"Art exists that one recover the sensation of life"

As the new year approaches, I like to reflect on the one just past, the distance traveled and the road still ahead. As a creator, I am constantly trying to understand why I make art and why it seems like one of the few things that brings meaning to the world.

Here I want to share with you a recent read that put so many clever words on what I always felt toward the current mainstream state of contemporary art, while trying to restore a definition of what an authentic artistic quest should thrive for.

In The Master and his Emissary, the Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, British psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist deals with the specialist hemispheric functioning of the brain, explaining how and why our left and right hemispheres bring about different -sometime collaborative, but mostly conflictual- relationships and views of the world. After explaining in detail the differences between the two in the first part of the book, in the second part, the author goes on to analyze how the prevalence of one or the other hemisphere has shaped cultural and artistic production in the Western world from Antiquity up until today, to conclude that the evil plaguing our time is that we live in societies where the "emissary" (the left hemisphere) has come to rule in place of the master (the right hemisphere).

In a subsection entitled "The problem of art in the modern world", McGilchrist decries the self-referential nature and deprivation of meaning we often experience in front of modern (and contemporary!) art, writing:

"The Aesthetes’ creed of ‘art for art’s sake’*, while it sounds like an elevation of the value of art, in that it denies that it should have an ulterior purpose beyond itself -so far, so good - is a devaluation of art, in that it marginalizes its relationship with life. In other words, it sacrifices the betweenness of art with life, instead allowing art to become self-reflexively fulfilled.

In the process of creation, the artist’s plane of focus needs to be somewhere beyond and through the work of art, not just on its being art, otherwise it becomes less than art. In viewing the artwork, we too are carried beyond the work of art, precisely because the artist was not focused on the art as such, but in something beyond it; and that is part of its greatness, by which, as it might seem paradoxically, we come to judge the work of art solely on its merits as a work of art - not, in other words, for some ulterior purpose for which art is being used. We come to see not the work of art, but the world according to the artwork".

(*which was the motto of modern art and artists)

"The work of art is more like a living being than a thing. That our encounter with that being matters and means something depends on the fact that any living being is in itself whole and coherent, and forms part of a larger context in which we too are involved and engaged. If it is itself experienced as fragmented, incoherent, decontextualized and alien, it ceases to live. It also becomes merely opaque - the eye rests on the wrong plane, the plane of the work itself, rather than passing through it. The work of art no longer succeeds in letting us see the world anew, as Merleau-Ponty* had suggested, but obtrudes itself as the focus of our attention."

(*A main French representative of the phenomenologist philosophical movement that emphasized our "relationship" to the world)

Further away, the author ends up citing Viktor Shklovsky, a Russian literary theorist and critic, to beautifully capture the purpose of art:

"Art exists that one recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known…"