White paper on creativity - ebla center

Chapter 14than concentrate efforts on a singlehigh-quality project. At the same timethe area may, for example, becompletely lacking in project spaces fornon-collecting purposes. A special rolein the contemporary art museumsystem will be played by the MAXXI,which as a national museum of 21stcenturyart will inevitably haveleadership responsibilities and so mustbe carefully built up and organised.14.8 A radical change inlanguageToday’s art has lost the technicalfeatures and recurrent iconography ofthe art of the past. Materials may onlybe presented and not manipulated.“Figures” may be completely absent,even only as abstract and geometricalelements. Some media used recently byartists, such as photographs, video andfilm, are not recognised as being partof the techniques in the category basedon painting and sculpture. It is difficultto highlight traces of continuity withart history, which, however artists stillclaim as their source of inspiration andmain reference as regards the past.There is a genuine difficulty inattributing the value of art to what isno longer recognisable such. Arthistorians consider many artiststherefore simply as bluffers with notechnical skills or respect for tradition.Moreover, international art was alreadymoving in this direction in the 20thcentury: the “ready-made” is about tocelebrate a hundred years. Since the1970s in the field of conceptual art themedia have been reduced to a trifle (adictionary definition, a statement, agesture) inducing the American scholarLucy Lippard to talk of the“dematerialisation of the art object”and the critic Harold Rosenberg todescribe the work of art as an “anxiousobject” in search of its ownredefinition.Moreover,dematerialisation and the absence ofmanual skill contributed to stating thepower of the work beyond allcraftsmanship and according only tothe underlying idea. Here we aredealing with a longstanding row whichtakes us back to the time of theRenaissance artists who had to fight sothat painting and sculpture would beincluded among the Liberal Arts and,more generally, fields associated withknowledge. This process of recognisingthe epistemological value of works ofart was very slow. And this slownessexplains the failed or belated birth inthe European and especially Italianculture, of truly university-standard artschools. The visual arts, painting andsculpture were compared to decoration,the third field of traditional education.The fourth, architecture, only recentlyemerged from the “ghetto” of minorknowledge in the Accademie, andarguably this explains why it stilldefends its recently acquired status withsuch vehemence.All the circumspection roundcontemporary art arises from acircumspection that has alwayssurrounded the territory of the visual,but today it is further reinforced by thedifficulty in understanding whatdeserves to be called art. After theFuturist, Dada and Conceptualprovocations, it is genuinely difficult toWHITE PAPER ON CREATIVITY 334