|
...
| It
has been published a book that must fascinate us or maybe it could. Stefano
Zecchi wrote it and its title is “L'artista
armato” (Mondadori).
The subtitle says: “Against crimes of modernity “ and it fully exposes, in a complex and comprehensive way, what we who are simple observers of facts and misdeeds of our country, have always sensed but have never been able to translated into an organic whole. Why art has become incomprehensible, why we are surrounded by horrors (architectural, urban, trendy ones), why artists do not influence the every day life, why, if we must point out an aesthetic for our times, it could not be other than the aesthetic of the ugly? Zecchi says that “a society, where representation of world rest on technocracy and market surveys, turns the values into laicism and degrades the imaginary, making everything becoming goods and consumption. A materialist civilisation build up on profit and utilitarianism is destined to decline in a nihilistic way. “. Pay attention : to our country (but not only, the phenomena involves, even with different nuances, all the west world), almost nobody is available to struggle for an idea of personal or national grandeur, nobody is available to bet on a social and cultural alternative project, nobody is able to bear the weight and the responsibility arising from the struggle against the current dominant thought. Mediocrity always prevails and anyhow, mediation is always preferred anyhow, arrangements are always and anyhow supported, normality is always and anyhow pursued, like the ultimate aim. By Zecchi this is one of the modernity effects, that 'doesn't allow to perform drama. Modernity is dialectic, it turns the conflict into a possible synthesis or into the comedy of compromise. This is the evidence of the decline; we must be conscious we live in a decline age. And so who asserts to make use of the Grande stile in modernity becomes an impostor and a lies seller “. Zucchi teaches aesthetics at the university and it is natural that this field where he works is the leitmotiv of his wondering. But the topic of beauty isn't something ephemeral, a pastime for intellectuals wasting their time. Instead it's something crucial for our destiny, both private and collective. “Taking care nowadays of the beauty of towns it seems to settle in second row essential aspect of the civil life in common. |
A
town must be functional, have well-run services; then we can take
into account also the beauty. Instead, beauty, represented into the shape
of the town, witnesses the ideas, the values, and the meanings bearing
the culture of a civilization.
 The
devastated outskirts of a town may point out a speculative urban decay
process, the administrative ineptitude, the corruption, but it's mainly
a crude witness of our current ideas about life and imagination “.
All that helps to understand why, since forty years, Italy, that along its centuries-old history had always known how to create an harmony of shapes and contents, an idea of squares and towns, a succession of landscapes and towns set into a quite natural order, had built the most ugly buildings it can be seen, had deemed to have nothing to gain safeguarding its things, cemented and damaged, not able either to preserve nor to valorize an artist riches patrimony, having no equal all over the world. Lacking a form of expression to identify with, a project, civil and politic, to which give start and substance, everything becomes matter for experimentalism, vote trading, economic speculating and intellectual expediency. We live in a shapeless country since we have nothing to believe, besides the derision toward who is obstinate in keeping on believing in something. Baudelaire used to say were need artists who know how to pull out from nowadays life its epic facet, and make us see and understand, throughout colour and draw, how much we are great and poetic with our ties and our patent-leather shoes “. But just the epic, the myth, the sense and the desire of grandeur have been expelled from our cultural horizons. “L'artista armato” of Zecchi tells about this withering and decline process. If we were the Minister of Education we will recommend this book as a textbook. But being Luigi Berlinguer the responsible of the Ministry, it is clear how an initiative alike is bizarre if related to the logic of the new, that is nothing else than the old going on. |
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