TWELVE PROPOSALS FOR THE FUTURE OF ART

As a new year is about to enter and, with it, the formal questioning about the Future to come usually takes place, I'll leave you, as I see it, twelve proposals for the future of art:

1. Art must be, first of all, the search for the Beautiful. Even representing the grotesque and the ugly, art can be beautiful. Art must be the expression of the Beautiful.

Goya, drawing from Los Caprichos collection

2. Art must aim for Excelence, both technically and conceptually. Being the expression of the aesthetics and of Human Thought, it cannot be feeble our pale when representing a concept. The exageration that is needed to enhance the concept must be obtained through excelence.

Michelangelo, detail from Dawn and Dusk.

 3. Art must be Symbolic. Reproduction should be no more than a tool to reach representation. The detail of representation must be used for no other purpose than that of creating a symbol.

Norman Rockwell, detail.

4. Art must be Daring. Art should not seek refuge in whatever is commonly accepted. Like science, art should travel to the extreme of Human Thought, beyond its bonderies and symbolize it with no restraint.

Scene from Amarcord, Fellini

5. Art must be Free. Art should not be restrained by the convencional techniques of representation. All techniques of representaion, both conventional and unconventional, can be used for the purpose of creating a work of art. Also, art must operate freely within a political or a social context.

Scene from The Strange Affair of Angelica, Manoel de Oliveira

6. Art must be Timeless. Even using as tools the available techniques of its time, an artist should create a work that can be understood, without the need of translation or adaptation, by a public from another Age.

Scene from Brief Encounter, David Lean

7. Art must be Uncorrupted. When tepresenting corruption, the artist cannot be, himself, the object of the representation unless in knowledge of his own fault, recognizing it as a fault. The public must sense the uncorrupted artist behind the fault that is represented. If not, the work becomes not a symbol, nor a representation, but the reproduction of a model.

Patricia Highsmith

8. Art must be Manipulative. The purpose of art is to create an aesthetic and conceptual effect on the public. Therefore, all tools of representation serve the purpose of manipulating the aesthetics emotions of the public. In this case, again, the artist must be an outsider to the emotions he intends to provique in others, while creating the work, even if those emotions can be used as tools in the creative process. Only by manipulation of technique and of concept can the artist create an effect.

Nikolai Gogol

9. Art must be Equillibrium. Even in exhageration of the representation, every element in a work of art must be in perfect balance.

Leon Tolstoy

10. Art must be Dichotomus. Both in concept and aesthetics, art plays in oposition, creating contarst in the composition. Every flash of light must accentuate darkness, every virtue must be opposed to a fault, no happiness should be felt without a share of unhappiness. Good and evil, light and darkness form a contrast that will give shape to the object that is represented.

Ludwig van Beethoven

11. Art must be Interdisciplinary. An artist can make use of subjects and thechniques of other artists in order to create a new one. Reality feeds art and art feeds a newborn work of art. No art should seek isolation from other arts or from reality, for imagination grows through knowledge of variety.

Piotr Ilitch Tchaikovsky

12. Finally, Art must be Original. Even if a subject or a technique has been used prior to the creation of a work of art, each individual -- similar in species to their fellow individuals -- is unique and each action will not be repeated. Therefore, each approach carries its own originality. Repetition or imitation must never be the purpose of art.

George Gershwin