Letters to Ukraine – 30

What is the best way to say goodbye? Often, goodbyes bring a sudden flash of all the things one might have said. I wish I’d spoken, for instance, on how far contemporary art should be ‘contemporary’: do modern artists strike a good balance between incorporating present circumstances and revealing the past? Are curators, generally, overly concerned with generating and cataloguing ‘aesthetic history’? I’d hoped, too, to discuss Ernst Fischer: “Art is necessary… to recognise and change the world. But art is also necessary by virtue of the magic inherent in it.” Let me add something to that: life lived without love and compassion, without that magic, is only a form of survival, a civilisation without these qualities merely animal. Another question: why do we prefer human pets to visionaries? Everywhere, people adore cutesy stand-up comedians who titillate the very world they wryly or (sometimes) insightfully mock; but, by allowing us to laugh at our predicaments, at our contradictions, does the hard-hitting comedian stimulate self-awareness or consolidate the idea of society as something we spectate upon rather than change? Alas, time! For the poet Frank O’Hara, “the only way not to leave is to go.” Therefore, without leaving, I take my leave, I go. Shanti.
 © Mario Petrucci, 2013