Anyone who has visited MoMA in New York, the Beaubourg in Paris or the Tate Gallery in London, to name just a few prestigious museums, may feel that something is missing among the many works on display. Some critics have drawn attention to the separation between spaces devoted to works from the late nineteenth century, the early twentieth century and the present day. They have clearly noticed that contemporary art has departed from tradition. We wonder why this separation exists: might displaying everything in the same museum space have exposed the emptiness of contemporary creations?
Who decided which artists deserved to be exhibited and represented, and according to what criteria? Why has painting, which has continued to exist throughout these years, been largely excluded from the spotlight?
Yet can we really blame them? Have conceptual art, Pop Art, Arte Povera, Minimalism, performance, installation art and the Transavantgarde not been the true protagonists of the postwar period, just as the historical avant-gardes were in the early twentieth century?
It is also true that many people working in the arts do not recognize these creations as artistic models. On the contrary, they see something distorted and misguided in them when compared with the past. Most of these creations present themselves as grandiose, pseudo-intellectual and paranoid philosophies taking on artistic forms.
We believe that this process of impoverishing art, which we experience as a loss of its soul, has its origins in a tendency that emerged in Western society at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Beginning perhaps with Picasso and continuing through Duchamp and the Dadaists, we suspect that some attitudes deliberately sought to destroy art by avoiding comparison with the past. Whether these were merely provocative gestures or were driven by the pursuit of prestige, fame, money and power is for future generations to judge. Beyond matters of sensibility, this phenomenon can only be assessed when critical studies examine the corrupting influence of the market on creative directions and on the decisions of museums and critics to elevate certain artists rather than others.
We suspect that the manipulation of information by centers of power, which intensified during the twentieth century, affected not only political, economic and social matters but cultural life as well. We distrust those presented to us as the great creative figures of modernity, because we believe that the spiritual values of art have been overshadowed by the corrupting pursuit of profit, prestige and power.
Art history is full of artists whose actions contradicted the depth of what they claimed to express. We are therefore not surprised that, over the last hundred years, a concept and practice of art rooted in intellectual dishonesty has gained ground and become dominant.
For us, then, it is no scandal that much twentieth-century art is a product consistent with a loss of meaning. We experience this loss of meaning in every sphere of social activity: politics, economics, science and education. We also experience it personally, through the steep erosion of rights, quality of life and education, the growing hostility of relationships between people, and the lack of communication between cultures and generations.
No scandal, then, but profound indignation at the way violence has spread through human actions, feelings and thoughts. We believe that understanding our history, engaging critically with the recent past and, above all, offering something different from what we criticize are the most appropriate ways to overcome this dark and barbaric moment.
The ESTETRA Institute proposes alternatives, in the hope that initiatives like ours will multiply and that art will once again play a central role and have genuine value in creating a nonviolent society without borders.
>>> Further Reading
Contemporary Art: Art Without a Soul?
Our Sense of Emptiness in the Face of Contemporary Art
Loss of the Soul: A Process Lasting Over 100 Years