78 79 So: if responsibility means the power to act facing the consequent impact, let me begin not with an abstract, but with a fact. On 16 November 2023, in a world more and more burning, the committee responsible for appointing the curators of documenta 2027 – one of the world’s most awaited contemporary art events, born in the aftermath of World War II with a very specific purpose: to remind us that art and culture are humankind’s most powerful line of defence – resigned en bloc, echoing the quitting of two other members: poet and art critic Ranjit Hoskote, following the publication of an article accusing him of antisemitism and support for the Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions movement in defence of Palestine’s right to exist, and Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Israeli artist, philosopher and psychoanalyst. The committee’s resignation letter concluded with these words: «In this intellectual climate of over-simplification of complex realities and its resulting restrictive limitations, we do not believe that there is space in Germany for an open exchange of ideas and the development of complex and nuanced approaches, that artists and curators deserve». Actually, the committee’s resignation – their act of taking responsibility – could have been (and intended to be) translated into a single plea: wake up. Wake up, the vital responsibility that contemporary art must assume in front of a world more and more burning, and less and less able to deal with the real trait of the contemporary: the complexity. Without having to mention my personal Platonic crush, Professor Giorgio Parisi who won the 2021 Nobel Prize for his systematisation of complex systems, even I renowned loser in Physics have come to understand that complexity requires the coexistence of multiple voices, and that simplification is tantamount to silencing or under-representing some of them. In a complex system as the one crowded with us humans, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – which, in Article 29, enshrines Responsibility as a set of individual duties towards the community never going beyond the abstractness of the definition – is echoed by a Universal Declaration of Human Responsibilities. Published in 1997 by the InterAction Council, a committee of thirty former world leaders convening regularly, the decalogue sought to fill that gap The body and the shelter: contemporary art and responsibility. A conversation with the D’Innocenzo Brothers Fabiola Triolo with 18 articles corresponding to as many responsibilities incumbent upon every human being – from respecting life and the environment to ensuring media freedom, from the duty to develop one’s own abilities to fostering solidarity and justice. Yet then, despite the noble intentions on the letterhead, what actually happens is that documenta’s committee resigns in despair, a Biennale pavilion remains indefinitely shuttered without even bothering to know what it might have exhibited, on a neocatechumenal Sanremo’s stage an Israeli singer and an Israeli singer (?) stand hand in hand intoning Imagine, heaven forbid we should ever repeat the scandal caused by Ghali the previous year, responsible for daring to utter two sacrosanct words: stop genocide. I still remember his reply, when accused of using the stage for a statement: «But what else should I use it for? I’m a musician». As if to say: in a world more and more burning, and more and more prone to ultra-unilateralism, while bloodied lands have become breeding grounds for the burrs of neo-conquistadores, who else – and who better – to take on the responsibility of visionary, courageous gestures, if not the artist? Let me repeat: visionary and courageous – the sidereal opposite of doctrinaire and rhetorical – because there are no artists less engaged than those who parade themselves as such; and because, if they squander their time decorating topicality or politics, that is anything but art. Self-professed artists posing as humanity’s saviours, an ideal commodified into content, a bubble as a showcase, artwashing or propaganda as the praxis: please, you who call yourselves artists, enough. And please, you who call yourselves the art system, wake up. If the defining trait of the contemporary is indeed complexity, then come back and scandalise us with your own responsibility of disturbing but therefore vivifying visions. Force us to confront with our own responsibility of being able to elaborate critical, complex thoughts, as critical and complex as our times are. Challenge us, shake us up, wake us up. And wake yourselves up. «Dad, good life screwed you. You used to be a foreman, but now you've got the money, and you're scandalised», said the actor Christian De Sica in 1983 busted by his parents in bed with his male ski instructor in that Italian cultural phenomenon titled Vacanze di Natale (let me take full responsibility for this quote, which would make the contemporary art milieu tear up in despair its mothballed-but-so-chic clothes, as previously for the Sanremo Festival; and the fact that even this movie got screwed by good life, degenerating into the cinepanettone format and privileging the box office over the screen, serves as an apt illustration of how culture has become the sacrificial lamb on the comfortable and sterile altar of today’s irresponsibility and historical paucity). Accomplice to good life, an atavistic fear of risk – and of the mirror – came. For when we talk about responsibility, we must always look into the mirror, to mirror and to be mirrored. Because a world more and more burning is mirror of what we have done. And because the artist, as Orwell wrote in Inside the whale, «is fiddling while Rome is burning, and, unlike the enormous majority of people who do this, is fiddling with his face towards the flames». The artist is not afraid to be a mirror and to be mirrored in the fire. The artist enters it, aware that the only way out is through.
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