the hunger for money,
giving - in this way - their contribution to nourish the perverse
tentacles of “Greed”.
It seems paradoxal, but in such a reality, the artist “produces” only
for himself, trying to carry out those individual and personal ideals
that day by day change, assuming different identities.
In this way art runs a risk of being like the most vulgar of the
mass-media (TV), useful only for those who makes it.
Incapable of really
turning to society, art is continuously determined by particular
virtuosities or trivial banalities. It has lost any form of sacredness
and civil values, assuming features more and more individualistic and
decorative. This is because “people continue not to ask what instead
they really should”, as it was already said by Engels.
The conciliation, the unitary ideals of synthesis of cultures that the
speeches upon art like untruly to purpose without ever knowing “how”,
are now replaced by absurd differentiations of genres and splitting of
specializations.
Actually to affirm the existence of an
“international-plural-multicultural art” is not sufficient to set
expensive itinerant exhibitions around the world or propagandize books,
movies, records with hammering advertising campaigns: it is the inner
message that must be capable of involving everybody, more or less
directly: instead, most of the times we are overwhelmed by gratuitous
and superfluous artworks as well as by literary, visual and musical
deliberate plundering.
So, what will remain of all this mess? Artworks nailed on some
collector’s house walls, or stocked in some dusty museum storage;
yellowed, moldy books stacked and stockpiled in some expensive domestic
library or fated to maceration; scratched CDs. |
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What is fundamentally wrong is that the artist requires money for
his own productions: art would not have to be paid, it would not
have to receive money in change of itself, art is pure giving.
Nevertheless, on the other hand, the artist is a human being that
needs to eat to survive.
Parodaxally, we have now to face the fact that the ideal has come to
an end: it has arrived to annihilate itself trying to affirm itself.
Consequently the concepts of “useless and futility” of the arts is
because everything can assume an artistic value, independent and
intrinsic, but without any criterion.
Everything can become an
artistic expression complete and accomplished in
itself: from the naturalistic and realistic motifs, to the
conceptual and symbological ones, as well as all the various and
different kinds of things and objects. If then today-art tries to
look back to its own past, it inevitably assumes a vaguely
academic-classicistic trend, sliding - and this is worse - towards
rhetorical imitations, conventional and artificial.
Therefore, in such a situation, it is not possible anymore to talk
about “growth and development” of the arts.
The words “growth” and “development” are by now annihilate for a
wild the speculation of genres and values. Nevertheless, a real
artist can’t and mustn’t give up. The all of the above is what he
must fight to save his gift and to continue to believe in his task.
In these strange, frantic days, more than ever, to conceive art is
an act of pure virility, an action of firmness, strength and
gentleness.
(to be continue)
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Andrea Pagnes
Andrea Pagnes is an
artist, writer, curator and senior editor for the international art
and culture magazine World of Art. He lives in Venice.
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