The premises
The “Paintings” section (figurative art, sculpture, architecture) of Debaser is, as of January 2010, the most neglected on the entire site: few authors, sparse commentators, minimal visitors.
Despite the expectations of the site’s Management and Editorial staff, it seems that this commendable initiative was from the outset destined for a certain lack of success.
The reasons are obvious, once one knows the nature of the so-called “average user” of Debaser and the state of Italian culture in this early phase of the new century.
The average user, perhaps also due to dysfunctions of a school system characterized for many decades by the predominance of Marxist culture, is not made up of subjects equipped with the conceptual tools suitable for a serious analysis of figurative art, and for its careful and conscious enjoyment.
It consists of subjects able to describe, sometimes even decently, contemporary musical and cinematic arts, for which it is not indispensable to possess particular refinement and education to achieve positive results.
For example, to discuss the content of a pop or rock album I do not necessarily have to know the history of music and musical technique, it being sufficient, and stylistically easy, to focus on emotion, empathy, controversy, even the paroxysm of some fakes used to overturn the terms of the discourse by speaking well of indefensible works, akin to the sophists with regard to the praise of Helen of Troy. The same holds for a film, or similarly, for a book.
This is the so-called “subjectivity” of Debaser, which however implies unexpected consequences, the price of the reviewer’s freedom, and of the container of freedom that this site is.
To be a good reviewer of these works, I must, in essence, be a simple “consumer” of reproducible artistic expressions, and therefore of material goods merchandised, reduced, Marxianly, to purchase goods.
Music and cinema as mass products, reproducible and available to anyone anywhere, have led to the creation of a mass culture (which does not take us too far from trivial sociological and anthropological analyses), but also, and above all, a mass “counter-culture,” in which thought does not escape the alternative of either mirroring the values it claims to fight by emphasizing their communicative effectiveness and amplifying their message, or ridiculing them with mockeries ultimately self-serving that lead toward nihilistic Dadaism.
Culture and counter-culture today are mainly conveyed through new mass media like the internet, into which a container like Debaser ends up being caught: as a container open to everyone, it is necessarily a function of such a phenomenon, summarizing its merits, but also its defects and limits.
In such a context, the founding of DeLo Channel, as a thematic channel dedicated to art curated by the user De Lorenzo, seems to be the opportunity to bring the aforementioned section of the site back to an adequate expressive level, uprooting the idea of mass culture and mass communication of culture right inside a mass media like Debaser.
The method
Art, understood as object and concept, is ineffable, based on stipulative and nominalistic premises that are entirely variable depending on people, times, and fashions, being, in summary, a function of History and the manifestation of Spirit in History.
This does not mean, however, that one cannot or should not discuss art by weakening the object to say all that is “sayable,” in the nihilistic perspective that we have already seen as one of the escape routes from mass culture and counter-culture.
In other words, if I cannot rationally explain what art is, that does not mean I consider on the same level an Alfa Romeo “Arna” model, the work of any young hopeful, or a Raphael fresco.
In fact, what I can say about art I can say starting from a method: descriptive analysis of the work, its historical contextualization, identification of the author’s direct and indirect message, verification of the theoretical-philosophical depth of that message (express or unexpress) and its heuristic meaning.
Artistic creation thus becomes a path of unveiling the world, and the review of a work of art the mechanism through which this message is interpreted and internalized, increasing one’s cultural but above all spiritual baggage, in the sense of knowledge of the spirit realized in history.
The application of this method on objects like the aforementioned Alfa “Arna,” or the painting of the young hopeful tells us nothing: if depth of message there is, it would only be the product of the reviewer’s ingenuity, and not of the object considered as such. The hermeneutic activity of the subject prevails in this case over the object itself, breaking surreptitiously the cycle of knowledge established when an event is observed, denoted, and connoted: reading the review, one knows the reviewer more than the work.
This method, on the other hand, tells us a lot if applied to works of Rosso Fiorentino, of Michelangelo or of Agnolo Bronzino, but also of modern authors, like Burri, Fontana, Morandi, up to certain works of Basquiat or Keith Haring, or even of an unknown who, through his genius, can tell us something more about the world.
The application of the method thus allows to distinguish what is art from what only appears to be art, or has neither appearance nor essence. It allows to know the work and not the reviewer, who stays in the background.
It is an objective and not subjective method, as it is canonized and applied with rigor, similarly to what user De Lorenzo does in all his reviews, describing things “as they are,” and not “as one would like them to be” in light of one’s philosophical wishes or the veil of one’s ideological prejudices, explicit, or, which is even worse, implicit and unconfessed.
The aims
The aims of De Lorenzo, and from today of DeLo Channel, have always been to spread culture objectively, to look at the world with disillusion but also with the awareness that it is somewhat different from what the “vulgate” says, understood as the opinion of the average site user, both popular and vulgar, and at the same time representative of mass culture and counter-culture, a political subject capturable by movements, opinions, assessments suited and built for the masses, for ochlocracy and not for democracy or any other correctly practicable political form.
DeLo Channel thus has a strongly educational role, to be understood as a path of emancipation of the reader, bringing them closer to a beauty and a truth that does not change, and which, at the same time, is not subject to the fickle digressions of mass culture.
Education that wants to be, on the one hand, the typical artistic education that seems missing for much of the site’s average user, perhaps due to poor or patchy studies, but also education on the “method” and reflection on the method itself, hoping for an intellectual growth of the users who, starting from art, also lead them to a different and deep reflection on the reality, historical and necessarily political, that surrounds them, detaching them from the masses to be, individually, aware of the complexity, but also the taste, of existing.
Rome, January 28, 2010
De Lorenzo
