Wise to Art

Contrary to what has been proclaimed by most art radicals over the last decades, Art is not just anything. Art is not an instrument for levelling out social hierarchy, a means for expressing individual psychedelic experiences or to promote abstract and muddled ideas. That is, art is not in everyone’s possession, nor is it a personal prerogative for personal use.

Let’s not pretend that art is what the greatest number thinks it is. Not everyone can appreciate art, nor be an artist. Art is by essence elitist. Attempts to vulgarize, or to make art a pastime as any other, are doomed to fail, as are all onslaughts on human nature. No education, be it voluntary or enforced, will ever streamline the innumerable disparities of the human mind.

There is art and there is egocentricity. Let’s avoid the tendency of confounding art with self idolatry and murky ideas. Even if art is not for everyone, it is necessarily shared by some. If there is no communion between the artist and his audience, there is no sharing present; neither is there a work of art.

Art is intuitively felt and shared. When art is in need of explanation, you can be sure that there is no Art present. Most of the movements that have dominated the realm of gratuitous creativity these last decades we can thus safely and painlessly forget.

What we stamp “art” is as elusive as ‘being’. Not being able to explain the concept doesn’t mean that we can dispense of its reality or its use. As well as we know that we, ourselves, are, and that art is, we know that there is Art.

This certainty on art can conveniently be called classicist, as it permeates all ages. It was present two thousand years ago and it is present today, it’s a constant. A contemporary art, regardless of its age, is doing nothing else than positioning itself against the classical undercurrent, always present. The quirks, more or less ephemeral, are the signs of the epoch, of the Zeitgeist. The remarkable thing about art is that it bears witness.

The ability to discern and appreciate art is a human constituent and a timeless one. A shared perception of art has prevailed through centuries, through millennia, and is today as present as ever. This classicist view of art should not be confounded with having a preference for the Greek or Roman era. We use ‘classicist’ to mark timeless, that is, what has been intuitively shared since time immemorial. The best works of the modern art movement are as classical as a Michelangelo; they are simply adapting the eternally same to current ideas and circumstances. As we go forward, any art pleading the most fervent avant-gardism will inevitably one day be time-stamped, dated, and, if authentically belonging to the realm of art, enter the unstoppable stream of classicism.