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”. 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. 

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.

©World Of Art magazine