( I write this post after reading an article on Vargas Llosa and seeing a free exhibition at Palazzo Reale, in Milan.
The article was on the Corriere della Sera (April, 12) and the exhibition will be open until June, 24th 2012. )
The 2010 Nobel prize Vargas Llosa wrote a book, accusing the "entertainment civilization" of killing high culture and literature. In 2009 he expressed his disappointment for Damien Hirst shark, at the Biennale di Venezia. According to him the "light art" (nowadays winning and well payed) is more tolerable by the public, easier to be created, but definitely without beauty.
He said that the naive idea of transmitting as much culture as possible through schooling, is now destroying high culture. In his opinion, in fact, the only way to widely extend the knowledge is by lowing the general level. Light art for light hearts...
These thoughts have not encountered particularly oppositions, not even on the local newspapers. Quite strange, considering the issues and the strong stances.
The article ends with a quotation of the author that, after crying for the global bad condition of "high culture", ensures his audience that his book has been thought not for an elite, but for everybody; he tried to avoid the obscurantism typical of philosophy essays...
Leave aside the fact that, in the end, it seems he published a book with features similar to the ones he criticizes in others work -if it's not for the elite, then is for everybody, consequently resulting "not high culture". I think that the democratization of the knowledge could have even lowered the global level of the culture, but if we look at the best Italian art of the Medieval era, for example, that was made for the illiterates. The iconography was very simple, the subjects almost always the same... But the purpose was -in some way- noble, but it wasn't considered high culture.
Now we recognize extreme value to those painters that, at their times, were only working for the mass. This happens because we are casting on those art and painters OUR idea of high art, so linked with history and dramatically European.
What's wrong now, then? It is very difficult to say what's art and what's not. With the present spread of culture, particularly in the richest countries, art has lost the need to explain something. From the Nineteenth century, the artists started to express subjectiveness, anxieties about the world or just give their opinion on our society.
Comparing the art of the past (the one recognized as high) and the current one, accused to be light, I think that the difference is in the spasmodic present research of expressing ourselves. Even the more committed artists, trying to educate the visitors -we still have them- can results too difficult to understand, or just weird.
Then you always have the impostors, but this is another story.
Seeing the exhibit "Gli artisti Italiani della collezione Acacia" at Palazzo Reale in Milan leaves you a sense of "little". Little done, nothing special, plus a sense of bitterness. In this hard times, we desperately need a meaning in what we do and see. People are looking for quality, nobody can waste money nor time. We need beauty, but it's so difficult to find!
Among the presented works, the only pleasant one was by Mario Airo': "la' ci darem la mano", title that quotes Lorenzo Da Ponte's song for the Don Giovanni by Mozart. It's composed by two big glazed vases, containing one lily each. The flowers are encountering in the middle of the composition, guested in a little room where the music is the original one by Mozart/Da Ponte. In the whole, it's really a pleasure to see that, but one thing left me quite disappointed. That piece was specially made for this private institution and, as the curator explains in the video presentation, represents the happy union of the public institutions and the private ones, for a better fruition of art. Well, nothing wrong with that, but I think art deserves something more now. It seems quite a weak motivation, for a piece of beauty.
This exhibit left me unsatisfied. There is something nice, something funny, something strange, something concerned about the society (but which one? The one working hard and suffering, or the rich one that squanders?)...
But who's really the target of all this?
I've no answers to this, but I must look with favor to a thing: if we only stop at the aesthetics, at the surface of the things, the dialogue between the weird contemporary art here presented and the original baroque environment of the ten rooms is fantastic.
Bitter consolation!
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