Carlos Basualdo, member of the scientific board of the Contemporary art festival with Angela Vettese and Pier Luigi Sacco, answers to three questions about the role contemporary art has in crisis times.

1.What kind of impact will the crisis have - if you think it will have any - on the contemporary art work? Positive or negative? In the actual debate, especially in the economic one, many people say the crisis is not only an obstacle, but could also be an extraordinary opportunity. In which way and in which range that could be valid also for the practices of construction, production and fruition?

The question is hard to answer for the simple reason that it is not clear to me what the specific nature of this crisis is. It seems, so far, as the opportunity for both a continuation of the neo-liberal economic politics that have characterized business –and so much more, unfortunately- in the so-called West for more than three decades now, or the beginning of the process of its dismantling. So far, we have seen little of the second possibility, so dramatic changes in the cultural field seem a bit remote.

The neo-liberal politics of the last three decades have produced, in any case, a deep crisis in cultural production, one that affects the entire world in different, but quite dramatic, degrees. It is hard to say that any crisis is positive even if artists, writers and people in what is most general and specific about them always respond in innovative –and thus “creative”- ways. ‘Da adversidade vivemos” (From adversity we live) wrote the Brazilian artists Hélio Oiticica in the mid-sixties, but by saying that he did not imply that we should resign ourselves to adversity and tolerate it like a necessary evil. On the contrary, we live to resist it and overcome it. To make and to make in an innovative way is what we do to exist and to continue to exist in hope. A crisis is thus both an end and a beginning.

2.Can the today’s art work show an exit startegy for the crisis even in other fields of contemporary society, in a mutual exchange and influential relationship?

An artwork does not indicate ways to escape a crisis, it is in itself the way out. It operates by both subjecting us to the conditions of its making and by providing us with a language that overcomes the limitations of the context in which it originated. An artwork is an artwork as a model for life. It is life itself, condensed -and given.

3.What are the aims, the dreams, the worries of art in crisis times?

To survive in beauty.

Carlos Basualdo

Carlos Basualdo, member of the scientifc board of the Contemporary art festival, is Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Curator of Contemporary Art at Philadelphia Museom of Art and teaches at IUAV University, Venice, Italy, Faculty of Design and Arts, History of Exhibition.

- published on exibart onpaper #61 in the section Cpensiamo -