I owe my friend, cultural expert Marcello Faletra, a careful reconsideration, which I find convincing, that was pointed out to me by the legendary and lucid Bruno Ceccobelli, regarding the banality, the cunning and manipulative stupidity – I add – of so much pseudo-art that chases and huddles together, with the frequency and speed of a train without brakes or timetables, like a continuous derailment, which has become “normal”. With the cover of criticism, which knows a hundred words (perhaps fewer) and uses them like this… shuffling them, so as to make varied what is not at all, of a game of images, of things, that have neither head nor tail and are nothing more than a re-grinding of the leavings of advertising and daily information, that which is destined to pulverise itself, at the very moment it manifests, without becoming true communication and culture. A representation of the flat part of alienated, reified society, of compulsive possession, of “fatuous” consumption, as my old professor Gino Raya used to say (whom I used to mock and who today seems to me to take on the contours of prophecy); to have and consume, without any quality, imploded, penetrated by the idols which, distilled, penetrate us, surround us, in an asphyxiating way, so much so as to create strong conditioning, dependence, artificiality disguised as naturalness: in a post-anthropology that is unavoidable for some, and for others not. Active, reactive intelligence must be opposed to this, capable of playing with complexity and not being played by it.
Fortunately, there is a significant, not marginal, portion of cultured individuals from thinking societies, artists, critics, and art lovers, who follow their ideals, their dreams, even their fantasies, and are not ensnared by the sordid (disguised as beautiful) sirens of popular success. They remain (so to speak) in their studies, saying and doing things that embody living thought. Because the imaginary is not merely image, trace, colour, immateriality, or metaphysicised materiality, but a transformation of temporality, of contemporaneity, making tradition out of innovation and experimentation, with quality and refinement, without being crushed by technique. The same can be said of exchange (you give something to me and I give something to you), which is the opposite of heartless and soulless commercialism. Yes and no! It can be said, if viewed with careful benevolence without accounting for the traps that can hide beneath its gilded carpets, which are fatal attractions for so many people focused on profit, hoarding, and investment, and not on pleasure and enjoyment. Those who wish to invest, as if in stocks or venture capital, should not think of art for profit; buy something else and leave the field to those who wish to surround themselves with sublime things, things that evoke suggestions, visions, mental things that invade the soul. There is a great struggle, not bloody, but profound, between the materialistic part of modernity and its enlightened part; it is an eternal dialectic between the physical and the metaphysical, which in microphysics is totally overcome by quantum mechanics, while in macrophysics it is still in force. I champion the human value of poetry, passion, and intelligence.
KLESSIDRA | EDITED BY FRANCESCO GALLO MAZZEO
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