Art and poetry

I often hear contemporary artist that, in order to explain the ridde of contemporary art to the laymen, liken their work to music. Music doesn’t represents things (with a few exception such as “Le Quattro Stagioni” by Vivaldi), and yet it conveys emotions. But I think that this likening is somewhat ill conceived. Contemproary art does represents things – actually, it imitates things so well that it usually present the thing that should be represented itself! Kounelli’s horses is so good an imitation of 12 horses that the horses … are actual horses in a staple! Morevoer, the feelings that arise from a piece of art are probably more mental than the very direct emotions raisen by music. Bach is very mathematical, and yet it is full of passion; the deep pleasure I feel when I look a performance of Rikriit Tirvanja is almost completely intellectual. This intellectual side of art is not new to contemporary art: Mona Lisa is nice to contemplate, but becomes terribly involving only after understanding.

In my opinion, a better likening would be with poetry. Poetry is basically grounded in metaphor, and it seems to me that the same can be said of contemporary art. When Damien Hirst arranges hundreds of pills on glass shelves he makes a metaphor; when Jeff Koons puts his electric hoovers on a pedestal he is doing an hyperbole (another rhetoric figure). Metaphor ethymologically means transport, and Duchamp’s ready made are “transported” from their original context into a new environemt. Art of the first half of the XXth century is still mimetic, although it is the mimesis of the not representable (Kandinskyj tries to represent spiritual entities, Malevic the fourth dimension), art of the second half of the XXth century is metaphoric. It is perhaps a coincidence, but many – well informed and by no way conservative – don’t like it and found it … rhetorhic, giving unjustly the fault to the market of art.

Metaphor is a short circuit, that flashes reality and illuminates – hopefully – the hidden meanings of things. The subject of classical art is truth, the subject of poetry and contemporary art are experience. The difference is not big, but important.