Page 6 - Art-In-Vogue

Contemporary thought is eclectic

Man is moving ever closer to a culture of becoming, and not of being. Art, in general,
thus becomes an evocation of other possible worlds, provided that it does not have history
at its complete disposal without having first to run through its spacio-temporal context. But
nowadays this does not happen. Now man is disappointed by art because he expects from it
the realisation of something that is other-than-himself. He expects new indications, while art
can only manage to pile dust on dust. The most tragic and painful aspect is that, in this culture
of becoming, man is evermore aware that he is a creature that can in no way go beyond itself.
Faced with the rapid-fire mutations of objective evidence, he is destabilised and incapable of
finding his centre within the real. The artist, the poet, incapable of taking charge of the real that
is incessantly eluding his grasp, substitutes it with a universe of signs, colours and words that
endlessly repeat the painful truth: “man is a creature that possesses no means with which to
move beyond itself. He is a prisoner of his own making, incapable of fighting himself”. This is
an implacable repetition that, however, remains immutable before the void of life; it continues
to repeat itself precisely in order to find an escape route, a solution to dramatic, anxiety-ridden
tension. Yet in our era, people often become artists to satisfy a need for identity; art is used to
affirm a depressing and lamentable individuality, and this is an agony we are all guilty of having
brought about. Art is art. Poetry is poetry. Writing is writing. And this is all.

The origins of this agony can be found in the figure of contemporary man himself. At
the end of the 20th century, in order to survive (in the existential sense) his de-centrality in
reference to reality, to the impossibility of affirming himself as a being in the world, man struts
forth as a grand actor representing himself, a manipulator of his own, and therefore others’,
image, a hoaxer who loves (even though in the end he is forced to do it) to continually represent
himself within different scenarios. A chameleon, a manqué protagonist who has lost all trace
of behavioural innocence, even though he fully intends not to forgo an attempt to retrieve an
improbable and indefinable naturalness of action and production: a standard-bearer, in other
words, of constant contradiction. This is a behavioural trait that is obviously induced and dictated