Artification of crafts and contemporary art

Omar Galliani and the gold leaf

Abstract

In the last 50 years, the work of art has left the framework in which it has been fixed for a long time and has approached everyday life, so it has become performative. This has led to the consideration of objects and artistic processes created to perform other functions. Artification, as in the case of craftsmanship, can also be considered as the revenge of the culturally low, the popular, the plebeian, the anonymous and the plural, the necessary and the useful, or what by definition is excluded from the inclined aesthetic enjoyment. With the current of the Anacronists, presented in 1984 by Maurizio Calvesi at the Venice Biennale, artists such as Mariani, Samorì, Galliani and Verdi stood out for the recovery and reworking of artistic techniques, especially Renaissance. The works of art of the Anachronists or Citationists, thanks to the recovery of some craft techniques related to the world of painting, demonstrate the will to leave the cultural spaces where they were kept to occupy social spaces in which they are presented as artificial, manipulation of artistic elements, closed relationship between the artistic object and the social actions where they are produced. The work, then, as in the case of Galliani's "golden leaves", becomes an expression of a social change, born as a set of reflections that contribute to defining the changes of the artistic phenomenon in the social and as a social fact that, in recent decades, has been analyzed as a new
paradigm to refer to in the analysis of artistic and social changes.