I was struck by a brief remark by Massimo Cacciari on contemporary art — a remark that, in few words, powerfully reasserts a concept that shifts our attention decisively away from the artwork understood as the visible fruit of a relationship between the artist's hand, material, and object, toward its eminently conceptual nature.
"Contemporary art is thinking art as never before. It seeks to think, and to give thought. Not merely to please. Not to represent what exists, but to think toward the new. This is the defining gesture of all avant-garde movements in contemporary art."
The focus, then, moves away from the manipulation of materials toward the idea, the message, the channel — toward meaning, toward that constellation of signs which verbal language alone is unable to contain.
Art produced through digital processes finds in the use of artificial intelligence a privileged means of demonstrating its own conceptual purity. Thinking art, made with instruments suited to thought — art that transcends the substance of its expression: pure idea, capable of taking form on a canvas printed by a plotter, on a video screen, or on the bonnet of a car.
Hegel would at last have the answer he sought when he demanded that art furnish a demonstration of the reason for its existence "in the world of the intellect, of science, and of technology." For every artistic gesture is called upon to justify its own necessity — to account for why it must exist in the world at all.