Am I a Work of Art?

We think and act as if our idea of a work of art were absolute, not relative to a specific time and place. And yet we know that just a few thousand kilometers from here, the art world does not exist. By art world, I mean an ordered system of positions and roles, corresponding to precise spaces, actions, and expectations. A thousand years ago on our peninsula, art served a society integrated with religion. What we now consider a masterpiece of medieval art was a communication tool organically tied to a religious worldview.

In fact, it’s only recently that the West attributes the gift of artistry to individuals and worships artworks as such. With secularization, works are venerated as cult objects, and their authors become stars. Even the terminology used is borrowed from religion. Silence is observed in museums, though it’s unclear why. In a library, it makes sense—noise disrupts reading. But is silence always necessary to concentrate and enjoy a visual artwork?

In our world, art, having taken the place of religion, now lives primarily through its relational character. It is recognized only by a community capable of appreciating it.

That’s why we’re not surprised by a monochrome, a slash, a urinal, or a row of stones. That’s why we smile at those who say: “But I could do that too!”

If art is a value shared by a community, it is also an exclusive value that alienates because it is foreign to the majority. I’m not saying that art should chase numbers, unanimity, or consensus. It’s not a political party. Art is not elitist by choice—it finds itself to be so out of necessity. However, it unkindly excludes those who are ignorant of it, who feel mocked. Its autonomy unfortunately comes at the cost of a detachment. Art pays for its freedom with a sharp separation from everyday life.

Once, art was intimately linked to craft techniques developed over time and learned gradually. It was tied to conventions that, while not immutable, were widely recognized.

Contemporary art, based on an excessive appreciation of the unique and the original, has dismissed anything made in the school of, in the manner of, according to a style. In doing so, individuals with compositional skill—often virtuosos in manual technique and capable of communicating with the immediacy and wonder of art—have been excluded or marginalized.

With the project La nuda umanità, Gabriele Di Matteo, through Armando della Vittoria—concretely embodied by the talented Salvatore Russo (a Neapolitan copyist)—and with the assistance of Loredana Filice, revives the illustrative, didactic, and interpretative vocation of painting, to present salient moments in human history.

Di Matteo, who has long worked on the figure of the author and his doubles, on the unique and the repeated, on manual skill and reproduction, here brings to light a popular sensibility toward the idea of art, introducing a doubt. It is the same doubt that flashes through Salvatore Russo’s mind when he, exhausted after a day of painting, asks himself, incredulously and spontaneously: “Am I a work of art?”

Giulio Ciavoliello