#reform!
Paolo Restuccia

Throughout the Reformation Year 2017, this site offers trendsetters and thought leaders a place to present their notions of change and innovation. What are the potentials and needs for current and future-oriented “reformations”?

Reforming Arts: a Thesis

What we need is an Art Reform.  And by art I mean all the forms and expressions humans develop to embellish their lives, delving deep into it, seeking an understanding beyond science, religion, law and philosophy. Music, painting, novels and stories, poetry and performances, graffiti and body art, dance and ballet are ways of coming to terms with the extreme unintelligible complexity of our nature.’ If the world had a meaning I would not write’ said Jean Cocteau, so art means questioning one’s self on the meaning of the world.

Fine, you might answer – so what needs to be reformed? The answer is the value we attribute to art.  Each and every artistic expression is considered important exclusively in reason of its economic value.  Music is paid according to broadcasting time, so much a minute, painters have their ratings, actors are worth their fees, a novel is worth the copies it sells so as to please the publisher and top the best seller list, a film has to break the box office to cover the producers’ astronomical costs.
 
You might object that there has always been a market, so what?
True enough, Renaissance artists worked on commission, but no one considered them great just because they earned a lot. Motzart is said to have died poor but no one would consider him a middling musician because of it. The necessary Reform is to consider art as an attempt to understand our existence, based on pure aestethetics.