Can art change the world?

In an era marked by environmental, social and existential crises, Art can still change the world? According to some intellectuals and professionals in the sector, he can not only do it, but he must. AND an urgency That makes its way no longer only in academic circles or in museums, but in the streets, in schools, in the neighborhoods. It is the art that assumes the responsibility of the present, which refuses to remain confined in decoration or aesthetic, to transform into a space for connection and social regeneration.

We also talked about it during the last Design Weekin ours Garden of ideas. There was also Michele Cerruti BuT, sector expert and coordinator of the Unidee Academy, the Higher Training Institute of Pistoletto Foundation. We reached it on the phone, just in the days when new research was released based on the “curative” potential of art: researchers of the Bicocca and the University State in fact they drafted a study, on a sample of 400 Milanese, made in collaboration with the Gam and the Museum of Natural History of Milanaccording to which a visit to the museum is a true art therapy that It can loosen the stress of 25%.

Francesco Andreoli

A fact that is not surprising Cerruti But, for which “The future of art is society and vice versa». But it specifies: «For over twenty -five years the Pistoletto Foundation has been working on this idea: art can no longer be limited to the self -referential circuit of museums and galleries that guarantee its symbolic survival, but but must leave the system. This shift is necessary to make art an instrument of social engagement, capable of responding to the most urgent challenges of our time ». It is no longer enough to remain in the context of the “art critic” or the organization of the exhibitions: art, to truly change society, must be “in the examples it proposes». The Pistoletto Foundation, for example, is among the promoters of Visible projecta world archive that makes hundreds of artistic practices visible that concretely transform societies: from urban regeneration to environmental sustainability, to social justice. «The institutions, concludes Cerruti But, have the task of working in these transformations, not only documenting them, but becoming places of learning and experimentation. In Italy, the potential exists, but must be activated. Why an absolute freedom of art also implies absolute responsibility».

Giulia Virgara

So art can really change the world?

“Art has a certain transformative powernot only decorative ». Nadia Righidirector of Diocesan Museum of Milan That ever saves when there is to act to promote and spread culture, he tells us: “At first glance it may seem paradoxical to seek an idea of ​​social change in an institution like the one I direct, the diocesan museum, which houses mostly art of the past. But it is precisely from this awareness of the roots, the future can be built. Only a certain man of those who are can move towards the future», Underlining how the museum, every museum, must help anyone, none excluded, from young people to the elderly, from the disabled to people with fragility, to understand their history, and from there restart.

Jacopo Benassi 19432022, Courtesy the artist and Francesca Minini, Milan, photo Andrea Rossetti: the work is exhibited at the Diocesan Museum in a direct confrontation with the masterpiece The deposition of Christ from the cross of Tintoretto

© 2022 Andrea Rossetti

“Art – even the ancient one,” says Nadia Righi, “is capable of arousing great questions. And from those questions a more conscious, more interesting life may arise, less folded into the newspaper. I remember that During the pandemicthe museum, through many seminars and online conferences, brought art to people’s homes, showing how much an inner resource can be useful to face a moment of solitude and fear for the future “. Nadia Righi then quotes Pope Francis: «When the heart of man changes, art changes history “.

“Art, in this perspective, is not only an aesthetic experience, but a spiritual and civil force. It does not serve to decorate, but to transform, to arouse questions. And the same », adds Nadia Righi,« applies to photography (by the way: soon the Diocesan Museum of Milan He will host an interesting photographic exhibition of the great American documentary maker from 13 May Dorothea Lange who told America between the 1930s and 1960s).