Art is political

Speaking about the militant art of Pablo Picasso, the great critic Mario De Micheli wrote that his masterpiece Guernica ‘was a demonstration of how much history, how much presence, and how much participation art could and should live.’ It is no coincidence that, even today, Guernica vividly embodies the drama, the scream, and the roar of every war and every era. A manifesto against the evil of any conflict.

If it is true that art, elevated to a form of testimony and denunciation, has the extraordinary power to shake consciences and transcend time with its universal messages, it is also necessary for the museum to listen to the world around it and its urgencies.

A museum that hides behind its institutional role would die quickly and abort its mission, just as a museum that takes sides with radical positions would lose its objectivity and its weight as a reference point for the community.

A place of culture must, instead, position itself at the center of the debate’s exploration. Like an antenna, it receives the circulating information and, like a megaphone, amplifies it. It receives and returns, obviously using the filter of art to process the data and communicate it. If art is political because it often effectively represents contemporary issues, then the museum is a political space because it hosts such reflections and disseminates them.

At the MAN, we demonstrated this by paying homage to Picasso’s Guernica (involving, among other things, the wonderful weavers from Sarule in a female tribute to the pain of mothers in war), or by collaborating with the historical archives of Odessa for the exhibition dedicated to the Potemkin Stairs, just a few months before the outbreak of the conflict in Ukraine.

We have also done this recently, denouncing the abuses of genetic manipulation and the profit-driven logic of the food industry in such a fragile moment as this, when we are completely rethinking our relationship with the planet and its resources. The MAN thus engages in politics, in line with its civic and civil function.

Chiara Gatti