Permanent revolution, revolution of money

Permanent revolution, revolution of money

It was supposed to be the end of nigredo, the avant-garde, the last stage, the final self-destruction of the West that chose the devil as its archetype
but a losing character remains a loser forever
the devil lost the fight against another devil
a dark being who has taken over every nook and cranny of the Western soul
Mammon, the god of wealth
and so instead of rebuilding itself from its rubble and being reborn from its ashes, the liquefied West has been trapped in a loop
a loop contained in the word ‘revolution’
today it almost seems like a positive term, it’s full of people who want to ‘make revolution’
words are fossils, if you study them they tell their true story
revolution comes from the Latin verb ‘revolvo’, this verb until recently told of the motion of a celestial body around the sun, a star or a planet
‘De revolutionibus orbium coelestium’, “On the revolution of the celestial bodies”, wrote Nicholas Copernicus in 1543
and say they would later speak of a ‘scientific revolution’.
the motion of the celestial bodies always revolves around and returns to its starting point
when we make a revolution we change everything so that everything goes back to exactly where it was before
That’s how it was in the English Revolution, the French Revolution, the American Revolution.
powerful people lost power, other powerful people took power

the logic of power remains unscathed
one has to be a true anarchist, a person who refuses to take on the logic of power, to get out of this logic
and to do so one must understand another word
evolution
from the Latin evolvere, to unfold the papyrus in order to read, in a certain sense to unveil something that is already written
Charles Darwin understood this difference well:
‘There is something grand in this conception of life, with its various forces, originally imprinted by the Creator in a few forms, or in a single form; and in the fact that, while our planet has continued to rotate according to the immutable law of gravity, from such a simple beginning innumerable forms, beautiful and marvellous, have evolved and continue to evolve’.
instead of evolving we have continued to make revolutions, to revolve around the same dynamics and aesthetics planted in the flesh of the West by the avant-gardes
the brilliant avant-gardes, executors of the nigredo, have become the only reference and the only horizon of so-called contemporary art
and we have continued and continue to live in an era of continuous revolutions
there is no evolution
and meanwhile the other devil, Mammon, ate everything and turned it into money
in the logic of money
art became the vanguard of unbridled capitalism
without a divine dimension, without beauty, without form, art has become simply a set of goods to be bought and sold

there is no longer an aesthetic criterion to define art, anything that finds a buyer within the art system is art
the most intelligent – Arthur Danto, but Hegel had already realised this – have spoken of the ‘end of art’ and placed all this in ‘post-art’
without soul, without the divine, art is no longer art
art without beauty is like a religion without god: useless and meaningless
but in the meantime, the system was spreading like wildfire, giving economic value to pieces and artists who, as time passed, were moving further and further away from what was art
Andy Warhol realised this in 1964
the Brillo boxes, reproductions of consumer goods
art had already identified itself with the market
and thanks to the logic of revolution we continue to revolve around this logic, without finding a way out
destined to remain in the Brillo box forever, without being aware of it
or having it, but not finding an alternative
and so art is the mirror of the soul of a society, or rather of its absence
art denounces, criticises, even criticises itself, disrupts, divides

just as in society, the self-destructive drive that with Marx had pitted poor against rich now pits women against men, humans against nature, humans against themselves, in the race of who is more broken down and isolated from the rest of the system
entire generations who grew up not knowing that art existed and was not the nihilistic, depressed, self-destructive and capitalist product they find themselves in front of at art fairs
that then the fairs were about chickens, beets or bolts
here, art has become the same thing
but it costs so much

permanent revolution