Andrea Barretta is an Italian art critic, curator and writer with over forty years of experience in the cultural and artistic world. His work embraces social issues, aesthetics and philosophy of art, and is the author of numerous essays, monographs and catalogs of exhibitions, some of which are requested by institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He has edited more than forty important exhibitions, including exhibitions of masters of the twentieth century such as Guttuso, Baj, Rotella, Fergola, Emblema and Warhol, and also organized collectives with works by Dalí and De Chirico, also about thirty personal exhibitions of contemporary artists. Barretta is also a journalist and has directed several cultural magazines, contributing to the Italian intellectual and artistic debate since the 1980s.
ZITA V.: In the deserted squares of De Chirico and in the dreamlike landscapes of Dalí, the space appears at the same time infinite and claustrophobic. How has your perception of the world change after immersed in those metaphysical voids?
A.B.: My perception has not changed because I am deeply pragmatic, and if anything I lose myself in the silence that emanates from the works of De Chirico and in the surreal of Dalí, congenial to admire the beauty, the one that arouses amazement and wonder, and that we must learn to regain beyond the current system of art of the great international market that has abandoned it, and which instead finds with pleasure in this newspaper. It is the sensitive experience of metaphysics, in the most authentic aspects of reality, according to a universal perspective in identifying the ultimate and absolute nature of reality beyond its relative determinations, and the surrealism of the other which goes beyond the perceived reality, often evoking images, atmospheres or situations that challenge logic and reason.It is the unconscious that freeing the creativity that for both artists lies in being as being, in an ontological going that from Aristotle with his metaphysics leads to the modern era with Giorgio De Chirico who is his father in art, together with Carlo Carrà and Giorgio Morandi, because every era generates one. In a search for pure concepts and in a study of ideas: for De Chirico everything seems stopped in a timeless moment, objects and spaces seem petrified; For Dalí, however, the sensitive world is subject to becoming, multiplicity and illusion, and both tell us that beauty does not have only one shape, but more than one.
ZITA V.: Many contemporary artists use random operations or algorithmic processes. Can you trace a line of descent – from the perspective grids of Piero della Francesca, passing through the mysterious geometry of De Chirico, up to the contemporary art based on the code – which shows how the mathematical order becomes a philosophical position?
A.B.: With this important question, we enter two worlds of art that coexist, but far away from each other. The first is what he quotes that by stating that many contemporary artists use random operations or algorithmic processes, and we are in that artist of stars artists declaimed by power and press, those who sell to millions of dollars and are in the conceptual Duchamp that still evokes concepts such as the Ready-Made and the provocation, in a doing that should be dead and buried since already widely explored in the first half of the twentieth century: But they copy and propose without any new idea. The second is that of a world of true, right art, with many artists who deserve success because they know how to use brush and chisel, but who unfortunately cannot emerge because that system excludes them and keeps them on the margins. An art that symbolizes the provisional in the replicable and reproduction, but while the first term determines a technical duplication that does without manual skills, the second indicates imitation, and those algorithmic processes are deleterious for art with examples that we already have of pseudo artists who use artificial intelligence and that lead to propose a sad future for art. Themes that I analyzed in two of my books: “Years of art”, in indicating aesthetics and canons of the twentieth century, and “the art supported by the word”, my last essay in which I explain why of lost beauty and I define the “non -art” and “anti art” which is a disaster for humanity. In fact, the prospective grids of Piero della Francesca are no longer considered in contemporary art, nor the geometries of De Chirico, even if objectively it should be said that art goes on and experiments, but it is not possible to trace a descent because that first world of art is still in the Dada, composed of epigones that make the verse to the iron (Cadeau) of Man Ray or the brillo boxes translated by Warhol in works. Reason why we are faced with conservatives disguised as riots of an already made revolution, so much so that it seems to see retrospectives, always to be overflowing for others. Thus aesthetics is no longer a philosophical or artistic position, and already the philosopher Walter Benjamin had moved perplexity on the technological reproduction of the reality that would have made the dimension of visual art disappear, so as to calculate “an autonomous place between the various artistic processes” for the (re) technical production. So Jean Baudrillard in claiming that the truth was killed. And we are now there. Also for sculpture with emerging 3D technologies and 3D printing that offer the possibility of creating sculptures.
ZITA V.: When crossing an imposing installation or compares with a minimalist sculpture, what somatic signs do they point out that art has pierced your personal horizon?
A.B.: The transition from beautiful things to the beautiful figuration of things is a sort of trace of signs for the transmission of purposes that are no longer manageable in one verification, with the one that I highlight to start from the individuality that exceeds the generality. In the suitability of judging what everyone maintains in the vision of aesthetics, “to decide whether it is beautiful or not”, enuclea Kant, must be compared to the subject and his feeling of pleasure, but the judgment of taste is not equal to knowledge, therefore it is not logical, but once again aesthetic: meaning with this term that whose principle of determination can only be subjective for the mass, but objective for the art critic. Here, therefore, that it will be necessary to ask why a large part of contemporary art prefers the large format, or rather the reference to devices of a flashy production phase, such as to point out that what is great is worthy of admiration and therefore in itself positive. So, when through an imposing installation I have only one signal: that of finding myself in a sort of amusement park where many are around to make selfies and nothing more, for fun. The current installations are not art, but scenography, which is a completely different thing, to be called if you want scenographic art, but not visual art, in occupying space to impose presences in exercises that should fascinate in an enveloping yield, as for a scenography precisely, to raise an expansion in the immense in quantity and not by quality. For sculptures, however, I wonder if anything: do they still exist? No longer in marble or bronze merger, but other themes and factors, in attempts with various materials such as the resin produced by others, by industry, that is, a farce in which the art object is dematerialized to convert it and reduce it to a marketable idea.
ZITA V.: Rethinking to the exhibitions of the Masters of the twentieth century that you have edited, which single work or moment has crystallized for you the precise turning point in which the illusion gives way to the radical self -awareness?
A.B.: The masters of the twentieth century for the exhibitions I have taken care of have always been, and everyone, a reason for continuous discoveries and awareness of knowing how to make art. The twentieth century has revealed all its secrets, in art, literature and history of humanity also in its catastrophe in terrible and overhaul events, but contemporary art does not reveal something plausible, so much so that it can enter a historical becoming, because it has no more currents, movements or posters as for modern art, because it has nothing new to say, and in the two thousand it has brought to extreme deductions as Historic. There is everything and the most of everything, there is the questionable. And in this surreal precariousness the alteration is activated, adapting to fashions the set of a consent made of indeterminate of the art itself which discounts an existential condition. The first artistic movements of modern art have marked the refusal of the past and implemented an opening to the experimentation with elements that have left the quidity, that is, that “quid” to weld and fix the essential character, which makes it a thing that it is, in the rooting beyond the painting, while between the 1950s and sixties of the twentieth century the arts have changed. Several trends of the early twentieth century, which land in the seventies with other changes up to the current degradation. Still, again, that I do not refer to the many artists who work with dedication and produce a sincere art, my applause goes to them and deserve more in being recognized. I am referring to what we see in the great international art market between millions of euros and dollars, to those who offer ideas rather than works of art; to those who still think about provoking today; to those who copy what already lived in the past; To those who pose in our eyes dark things and in some cases obscene. A lack of cohesion has been configured. And, once again, the direction of art takes other paths for a new contemporaneity, in an artistic phase that considers the “substantia” an operation no longer to be reconciled with traditional ways. In summary, the emergence of intentions without the important question that has pervaded the 1950s: “What is the social role of the artist and artist?”, While there is only evidence that led to the restlessness in painting and sculpture.
ZITA V.: DE Chirico once said: “Painting is a journey of discovery.” What unexplored intellectual or emotional territories did you discover by worlding your exhibitions and how these discoveries have influenced your approach to living art today?
A.B.: There is the urgency of critical contributions that indicate a path in aesthetics that is not a prejudice, but a possibility still indispensable, so much so that the exhibitions I curate have aimed to find what it can satisfy in art that invites to reflection to denote creativity. I opened a horizon to contemporary art in heterogeneous artistic paths, in the exercise of languages to build my own critical syntax for exhibitions or catalogs. And the dynamic lies precisely in the different experiences that I have conveyed for each artist with a dedicated space, with chosen works, and which I presented as a documentation for an art still possible in a contemporaneity aimed at far from another. A common denominator, for example, is the color. What – said Matisse – “perhaps even more than the drawing, is a liberation”, and how to blame him in a specific prevalence in addition to his value in providing imprints that lead in a relationship with incorporeality and existence itself, developed in an evolution in the different areas. Just as the symbolic meanings of semblance are recognized with respect to the configuration in the expressiveness that represents the intuition and curiosity, the archetype of art that has been perpetuated for centuries and that we look at the moments of a sincere art, on a path that is not only memory, but an extraordinary path in beauty that helps to live better. Because art, it is good to repeat it, is gratuity, and there is no need for a flash of genius to interrogate it. Intellectual and emotional territories between different observations of tangibility, but with styles attributable to demonstrate an aggregating capacity, up to evoking a highly suggestive communicative force, on a path that, although going from the figurative to abstraction and the information, creates a relationship by means of the form that on the palette finds its glue, in the chromatic and compositional balance that is made to the surprise of revealing.
ZITA V.: Contemporary art may seem to be drifting in post-concentration irony. Do you detect an underlying “equation of meaning” that wanders the irony to reconnect us with the sacred, the poetic or the intrinsic human?
A.B.: Contemporary art cannot “seem” drifting in post-contemporary irony, because it is already, for the reasons previously said. Because the impression is that we find ourselves in the race and we do not know where we are going, and the condition of contemporary man is similar to that of a traveler on a train that goes to three hundred kilometers the hour and realizes that there is no driver. In fact, the influence of globalization in an anthropology on world parameters extends not only to economic activity, but also to artistic life, and has not always achieved positive results for the development of the company itself. This is terribly limiting in understanding that art is not distance, but a way of feeling the breath of the universe. A fact that divides a lot and has created divergences, in a methodology that does not correspond to canons and stylistic attributions. However, this art could not be the drop that overflows the vase, an extreme resistance tool, a remedy in order not to lose ourselves in what is behind the demystification mainly of theorists who hold the fate of culture and block every necessary action. And many do not know the work of the artist who is total, and for this I always write widely, in bringing their creative acts back to a healthy ambition unlike any other work, since it is not the only economic satisfaction to seek, but the recognition in the attitude that is the result of originality. First of all, the inspiration, the exultation of exciting that enchants and that leads to merge with the absolute. Decisive would be a competitive line that has that recognizable component within new meanings, resolved in the definition of the contours that for now they cannot tell the world of art in difficulty, because this distorted beauty has lost value in thinking of being everywhere, while it is very rare. Many artists have the strength to try, like those I have presented, not with swerring or recklessness, but with the firmness to get out of the dialectic of immobility, to open an imaginative destination, because art in all its form can provide the devices necessary for the beauty that few transmit, many others seek and others do not know what it is.
ZITA V.: In sorting an exhibition, you are both curator and philosopher. How do you manage the tension between the curatorship and let the works of art “speak”, especially when you are dealing with giants of modern art?
A.B.: Joice urged to “seek Adagio, humbly, … to return to squeezing from the brute land or from what he generates, from the sounds, for shapes and colors, which are the doors of the prison of our soul, an image of that beauty that we have come to understand” and claimed that “this is art”. It is the art that “needs either of solitude or misery, or passion”, as “a rock flower that requires the harsh wind and rough terrain”, specified Alexandre Dumas father, and this is the first -rate beauty. In short, I try to ensure that nobody tells us what art is, and what is it for, because we already know: it is the one that resides within us and speaks to us. It is this discernment that should give a prototype of perfection that appears in the thrill that is felt in front of the real masterpiece, the true work of art that is, said Hegel, “essentially a question, an apostrophe, aimed at a heart that answers you, an appeal addressed to the soul and the spirit”.
ZITA V.: Time is distorted differently in an exhibition: the seconds stretch until they become eternal. Have you ever changed the lighting, acoustic or the rhythm of an entire gallery why did the “perceived time” not aligned himself philosophically with the temporal fracture desired by the artist?
A.B.: Yes, I did it. How to set up an exhibition is very important in the dialogue between work and work, however precisely for this reason I always chose by going to the studies of the artists, having well in mind space and dimensions which then must be one and create harmony. It takes the cognitive capacity – but also spontaneous and emotional – to create an event, and therefore talent and inventiveness to support the artist. It means embracing the curiosity and audacity to experience new paths: “Creativity is the intelligence that has fun” said Albert Einstein. There is no univocal notion, but wanting to try to define it, we could describe it as the ability to diverge from pre -established patterns to reveal the unexpected, even capable of surprising us, in inspiration and in the realization of new possibilities.
ZITA V.: From your point of view, what is the role of mathematical harmony – spirals of fibonacci, modular arithmetic, platonic solids – in awakening the trust of contemporary spectators in beauty as a universal constant?
A,B.: The golden section is considered a principle of universal harmony, present in nature, in art and in architecture, and thus the spiral of fibonacci, closely linked to each other, to create harmonious and aesthetically pleasing compositions, following the golden relationships. Equally the mathematical-geometric component, already evident in ancient art, which in its different expressive forms, from sculpture to architecture, was and should still be constantly looking for an objective canon, based on a precise system of measures and proportions designed to obtain a balance effect, see for example the great wave of Kanagawa. Mathematics and art seem two distant worlds, but the logic of one allows you to create the creativity of the other. Artistic movements such as Picasso and Braque’s cubism or Kandinsky’s abstractionism incorporate geometry into their paintings to break down, give dynamism and freedom to the artist and some painters, such as Escher, use complex mathematic calculations to design paradoxical paintings. Then, although distracted by aspects of memory or iconographic introspections, it would be necessary to get closer to these data and use them to understand the current cannibalism of art that binds and marks, and designates the artifact as aesthetic object that in and for itself does not give any emotional involvement, since that contemporary art has isolated to be celebrated as a sublime and therefore affects the usual few, spectators. Beauty – forms Gratiae writes Petrarca – is subjective for the emotion it expresses and in the same way objective for having changed its “forms of grace” over the centuries compared to different visions and from place to place, from the square to the palace, from country to city, capable of relating to what is around it and art in grasping the visible in the invisible in renewing the idea of life, of the “beauty” that also means in Greek – Kalòs – “Good”. The name for beauty, in its thousand shades, is what comes from the medieval Latin Bonicellum (beautiful, small good), from the diminutive of Bonum, as if to indicate a “good” that becomes small in the face of the revelation of true beauty.
ZITA V.: For this reason, it affirms that the remarking of art, the real one, the one inherent in living it does not give the help necessary to endure the weight of a contemporaneity that pays the pledge to innovation with depression?
A.B.: It is so. If we do not give ourselves a shock, we will all be in I do not see, I do not feel, I do not speak … in forgetting that art is quite the opposite, not to recognize it for what it should be, but in merchandise, in purchases in places symbol of the earnings, where many artists preach well but scratch badly in populist sermons against everything and the opposite of everything, while they are part of a medium-high bourgeoisie and their works do not have the works. Not rebellious but proletarian in luxury, in the hypocrisy of proclaiming flogners of social imbalances, covered in suggesting that this pseudo junk art is inevitable and even acceptable. In incarnate what was stated by the Vespasian emperor: “Pecunia Non Olet”. For this reason, more than caustic I am sarcastic towards those who dishonor art and I compact them, because if art is the epiphany of their irrational, unfortunately, they will never get there, and they will never perish to a barrier to implement a change, and will remain waiters of the current financial system that is made, between museums and famous artists, all in a market that does not immortalize what is not there.
ZITA V.: Having witnessed the evolution of art from analogue to digital, how do you think that the virtual world has challenged – or deepened – our ability to live sculpture, painting or installation as lived events?
A.B.: It is another paradox. In fact, it is that art is itself centuries -old, dropped in a virtual contemporaneity, in a dimension achieved in the transitory, beyond the science of what is appropriate and right, in a change in the categorical application of the rules of conduct regardless of the consequences, often reinforced by the useless action of an action that is good only if the desired effect is obtained, leaving out the means with which it was obtained with which it was obtained in the argument of the terms of the dual between soul and art.Thus we are in the theory of the factual and current case, that is, as the work is, and the factual in its diversity for what the work communicates in the reaction that our brain develops after visual exposure. For De Chirico, however, the search for the new does not mean “doing a good thing”, but the artists today have lost it “because they are lazy, … because the quality of painting has been lost and therefore it is not understood, and for them to make a picture or an omelette is the same thing”. Then, the painting, the most inquired element, more driven out and judged overtaken, could return as a medium of a new art. Because if it is true that art has changed to the point of being disfigured, indecorous and often unpleasant, insubordinate in embracing too many ways, including digital, and integrated to use as a habitual condition, it is also true that beauty in detaching itself from ethics has contributed to its weakening. Indeed, it has impoverished it, and this has no precedents in the history of art. Nothing is enough to solve it and does not save from the exile that we count in the degradation of the suburbs, in the abandonment of monuments, in the abuse, violence and intrusion of politics, so much so that the victory of the ugly on the beauty could be understood as the evil that wins on the good.
ZITA V.: If I could sit with Dalí or De Chirico in front of an espresso coffee and ask a question about the condition of the 21st century, what would be and how images that their answer could realize our understanding of existence?
A.B.: Let’s hope! I would be happy and I think my company would be enough for me without many words, but above all I would like to visit their studies. Realling our understanding would be all there, looking at their works, and if the debate ever would be on decrypting the current art and its rules that lead not to take into account that not all that is feasible is also ethically lawful. Especially since in the current political agone far from an ethical state, it is the will to power to emerge and not the res publica, or the needs of the community in which the citizen lives. Here the prospects made by the current opulent company are spoiled and poor in any rational weightiness, through a bombardment of admitted messages that remove from impelled problems. The stakes are a pact with the neighbor to come, in finding adequate answers for young people who are missed by false doctrines, and winning in re -founding the principle that art has the obligation to respond to giving sustainability criteria despite an immense hedonism. The origin of what we are experiencing is all here, but unfortunately we do not go further, and everything runs so fast as to get lost in looting a transitory nature that regurgitates ugliness in exhibitions on exhibitions, ready to tell more in an advertising carousel while the artists become sacrificial lambs at the altar of success. There is not even time to resume breath, to put up the aperitif of the last inauguration in the vortex of worldliness, and understand that there are higher values of profit, to understand the breath in highlighting that there is no contrast between ethics and morality, between art and art, because there is only one art and one ethics that accompanies morality. There are no different considerations, beyond the event to be consumed in suspicion that one wants to propose a model of art and life as a medium and not as an end, using conceptual violence in the name of an insulting cultural order in which everyone will live without beauty, but in its opposite, members of an individualistic society in which art gives nothing, but it is used for what it convenient. And if Kant indicates only a few conjunction between aesthetics and moral, there are other philosophers such as Hegel and Friedrich Schiller to reunite completely aesthetic and ethics, while Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Hans Georg Gadamer and Ludwig Wittgenstein, claim their agreement, what is no longer referring to beauty for a large part of an inaccessible art. But this is another speech that I go to deepen in my next book entitled: “Ethics and moral in contemporary art”, coming out at the end of the year.
ZITA V.: Thank you very much for so fulfilling and interesting conversation.
