Among the most hopeless absences complained by the recent art, that of the New, meant as golden spontaneity and not as pursuit of the new, has to be considered before everything else. But spontaneity itself is a condition now absent – replaced as it is by the incontinence which, far from bearing witness of a good physiological condition, indecently shows the symptoms of collapsed sphincters – of the very bad functioning from which a fringe of the society seams to be suffering, as the daily chronicles testify, with abundance of ghastly examples; and not only of art.
New appeared that faecal material which, denied to proper toilets, was instead destined to the market of art and – sealed in cans labeled with a memorable caption – thrown to voracious and omnivorous beneficiaries of the new whatever. It was an omen of future times in which, with crooked syllogism, everyone, discovering to be suffering from peristalsis, felt himself devoted to art and determined to practice it.
On the contrary, the constipated and courageous intellectualism of many works, which object to a mistaken and degraded spontaneity, testifies the difficulty of finding those new solutions mentioned by Picasso who used to say that he did not want to look for them but that he knew how to find them. By word of mouth, the process seems easy: it would suffice to become ‘ troubadours ‘, with in addition the adjective ‘new ’. But as everybody knows, in archaism much can be found; but not the new.
Where then does the much renowned value lie if, wherever you search for it, only misleading traces can be found?
In a film by Hitchcock titled International Intrigue (title as much unconsciously sociological as sociologically significant) the script builds a peculiar figure not corresponding to any concrete person and whose imaginary physiognomy is made up of the only signs which the passage of the imaginary figure would produce, if the person really existed.
Few metaphors would appear as much emblematic of the falsification of the new in our recent culture, which constantly points at its ubiquitous presence, pretending to ignore that it is a matter of oblique presence; made up of misleading features only, in absence of a subject to which to ascribe them.
What else to say of something which remains only memory, impossible to probe but in a simulated way? Users of the art of the present have the same probability to come across a real New that the children of New York have to run across a farmyard hen in the streets of Manhattan. Those children must go to the zoo to get to know what a hen is, alive naturally: actually only there can they experience the hen itself; but it is a distorted experience.
If one agrees that the animals seen at the zoo are different from their fellows living elsewhere; if one admits that our concerts, exhibitions, contemporary art museums are not anything else but the zoos of works in captivity or, worst, of their captured authors, one can sadly come to the conclusion that the new does not live here anymore. And it has left no address.
