It’s a strange story because it’s a strange feeling. What is it like to live in a time of decline?
In the last 20 years, it has been a crescendo. My discomfort grew to intolerable levels. Around me, values and many perspectives of life slowly melted away.
The desert of social mediocrity has been consolidating. Human relationships became more and more empty and superficial, often downright detestable.
We even witnessed the resurgence of denunciation and betrayal as socially virtuous behaviours and the community concept sanctified to the detriment of the inviolable reasons of the individual.
I FEEL THE DECADENCE ALL AROUND
Globalism levels and flattens everything. It tends to eradicate every singularity, every voice that doesn’t sing that particular song within the choir. No dissonance of lead vocals.
Globalisation wants your dreams and will give you cheap false certainties in return.
But life is always that individual quest for a momentary balance, even if precarious. Life is the continuous, fantastic achievement of this goal, day after day.
No society will ever be able to guarantee this result to anyone. Still, it can do one crucial thing: not hinder anyone in realising his dreams and ambitions.
A PIECE OF THE HEART
In my life, only one thing has played a central role: art in all its forms and expressions.
Art has repeatedly saved my life over the years. I’m still alive because art embodied my dreams. And not only that: art has filled my existence (and not only mine) with meaning and value.
In this first quarter of a century, even art has become infected with the virus of mediocrity of conformity.
Today, many old and new artists have been cleverly deceived and manipulated to the point of appearing as a compound army of propagandists, ready to convey the ‘ politically correct ‘ as the new gospel by any means.
Much of today’s art seems mass-produced: same message, same taste, just little stylistic differences. Today art, in my opinion, is mediocre and homogenised from a formal point of view that repeats the same worn-out contents like a broken record, similar to advertising slogans. These artists just want to please a possibly paying and increasing large audience. They want desperately to feel approved.
And unfortunately, all forms of art are victims of this phenomenon, none excluded.
As an artist, I am sad, and my heart is broken. In my art, there is a sense of bitterness; something wants to escape from everything and everyone.
My art is restless, iridescent and elusive.
We are both uncomfortable.
THE WHEEL TURNS, TURNS…
But like all things, this particularly confusing period in human history also will be just a memory.
But it is important to have lived it intensely, even in the innumerable difficulties.
An era that ends always entails a certain amount of trauma for billions of people.
But not for everyone and not to the same extent.
Even if it takes many years, the world of men will invent new landscapes for new ventures because this is precisely the goal of this epochal change: to provide humanity with new scenarios for new experiences to fulfil its values.
Change of scene, new play. Get ready to turn on the new lights on your new dreams.
And art, together with society, will flourish again in new and unique forms.
No more mediocrity, no more. There’s a time for everything.
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