Disreputable subjects, Marina, presumed icon of art, but also and above all her apologists of any parish, that of the gullible people impressed by the pseudo-revolutionary jokes of the “artist” and that of those who, thanks to the gullibility of the former, have collected mountains of money over decades and decades. But what is art? Once, in order to answer, he had to consult the encyclopedia, if dad had bought it and put it in the bookshop. Either you went to the library, consult, study and answer otherwise I’ll fail you! Today, embarrassing to say for those who remember the old days, it is very simple: go to Google and it will explain it to you quickly. So let’s read together and see who these blessed artists are according to Wikipedia. But also according to Treccani. We are talking about painters, sculptors, writers, musicians, architects. Let us also rightly extend the definition to those who dance or act with skill and grace. Then let’s stop here, if we don’t want to fall into approaches and methods that allocate diplomas and craftsman’s licenses, in the noble Carduccian sense, to various kennels and pigsties. Artists, the real ones, are not improvisers or charlatans. Caravaggio was a bandit, a scoundrel, perhaps a murderer but he knew how to use the brush well, good God!
A performer, that is, a provocateur for money
Abramovic he doesn’t paint, he doesn’t write, he doesn’t sculpt, he doesn’t sing, he doesn’t play, he doesn’t dance, he doesn’t plan. Maybe he’s acting, but it’s a terrible part. Yesterday, as a great guest of honour, she came to give the lectio magistralis to 120 unfortunate students of the old praiseworthy Turin Academy, which once produced high-level artists and historians, critics and young scholars of the fine arts. And he considers the brush at most a sexual organ. In the pictorial sense she doesn’t even remember what she is, after having attended the art academy of red Belgrade and anti-Italian of Tito, the marshal who was a great friend of Sandro Pertini.
She has certainly become an extraordinary character, a Serbian who never seems to age, despite being 78 years old. She is perhaps not beautiful, but she is the bearer of an irresistible charm because she is capable of anything, with that Slavic face with non-existent cheekbones, with that strange smile somewhere between enigmatic and treacherous, those full lips and the shapes often displayed bare.
Daughter of two leaders of the communist party headed by the Slavic infobator, she became an agit-prop from a young age, an agitator of propaganda, but not of the party or of the idea: the prop, in her case, can be read as “in own ”, because since the beginning he manages to transform his most perverse fantasies into a providential mint of banknotes. A constant in his performances consists in making her body, with self-harming and pleased masochism, available to the public, stimulating their voyeurism. She often inflicts cuts and wounds on herself, sometimes she discovers how to unleash the sadism of the spectators by lying naked on the ice, cutting her belly bloody with a sharp blade and then pouring boiling water over it. At the Moma in New York she spends 8 hours a day for three months sitting in front of a table at the opposite end of which, on another chair, the visitors alternate (it is estimated that there were 750 thousand) eager to be able to stare at her face for a few minutes .
She spends four days naked hoisted on tons of bloody bones of dead cows. It goes so far as to promote “aphrodisiac” recipes based on sperm and pig’s blood, produces videos that broadcast images of numerous men masturbating, and so on, in over half a century of vulgar and repugnant provocations, in which someone has gone so far as to glimpse the spectrum of Satanist practices.
Enemy of art
Marina Abramovic, of what we continue to consider true Art, is a terrible enemy. He is a person who has used every means, even ideologically violent ones, to smuggle his antics to us as artistic, constructed only with the aim of “épater le bourgeois”. Mission substantially accomplished, with great economic return, both personal and for its sponsors, including some institutions that have been converted from museums to department stores.
But that of Abramovic and his supporters, from both of the aforementioned parishes, is not only not art, but a violent and pervasive lack of culture. It is violence to conceive artistic creativity as a mere nagging marketing strategy, to level and anesthetize aesthetic tastes for commercial purposes, indicate shortcuts and not authentic routes, thinking about how to amaze or frighten the public and not about generating a horizon that can look not only at the ancient but also at the modern, with the great artists from Cubism. to futurism and dadaism they knew how to excite and involve in their activities and works with transgression and originality, genuine and not artificial, specious and manipulative.
But let’s read what he writes in his essay “The winter of culture” the French Academician, curator at the Musée national d’art moderni, former director of the Picasso Museum, Jean Clair: «After the war (1945, ed.) a dramatic decline began, marked by scandals, by permanent revolutions, by the tyranny of something new without origin. We are in the geography of the negative. In a theater of burlesque pantomime: a festive and funereal theater, venal and mortifying, infected with blasphemies.” The artist of our time is no longer a prophet: he practices desecration, profanation, murderous fury, since the proclamations of the surrealist manifesto where «the simplest act consists, revolvers in hand, in taking to the streets and shooting at random, as much as I can, over the crowd” (second manifesto of surrealism). Abramovic’s are therefore not challenges of artistic innovation but trivial offenses against Art with a capital letter that only generations without a critical sense can suffer and, sometimes, even appreciate.
