Total freedom is a symptom of irrelevance
Beyond the usual victimist whining, in Italy the contemporary artist enjoys a freedom their predecessors would not even have dreamed of—because contemporary art barely interests anyone anymore.
They no longer answer to popes, princes, or totalizing patrons. When they encounter limitations, it is only due to the petty-bourgeois mindset and lack of funds of ignorant commissioners. Most of the time, they do not have to justify their work before a higher symbolic order or a cultural elite in which they were formed, but before a PDF call for submissions.
They are free—but completely ignored and disconnected.
That’s why contemporary art today counts for nothing.
Group photo of Dadaist artists, 1921 - (Louis Aragon, Theodore Fraenkel, Paul Eluard, Emmanuel Faÿ, Paul Dermée,
Philippe Soupault, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Tristan Tzara (with monocle), Celine Arnauld, Francis Picabia, André Breton)
During the Renaissance, the artist was not an individual, not an absolute self, but part of an elite of scientists and artists, inside a larger machine, with a clear objective: the will to power.
The relationship with the Catholic Church was not a constraint, but a function. Art built the world, organized visions, disciplined the gaze—working in sync with science and religion. Modernism broke that alignment. It turned the artist into a fake rebel: individualistic, slightly unhinged, lost inside themselves.
Visual artists stopped being technicians, scientists, theorists, intellectuals.
They chose marginality—and got it.
This is the real fault of the historical avant-gardes: more conceptual than formal.
With bourgeois art, the chain connecting intellectual elites to real, temporal power was broken.
Instead of rebuilding it, contemporary Italian art chose the easier route: turning victimist irrelevance into identity, solipsism into style.
Individualism became the default setting.
But Italy once built something else entirely—communitarian systems that reshaped the world for centuries.
Today, the artist doesn’t plan. At best, they complain, miss deadlines, show up late. They are seen as eccentric, harmless, vaguely unproductive—because eccentricity and rebellion are now mainstream aesthetics.
Take Maurizio Cattelan: once sharp, now trapped in his own “Boomer art,” a meme of himself running on repetition.
“There’s nothing left to laugh at,” David Foster Wallace said.
The parents came back to the party—and now everything has to be cleaned up.
Contemporary art is fully present inside institutions—biennials, exhibitions, critical discourse—and totally absent in reality. It doesn’t shape anything outside its own closed loop. Often, not even inside it. Even its critical tools have been neutralized. It no longer provokes, not even in the most naïve viewer. No more shock, no more Stendhal syndrome. The market fills the vacuum.
Artist Jayakumar 2 at CPIM State conference Artists camp
(Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci.
(Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
The truth is simple: the artist hasn’t been pushed out of the system.
The system just stopped needing them.
It has its own art now—memes, social media, political aesthetics, algorithmic culture. A total mix of every language, every form, every style.
Art didn’t disappear.
It migrated.
And today, anyone with a smartphone can produce it.
So who is art for now?
Other artists. The insiders. The mediocre.
Any field that loses relevance becomes a dumping ground—for the incapable, the corrupt, the directionless. The system artists attack is a closed loop, irrelevant to the real system, which has already moved on.
It’s a game for the bored children of wealth: the family outlier becomes an artist, a curator, a gallerist. The goal isn’t impact.
It’s to look intelligent.
To build an existential alibi.
The biggest mistake is thinking art lacks attention or necessity.
The space is wide open.
No one is taking it.
Elites are not recognized into existence.
They impose themselves.
No need for protection, funding, or paternalistic policy. What’s needed is a mutation: becoming necessary again.
Not decorative.
Infrastructural.
This breaks the artist’s social routine.
They no longer enter the places where reality is shaped—companies, institutions, infrastructures, labs. They used to go there to shape history, not decorate it.
Now they’re locked out.
Post-history killed the artist.
Art imploded with it.
Impact requires exposure, conflict, risk. It means getting political, building alliances, forming real lobbies across art, science, and technology.
The will to power doesn’t appear.
It is pursued.
As long as artists produce only objects, they remain irrelevant.
They must write. Theorize. Construct frameworks.
There are moments in history when a theory matters more than a painting.
Art doesn’t need more works.
It needs power.
Works circulate.
Ideas govern.
Narratives, infrastructures—that’s where influence lives.
The real architectures today are invisible. Theory becomes aesthetics. It enters society, politics, behavior.
Like Futurism once did, shaping a century.
What we need now is a new prompt for the West.
An artist who doesn’t produce written thought is an involuntary craftsman.
And the system has never feared craftsmen.
They have no theories, no visions, no models of life. They don’t challenge power. They decorate around it.
So what’s the move?
Build alliances with companies seeking cultural positioning—not sponsorships.
Enter decision-making spaces—urban planning, education, public communication—not as decorators, but as vision producers.
Work with political parties. Schools. Research centers. Tech sectors.
Build independent platforms. Cultural infrastructures. Operational networks between artists, scientists, technologists—with the ambition to decide, not just participate.
Act in public space with real goals.
And above all: dominate new media. Especially AI.
No more communities that self-soothe.
Organizations that act.
The Renaissance wasn’t luck.
It was alignment—artistic, scientific, and political elites converging around power.
If an elite is to exist again, it must be built—deliberately, structurally, aggressively.
Not scenes.
Systems.
Not comfort.
Conflict.
Because without conflict, there is no power.
And without power, there is no power.
The contemporary artist is marginal because they are harmless.
They no longer produce thought—only objects.
And harmlessness, unlike censorship, is a choice.
It is the final form of self-censorship.
Credits to: Vincenzo Profeta
https://profetalandia.substack.com/p/the-new-italian-artistic-elite-or
*All images on this blog are used for educational and critical purposes only. Credits and copyrights belong to their respective owners and authors. The gallery remains at the disposal of the rightsholders for any corrections, specific citations, or immediate removals upon request.
