If you don’t take care of art, art will take care of your life
Trump-Musk, artificial intelligence, and pop culture: how contemporary art reshapes reality.
"I could have done that too. I don’t understand this piece, it’s too conceptual." These are typical phrases heard in contemporary art museums. The real issue, however, is that since the 1990s, contemporary art has moved beyond museum walls and now exists all around us. So, if we don’t engage with contemporary art, the worst of it will engage with us—it will come knocking at our door.
Mobile Skin, various materials, Guggenheim Bilbao, Luca Rossi 2023
Trump and Musk represent the duo of the moment, demonstrating daily how art is invading our lives without anyone truly noticing. But even the "Tinder generation," accustomed to existing as nothing more than a phone screen and trapped in Andy Warhol’s colorful Marilyn Monroe prints, is oblivious to it. Becoming an exaggerated media surface didn’t turn out well for the unfortunate icon of the ’60s. By now, every political and personal issue has a creative and artistic dimension that can be as entertaining as it is dangerously deceptive.
Comedian, the controversial artwork by Maurizio Cattelan, consists of a fresh banana taped to a wall. Courtesy of FMT.com
To further complicate and confuse matters, artificial intelligence has made giant leaps forward, and the video of Trump redefining life in Gaza is just the tip of a far more unsettling iceberg—one we do not yet know and cannot yet see.
Only by training our eyes and minds—something we can do within the world of art—can we protect ourselves and recognize the dangers hidden beneath the surface of things.
Every work of art, whether compelling or banal, is always a testament to a particular way of seeing the world, an attitude we can apply every day when we step outside, but also when we remain within our private spaces.Don’t think that’s the case? You’re right.
Mobile Skin, various materials, Guggenheim Bilbao, Luca Rossi 2023
. Looking at the latest major contemporary art events—Biennials, Documenta, and Manifesta—art seems relegated to nothing more than an innocuous interior design solution or a tool for financial speculation. The most pressing question of 2024 has been: how much can a banana cost?
This marginalization and irrelevance of art have very specific causes, perhaps rooted in the powerful forces that prefer to keep us silent and obedient—just as a recent song by Måneskin put it. And even they, symbolically, have now been reduced to silence.
Cover image: Donald Trump e Elon Musk, from FMT (AP pic).
“Luca Rossi” has been described by Fabio Cavallucci as the most interesting artistic personality in Italy, the ‘art world's pain in the ass’ (Nicolas Ballario) and the ‘new Vanessa Beecroft’ (Giacinto Di Pietrantonio). Since 2009, “Luca Rossi,” an open collective, blogger, critic, curator, artist, and controversial figure in the art system, has been trying to stimulate more critical discussion on a daily basis in the field of contemporary art as a subject that could play a fundamental role in our present. From his own critical reflections, very popular in the art world, has descended unconventional artistic planning, popularization and training projects with the creation in 2016 of the “Luca Rossi Art Academy & Coaching.” Some “critical nodes” developed over the years by Luca Rossi (“Evolved Ikea,” “Young Indiana Jones Syndrome” and “Grandparents Parents Foundation,” etc.) have entered the language of Italian art and changed the perspective and vision of many practitioners and others. In 2014, famous art critic Angela Vettese said that since reading Luca Rossi's texts, she has decided to no longer devote herself to art practice but only to theory.
