from a poem by Fred Moten and a reading of Rolling Stone.
I recently read an article in Rolling Stone Italia that sparked this introductory piece in the first issue of the classiche armonie magazine, out in September.
It was about Leica (one of the most magical objects I’ve ever handled), the celebration of 100 years since the birth of the famous cameras that revolutionised photography. In a passage from the article, photojournalist Gabriele Micalizzi talks with Andrea Pacella about Artificial Intelligence and photography. I will extrapolate a couple of points from their discourse that I want to apply to music and art in a broader sense.
There are cycles in life. We are overwhelmed by the excitement, which goes hand in hand with terror, of artificial intelligence. I am sure that in history these hysterics and amazement at new discoveries are repeated in circles. They feed on ignorance and naivety and fade in their arrogance and aims to revolutionise the world. Some things, however, never change. Or rather, they change all the time, because if you don’t change, you don’t live, but they remain true to their fundamentals. Photography is certainly among them, as are music, literature, the visual arts.
…people need photography. It is a means of expression that bypasses language and culture, people can communicate this way without having to know it thoroughly.
Here Pacella hits a fundamental point. Some means of expression are inexhaustible because they have their roots deep in neutral territories where there are no language wars going on or where cultures compete.
True art must have two characteristics: it must be comprehensible to all, and it must be incomprehensible to all. A great work is such when it succeeds in communicating and touching on a first level of analysis, but at the same time possesses multiple ramifications, which are then what make it immortal. Music does and does not need explanations at the same time, as does photography. They are universal languages that everyone can use to communicate without necessarily knowing them deeply. People need them, even and especially people who do not realise this.
So everything changes but things remain the same. Artificial Intelligence in my opinion will increasingly legitimise photography as pure art. Just as photography has done for painting or sculpture, spreading them.
A few months ago I took a walk around Basel and took some photographs with a Leica Monochrom, which I will include here and there in this piece. My idea was to make a simple everyday action into a work of art. This sentence in the Rolling Stone article provoked me to share the thought that went into making a human act. An intellectual and artistic movement aimed at achieving something that remains exclusive to human beings and that no artificial intelligence will ever replace. On the contrary, it will spread and reinforce art as a pure element of our society. I believe that our obstinacy is going in the wrong direction, in allowing forms of anti-culture or culture with too easy a consumption to flourish.
In culture itself, our obstinacy often goes in the wrong direction. I believe that in classical music, for example, forces and gaze are turned in the opposite direction to what should be natural, to preserve the past rather than make it current and look to the present but above all to the future. I do not want my tenacity as an artist to wear out and fade into nothingness. For a few years now I have had these thoughts, already partly recounted in the booklet of last year’s classiche armonie festival. As time goes by, these little niggles in my head intensify and make me more and more uneasy.
There is something deeply wrong and viscerally rotten in the world of classical music.
I often compare the different arts, and sometimes I feel that “cultured” music (terms that are increasingly pissing me off, because in the end they mean nothing) is not treated as a real art but as a mere technical exercise. By the musicians, not by the people who enjoy it (less and less, but that’s our fault, indeed, the fake musician-lovers). One of the biggest misunderstandings in the classical music world is related to the greatness of the works played, which in themselves are masterpieces and therefore sound good in one way or another. The problem, however, is this: people will never have a deep connection with these great works if they are played with the ass instead of the soul.
The destiny of classical music is black as long as it remains in the hands of these dinosaurs of academies and competitions (who have never understood and done anything about music, except move their fingers quickly) who feed other little dinosaurs, their pupils or the pupils of their friends, who at 20 years old think as if they were 150. Everyone is talking about art, musicality, deep connection to the masterpieces played, but in the end the performances are all the same. And they suck. I often dread the monuments I have to play and even get emotional at home while studying them. I don’t understand how these characters can lack so much respect for such gigantic artistic expressions.
At the end of the day, the solution is not easy to find, although the audience immediately understands when a performance is sincere, and from this we should learn from other genres of music, where there is more spontaneity, truth (not always, but no one is perfect).
We need to recover the universal language mentioned earlier, which perhaps lies not in the medium but in the message, which is at the heart of every artistic act.
In an art gallery in Basel, where there are super cool fanzines, I found “Cheat Sheets” by Tiger Tateishi, the legend.
I don’t want to be a painter, or an illustrator, or a cartoonist. What I want is incessant anarchy.
Said the mighty Tiger.
I want to live my artistic life according to the rules of the great Tateishi. His illustrations are beautiful and his work reflects his idea, as well as that of other greats, of art in constant motion and anarchic in the purest sense of the word. Everything changes, evolves, regresses. Every element of our life in the broadest sense can be seen from so many points of view. Nothing is only one way, not even classical music (sorry dinosaurs if I don’t think like you). I want to be surprised, to see something new, every time I come across an artistic expression. And I want to start fighting against this view that everyone should specialise in one field and stay there. The only way to move forward is to experiment, to look around, to learn from other artistic fields, in depth. And not to study too much, otherwise you damage the essence of things. Purity is always contaminated by too much studying.
Having the widest possible horizons helps not only to better understand one’s work, but to have a deeper connection with the outside world and the people in it. Every great artist must have broad views and abundant common sense, with a pinch of madness, which never hurts when it is positive and does not lead to human failure.
To recover the universal language.
My invitation is therefore to strive for incessant anarchy, continuous movement.
I will try. Will you?
Exclusive preview from the opening article of classiche armonie magazine 2025.
Quotes from:
umberto beccaria 