AR:
How would you define the chances and needs of art in the social society you live in?

SI:
Artists are beginning to melt into the figures of “experts”: engineers, communicators, critics and curators (did you notice? in the contemporary era they seem to be artists more than the artists themselves)…. Artists are becoming scientists. In the past artists often were alchemists (and this is a hint on the total disappearance of mysticism from our society). Human beings need a mystical dimension, a transcendency. In the past they had mysticism, and art was an illuminated view on it (think of the ecstasy of making art, or the work/study/research on materials and minerals). Nowadays we’re superficial and lost, so we think an engineer (or any other form of scientist or technician) can bring us to illumination and ecstasy. This is perfectly fit for our contemporary life models, where illumination has changed meaning and has become a fact of the contingent life, associated to consumism and the like, and is now a series of short-lasting orgasms derived from achievement and/or ownership. Art, as expression of the mystical (in a broad sense) domain in which it lives, produces. Call it entertainment, call it generator of value, call it need for expression: artists have a view on society that is privileged. They can invent and express. They are actually the only ones that can.