120 slumbering» (Georgi Gospodinov, Time Shelter, 2021), if only one has the power to imagine it. And it cannot be lowered from above, and it cannot be permeated by the stale stench of paternalism: in order to be able to question tired preconceptions, art must be made by artists. «If I can't dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution», wrote the anarchist essayist Emma Goldman in her autobiography. When, in 1968, the MET - Metropolitan Museum of New York decided to curate a very nice and very white exhibition on Afro-American art entitled Harlem on my mind, as if we were talking about a distant memory and not about a living and burning reality, the protest flared up due to the inability to worthily represent a humankind that asked above all for respect and competence. Eight years later, at the LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art, David Driskell curated Two Centuries of African American Art, and suddenly the world realized that African Americans had a very important lineage in visual arts. Almost in parallel, in 1977, at the Los Angeles City Hall shopping center, the artist Suzanne Lacy gave life to the performance Three Weeks in May, going daily to the Central Police Station to find out the number and location of rapes occurred in town during the previous day. For each of them, a red and definitive RAPE was stamped by the artist at the exact place of the crime, on a large map of the city posted in the shopping center, accompanied by nine other RAPEs less loaded with ink, whose presence was legitimized by the statistics of the time: in those years, in fact, domestic abuses were not punishable, and only one in ten was reported by the victim. During those three weeks in May, the map turned inexorably red. After a short time, domestic violence in Los Angeles County inexorably became a crime. «Beauty as salvation. Consequence: cleansing beauty from hedonism – and salvation from sanctimony». (Lalla Romano, In extreme seas, 1987) Beauty is art, an aesthetic experience which, as salvation, contains ethics, therefore rights; and it is not sterile hedonism, cosmetic anaesthetics, useless decorum. Which means that beauty, when it is not burdened by sanctimony, also contemplates the aesthetics of the uncanny, of the different, of discomfort, of the Other by itself. It is the matter of art from Egon Schiele onwards, corroborated by Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (1970) according to which, after the barbarism of Auschwitz, it is more urgent than ever for the function of art to pass from contemplation to reflection, through two fundamental dynamic moments: the rupture and the irruption of the Other. Only in this way will art be able to save. Only by welcoming the Other will we be able to save ourselves. Although great contemporary art is not designed to give answers, but to raise questions where for many it is more convenient not to question, its example, in this sense and translated into the field of human rights, is enormous. «I believe in the power of beauty. In my opinion, beauty is based on the convergence of an aesthetic thought and an ethical principle. For this reason, I still believe that art can change a society. I still believe that a good exhibition or a good theatrical piece can heal the wounds in the mind of a spectator. I still believe, as an artist, that viewers' bodies and minds can be awakened. Therefore, first of all, I feel the need to look inside myself, to understand what I represent for society, what it means to be human for society, where we can place ourselves as human beings, through work, thought, the traces to be left through visual art or writing. And obviously the next step is that some artworks need to communicate, others refuse to communicate, because even some artworks’ refusal to communicate represents a historical decision, it speaks of a historical position. Perhaps some artworks do not want to communicate because they do not want to be included in the society of the spectacle. By "spectacle", I mean the spectacle of economy, trade, inflation both of image and culture, but an artist must be like Prometheus, who stole the source of life, he stole it from the gods to give it to men and made them capable of creating their own life», writes the contemporary artist and dramaturg Jan Fabre (in Parallelo42_08 Pensiero, 2008). We need heroes, now!, was the invocation that repeatedly pierced the scene of his Prometheus Landscape (2011). The current, ravenous need for heroes probably responds to a path of the humankind which proceeds hand in hand with the path of science and technology, both saturating our imagination to the point that, as in every parable of vice, we do not need nothing, so we do need everything. While in the global south human rights substantially coincide with the Sustainable Development Goals set by the UN 2030 Agenda – including the right to water, to land, to health, the fight against hunger and poverty – on this side of the world, sated and unsatisfied, we discuss the opportunity for the promulgation of a fourth generation of rights, consequential to new needs that burst into the contemporary and that are mostly induced by our condition, embracing the words of Marcuse, of one dimensional men: that of consumers.
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