Always more often artists are asked to speak of their work to an audience of experts in other disciplines. Listeners are sometimes scientists, other times managers. Faculties scientifically oriented organize Masters to which artists are invited with the precise aim of giving voice to their experience. Has the worldwide carelessness for art prodigiously evolved in willingness because of its recent events? What does such awakening of the attention for art from sectors traditionally distant presage?
Why have the artists become an object of interest to exponents of science, trade, management? Putting aside the hypothesis that their interest is oriented towards the fruits of their work, the opinion according to which the ‘modus operandi ’ of an artist contains a potential – unnamed for the moment – which, if correctly sensed, may be useful in ‘loosing up’ situations and problems with which men of science, management and other noble trades face themselves. When ‘ proper ‘ means for solving problems appear inadequate, it may be advisable to change the strategy with which to tackle exactly those problems which the known techniques do not solve.
What of the artists’ work may then pass on in other operators stalemated by the techniques usually adopted, generally of rational or rationalistic origin?
The artist is often considered as a man of intuition and guided by it. It is wrong. He surely has intuition but the adjustment of means to the intuitive vision is a work of high rationality, without which the result would betray the primeval idea. Therefore, the reason at the service of intuition. And because the intuition is for every work always imperiously different, the artist organizes the adeguate means through the insight of his intelligence. The artist is a man trained in solving myriads of problems. He succeeds in this as much as his rationality is alert and the latter is able to bend in front of intuition. If the interest of others for the experience of artists lies in this aspect, how can one operate fruitful transfusions of such mentality?
The work of an artist metaphorically repeats the times of life. An embrace burns out quickly. The resulting gestation goes on for months. Desire is quick, rapacious and fleeting. Its fruit ripens slowly. Times of conjugation and times of gestation are stretched apart but inexplicably fitting and not reversible. Inseminated by the lightning of his intuition the artist starts a long artisan path made concrete by intelligence, tenaciousness, skilfullness.
If reason alone fails; if intuition alone does not get to the end of the enigmas; if the synthesis (or the syncretism ?) of reason and intuition can open daring breaks in the untouched enigmas, one has every reason to sense in the artists an aptitude for solving such enigmas. Enigmatic to themselves and others, artists live boldly with enigmas. They are their real craft. Their art consists in facing them.
