“Liberty, O Liberty he seeks...” wrote Dante. And we are still on that road, in a system that, in the current era, is increasingly closing off, in rent-seeking, in inherited advantages, which seem like medieval privileges to me, real chains for every artistic manifestation, of thought, verbal, imaginary, sung; with everything becoming, copyright, authenticity rights, image rights; and everything is limited, regulated and even forbidden. Anyone who wants to put on an exhibition must pass an X-ray, of authentications, often given by “whomever God wishes, by any associations, to “volunteers”, to family members, who have no specific skills and confused ideas, but they apply them ruthlessly. The same can be said for catalogues which must pay “resale rights”, like the sale of works, which if applied to houses, land, cars, jewellery, would bring about the end of all forms of market, in the name of an arrogant primogeniture. Without anyone noticing (so to speak) we are moving towards the perfectionist curse of utopias, which there is no need to call dystopias, to understand that they represent the possible end of critical consciousness, of freedom of expression, of creating culture and the regression of brilliant and intelligent biographies to nervous and emotional biologisms, typical of mass subcultures, uselessly informative and distracting. The cases of rights all in “capital letters” and “haughty”, claimed without duties and rewards, also extend to historical and critical essays, which cannot use images, neither to comment on, nor to illustrate, nor to exemplify, without authorisation and without paying “rights”.
I’m not saying Orwell, with his mythical (but then not so mythical) 1984, is near, with its rationalism, devoid of feelings and emotions, but something acrid and smoky is already emerging on the horizon, which is neither humanism nor enlightenment. Scholars, critics, lecturers, researchers, and all possible and imaginable heretics, must be able to move freely, because in the era of uncertainty, where knowing that you don't know is true knowledge, boundaries and barriers must be broken if we don't want to rot in technicality and automatism; historians all the more so, and one cannot pay for everything, because this stunts civil society as a whole and the necessary freedom to speak and not speak is not safeguarded. If Cavalcaselle had had to pay for all the drawings he made, art history would not have been born, and the same applies to Morelli and Berenson. I was reading that some people don't like temporary exhibitions; I like them, because they are the most suitable means for broad and widespread knowledge. An agora for scholars.
KLESSIDRA | EDITED BY FRANCESCO GALLO MAZZEO
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