What do art and the art system do in the face of the world's problems?

The art system is entrenched above ivory towers and artists are forced to produce harmless and reassuring interior furniture, what I called in 2009 evolved IKEA. There is now a fair a week and there are only “gathering” places, there are no longer places to “sow” intelligence, critical thinking, valuable attitudes from which works can then precipitate to market.

Palestine, Gaza, Elon Musk giving the Roman salute, war in Ukraine, Telemelons, violence against women, sanctity crisis, rising poverty, floods and climate change, global crisis in institutions and democracy, Cybersecurity problems, food insecurity, demographic pressures, human rights and discrimination, geopolitical conflict and instability, social and economic inequalities. The truth is that we are getting used to everything, and artists mirror the society in which they live. It did not happen all of a sudden: it takes time and perseverance to bring people to accept the absurd and unacceptable. History, just read even the history of the last century, reminds us that, one drop at a time, we fill a bucket that then overflows, without realizing that the faucet had been leaking for some time.

This article could not contain all the examples and episodes that come to mind, nor can we know what the first signs were. The fact is that we have become accustomed to it: accustomed to seeing men slitting children’s throats and carrying away terrified women on motorcycles, accustomed to accepting bombs on entire civilian neighborhoods, to witnessing the murder of a thousand innocents in order to target a perpetrator.

We have become accustomed to seeing on TV or on our cell phones, as we shoot pasta, boats full of people who, while trying to escape an impossible life, drown to death. We have become accustomed to it, but most of all we have accepted that a president of the nation that is supposed to be an example of democracy in the world, declares that he wants to invade Greenland as if he were playing Risk. He speaks of deportation with the nonchalance of one who knows that word will trigger applause, not insults.

We have become accustomed to just about everything: we justify everything, we are no longer indignant about anything. We allow the richest man in the world, in mondovision, to give the Roman salute without arresting him a minute later, because by now we are used to everything.

And what does art do? Nothing. Yet contemporary art could be, on the contrary, a gymnasium and a laboratory to train our ability to see and consequently to act. The only field that could effectively represent and resist our time. But it seems that even the art world has, in recent years, assimilated the worst things in the world, and has become akin to a regime worthy of the most terrible dictatorial dynamics, and where divergent thinking is marginalized and professionally done away with. Where artists and works are completely secondary to the domination of curators, who however create nothing, to galleries, real cultural and commercial concentration camps, to large international exhibitions, occupied by merely facade themes. The system and the market are important but must be regulated according to critical sense, ethics and intellectual honesty. If only contemporary art can be a gymnasium where new eyes can be trained and experimented with, politics as we know it no longer has credible space and room for maneuver, here is where the issue is absolutely political.

Artists must find courage and lucidity in facing our present, but without rhetoric and with courageous attitudes.

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