Will beauty save us?

«Terrible but wonderful». This was one of the comments written in the guestbook of the MAN last summer. 

«It makes you think and moves you» another one said. 

«It leaves you speechless and shows what the role of a museum in the community should be». 

The exhibition in question was “Diorama. Generation Earth,” dedicated to the unequal relationship between man and the natural world. 

There were lost paradises on display, extinct animals recreated with artificial intelligence, food industry waste transformed into trophies of deceptive flowers, uncomfortable hybridizations, and mutant creatures resulting from genetic manipulation. Tough stuff.

The risk – by touching the raw nerves of our society – was that it could provoke an outcry of disgust and criticism from animal rights activists or nostalgic reactionaries of the Anthropocene.

Instead, with nearly 20,000 visitors, the rare censorious voices were swallowed up by a chorus of poignant, engaged, and painful approvals. A seventeen-year-old girl, coming down the staircase, under the gigantic earth egg suspended in mid-air that simulated an ideal return to nature by mixing our mortal remains with the seeds of a plant, sighed, “It shakes my conscience.”

Perhaps, in the aftermath of this unexpected and surprising result, we should reflect again on the role of exhibitions, on the very meaning of displaying, which – in the face of a daily life shaken by the shared feeling of precariousness – cannot limit itself to celebrating the past, but should strive to project its legacy into a dimension of current relevance and presence. While environmentalist policies succumb to economic interests, we should ask artists to do what Bruegel did with his Tower of Babel, or Goya with the etchings in his series of *Caprichos* and *The Disasters of War*; or Munch with *The Scream*, which shook Europe at the dawn of modernity, and still Dix and Grosz with their violent denunciations of the horrors of conflict.

Not necessarily militant or didactic art. But aware. Capable of channeling the necessary content of our time through the filter of poetry and beauty. Because the public (as evidenced by the declining numbers of mainstream exhibitions…) does not want to be comforted by the security of the past, but is asking for proposals and visions as antidotes to the fragility of the future.

Chiara Gatti