Costituente

La vignetta di Staino (Venerdì di Repubblica del 12 gennaio 2012) è acuta e divertente. Occorrre però sottolineare come la “pozione” sia sostanzialmente la stessa del patto costituente: cattolici, social-comunisti e liberali. Quello che forse è cambiato più fortemente è la componente liberale, che allora era composta di azionisti e oggi è composta da “massoni”. Gli azionisti esistono ancora, e sono numerosi, ma, essendosi sostanzialmente schierati con gli eredi della sinistra sessantottina, sono stati esclusi, su ordine degli eredi del PCI, dal nuovo patto.

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Dai Pra'

Ho appena letto il libro di Dai ‘Pra “Quelli che però è lo stesso”. Carino: il politically correct come sostitutivo di un’educazione politica assente. L’autrice, insegnante precaria in una scuola all’Idroscalo, estrema periferia degradata di Ostia, incontra i (sotto)proletari, di cui sostanzialmente invidia la libertà, anche quando si esprime nelle forme aberranti della violenza, del facismo, del machismo, del cattivo gusto. Non vorrei essere troppo cattivo, ma mi sembra che non avendo né il coraggio di abbandonare la propria piccoloborghesità né gli strumenti politici (nonostante o forse a causa del padre sessantottino) per rapportarsi dialetticamente con i proletari, si mette a fare la crocerossina, ovvero a tentare di trasformarli in piccolo borghesi di sinistra. Peccato, perché i sottoproletari sarebbero stato un ottimo punto di vista per rappresentare l'Italia berlusconiana.

XXIth century art

Many complain that the art of XXI century is somewhat a reptition of the art of the earlier 30 years, and that we lack the geniuses of even recent past. But this situation is not very different from the centuries after the Reinassance. Reinassance is an age of giants, when even not so great artists could achieve the highest performances; in the Baroque we have a number of geniuses (Velazqeuz, Caravaggio, Rubens), amidst a very large number of excellent artists that are however not very original; in the XVIII century the average quality of paintings is very high, but the century produced very few outstanding artists; in XIX century, paintings is largely academic and weak, although a number of very fine artists (Ingres, David, Géricault, Friedrich etc.) was produced by this century. Of course, the reason of this sort of decadence is the development of the language of modern paintings, that was tumultuous in the Reinessance and then slowed down - as well as there are only seven notes, and you can compose a large but not infinite number of melodies, there is only a limited number of subjects in painting and in the way to express them. After a century of tumultuous development of the language of art, we are in a phase of settlement, with little innovation because almost everything has been explored. Nonetheless, the quality of the latest art is in my opinion on average very high, although actually often not very innovative. Then, a time will arrive when the meaning itself of art will change, in the same way as in XIX century the meaning of art changed from representation to imagination. Probably we have already some hints of this great change, but we cannot see it: Michelangelo was already a conceptual artidu, but of course nobody could suspect in that time that such ideas would lead to objects trouvés and abstract painting.

Daverio

I have read the fine book by Daverio "Il Museo Immaginato", recently issued. It is amusing and funny, but behind the friendliness there is a rather revolutionary proposal in approaching the history of art: to replace the usual storicist approch that emphasize the innovations of each artist and that wasa inheriteed from Vasari, with an evaluation of the web of citations and relationships that link together all paintings of every age, not differently from the approach of literary cirticism. The plat works mainly because the selection is very restricted, only paitingins and only paintings from Titian to the XIX century (with rare exceptions), a period of very little innovation before the revolutions of the late XIX-early XX century. But the proposal is well worth of consideration.