Visto y no visto

Until a few years ago, talking about art was simple: the painter painted, the sculptor sculpted, the musician composed, the filmmaker shot. But we have been missing new words to describe current art for a long time, and the matter will become more and more urgent until it becomes indispensable. What does an artist do who turns a light on and off, who cooks a dinner for a hundred people, who signs a urinal or shoots at a plane in flight, who cradles a dead hare or orders a shark in formalin? "Makes Art": for now we have to make do with that tautological and disappointing verb. Not just products, not just gestures: tastes, processes, moods and ideas today become art. Perhaps contemporary art is already, more than anything, an attitude shared by artists and viewers, which would consist in accepting that art can be hidden to provide stimulation and pleasure and reflection in all manifestations of life: a bottle of detergent, a community neighbors, an idea never said out loud, not showing up at the opening of our own retrospective. Writers who make art and artists who write pass through here; writers who write about art and fundamental writers to understand the art that is contemporary to them. There are artist-dandies and there are rare artists, who go free or obstinate in prowling the margins until that margin turns out to be the central place of an entire territory that no one had noticed before. And there are, for better or worse, those who have modeled the collective image of today's successful artist in the era of mass hypercommunication. It won't take long for the reader to realize that in these pages, perhaps due to sheer professional deformation, those places where art and language meet hopelessly tend to end up irremediably. Perhaps the book itself is the result of an attempt sustained over time to satisfy the need for new verbs and new words to describe new forms of creation. And to give them body, even.