text by Aniello Ertico President of Porta Cœli Foundation
Nothing more than artistic practice seems to be naturally devoted to myth writing. In this sense, contemporary art, when it exists, assumes a posture that is naturally bold and formally suited to the writing of myth that the future will adopt, maybe.
The evolutionary processes that have affected, with unprecedented rapidity, every specific or general order of existence, also reveal new problems regarding even the art definability, both in terms of expressive grammar and function.
It is only possible to approach the subject, without risking rhetorical drifts, by reversing perspectives, that is, by leaving aside the definitions of art and taking an interest in the function that it guarantees with respect to a possible purpose: expressive efficacy in the rendering of meaning within a function of public enjoyment.
After all, myth, with its figurative metaphors and constant recourse to the emblematic, has the merit of giving the unknown and the ethereal a possible face, a plausible name and absolute impact.
One should not think that recourse to myth is obsolete: current times are saturated with mythology! A mythology which, however, appears to be exorcised of any possible element of perturbation; a mythology adopted to fulfil the salvific, sometimes soporific role of pacifying the ego in the face of traditional unknowns. The myth of today is embodied, for example, in the infallibility of the markets, in the unconditional reliance on technology, in the very special sensitivity of those who, simply because they have cried a few times as children, believe they possess an extraordinary emotional endowment, and in the democratic label that panders to the illusion of accomplished protagonism without any participation in decision-making processes.
Above all, the prevailing myth of this time is that one’s own idea is correct, just and fair, worthy of strenuous defence as a possible seed of the manifesto to be adopted to save the planet.
The novelty of the myth lies in the ambition to be the myth ourselves. Nothing intolerable if it were not for the risk that such saturation of ambition suggests: among the many wrong ideas that reach self-aggrandisement in the total absence of critical thinking, some become myths. A wrong myth.
We are in the age of mythology without meaning, the kind that collapses from the foundations at the first comparison, the kind that sets itself up as a caption for the immense but only reveals itself to be an x-ray of profound fragilities and crude improvisations.
We then come to motivate the use and abuse of de-conceptualised and often completely de-contextualised terminologies: identity, resilience, potential, vocation, talent…! These terms are used to predict an outcome which, punctually, takes a long time to occur until it vanishes, fatally and mythologically, into the inconsistency to which contemporary mythology is condemned. It will be said unjustly.
There is probably an antidote to this spell, a sophisticated concoction of critical and sometimes unpopular thinking using tools that are mysterious to some because they are completely unknown. One of these, for example, abandoned in the cellar of intellectuals with dusty desks, is semantics.
If we were to use semantics, for example, we could certainly understand that identity is not a licence for uniqueness that we hold by birth right: it needs broad social recognition in order to be determined and not reduced to the rank of self-proclamation. Resilience is not a human virtue but a prerogative of clays, typically condemned to undergo events and certainly not to determine them. Potential that is not sustained by ability rather than competence, and that is not expressed in a parabolic crescendo of sacrifice and upheaval, is resolved in a beautiful photograph that is never taken: an absolutely useless supply if only to feed regrets. The vocation, the one that thinks it is enough for itself, soon turns into a waste. Talent, in its specific etymology, is measured on double-armed scales: my talent compared to whom? Talent is an endowment, of course, but it only becomes a virtue if the arm of the scale hangs on my side with a counterweight.
No one is talented on a scale that weighs only themselves.
Returning to the role/function of contemporary art, we have chosen to explore an unprecedented path: the path of humility. We do not propose works, in the sense of artefacts. We propose the expressive result of subjective tensions, of experiences that perhaps cannot be replicated, of curatorial processes that have produced personal evolutions before being technical and stylistic. We exhibit a subjectivity that is a candidate for exclusive recognition, for an attribution of identity that comes from an unknown public. We present an opportunity for the contamination of established artistic practices with the most daring avant-garde, in order to cultivate motivation and evolution before vocation. We generate opportunities for artists to meet, multiple arms of scales capable of highlighting talent. A scale in which the counterweight at the first weighing aspires to become talent at the next call. A system without the pretence of producing tides by invading neighbouring shores.
Rather, as in a calm sea that washes shores that are only apparently distant, we offer ourselves as a welcoming middle platform. Close enough to each shore so that no one feels like a stranger. This platform, which we call the Mediterranean Contemporary Art Prize, lands in Vicchio, the land of Giotto, a safe harbour, devoted to the production of modern myths in the presence of which even Medusa will blink and for a few seconds will be able to be portrayed. A tribute from Greek Lucania to timeless Tuscany