Friday, August 17, 2012

Anti-art

Among my friends I'm labeled as an anti-artist. That's because I have deep concern about the functionality of the things I do.  But, more than that, I have a deep concern about what is labeled as art in the last decades.
Every single thing can be art today, I mean, every act of expression can be labeled as art with some sort of rhetoric juggle. "Art" became a synonym of expression and creativity. There are no clear boundaries between what is and what is not art.
So far, so good. What bothers me is that I can't say if it looks more like a promising stem cell or a lethal cancerous cell.
What is called art today can't escape from the vicious circle that exists since the avant garde movements of the last century. The avant garde artists left little to break and the artists today are trapped, like post-apocalyptic survivors. They can't bring back the clear boundaries of art, and they seems stuck without know what to do next.
New technologies came and they were absorbed by the creative people. The tools changed, but there isn't a clear sense of critic awareness pervading what is proposed. The "techno-artists" today are so amazed with the new technologies that they seems to be not concerned with developing the artistic language.
In our time, every single artist is an autonomous art movement, like flying islands, with little connection between them.
Not every creative action is art: they're just creativity manifesting. It can happen when a company develops a revolutionary computer, or when pharmacists synthesizes a brand new drug that cures a disease. Art is more complex.

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