74 who fatally fell in love with himself looking at his own image reflected in a mirror of water. Leon Battista Alberti (De Pictura, 1435) was the first to metaphorically recognize Narcissus, who loved nothing but an image, as the foster father of figurative art. On the wave of the centuries, the theme of the self-portrait is a loop in the history of art. The artist becomes a white canvas and actually a mirror, whose image to fall, and to make fall, in love with. After all, one of the watershed moments of the artist's activity is what is called exhibition: the show of one's own work and one's own, naked, vision. I have a thought: the one for which the artist is Narcissus, bent over the mirror of water of an urgency to share, and not just any narcissus, devoted to a liquid crystal black mirror capable of reflecting only its vacuity. However, a system of contemporary culture watered down by the politically correct is not able to look beyond the surface, it is not able to read Oscar Wilde, Jean Genet, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Carmelo Bene, it is not able to see that «A sword reflected in water takes the shape of a cross» (Giovanni Papini, The Devil, 1953), not failing to put Narcissus on the cross whenever given the opportunity. I then ask him – in the trial constantly inflicted on Narcissus, and on Narcissus-Tosatti as an artist – to which words would he entrust his defense speech, but Gian Maria declares himself innocent for not having committed the crime, «because my reference is not Narcissus, but Dorian Gray. The portrait is the only mirror capable of showing the soul. And for this reason the portrait is the only weapon able to kill the monster inside us. I build mirrors that can show us our true face and make us want to change, murdering what is unbearable to us and about us. After all, that is what art is for: not to pacify us, but to set us on fire». So I return a bit stubbornly to Narcissus, but only to broaden the scope by giving voice to the coprotagonist of the myth, water, recovering Tosatti's reference to Oscar Wilde because, in his poem The Disciple (1894), not only Narcissus mirrors himself in the water to enjoy his own beauty, but also water does, contemplating itself in the mirror of his eyes, itself becoming Narcissus. And beyond the satisfaction on both sides, «Water invented us to be admired», writes Alok Jha in The Water Book (2016). In other words, beauty must be shared. And in this I totally agree with Gian Maria: not the graceful and lobotomized decorum, but that beauty which also makes the unheimliche, the uncanny, its own, not to pacify us, but to set us on fire. That kind of beauty you struggle to sustain. The unsustainable sustainability of art. It's time to talk with Gian Maria Tosatti about sustainability. Cornerstone of that Cathedral which is the UN 2030 Agenda, in a world that we have dangerously led astray, is the search for sustainability, the only response to the complexity of our time, systematized by Edgar Morin in his transdisciplinary and fluid Complexity Theory. Certainties fall, and this is the only certainty that must lead us to dance, like stars generated by chaos. Like water, which can always find a way to flow. According to the Complexity Theory, culture is the trait through which human being emerges from nature, its mother, through a dynamic movement that has been disjunction, but must necessarily switch into (re)conjunction. Human being to nature, through culture: in Morin's view the contribution of culture, and therefore of art, must bear the features of this urgent paradigm shift. In 2016, the essay Systems in art making and art theory: complex networks from the ashes of Postmodernism by Philip Galanter, father of generative art, dealt with the definition of a complex work of art: a work able to increase the awareness of the spectator, active part of the work, compared to the sea of which we are but a sip. No longer an image, but an environment. No longer a drop, but a torrent. No longer a tree but a forest, with its vital interactions, thriving on biodiversity. Living artwork. In feeling profoundly close to Gian Maria Tosatti in the war on rotting labels, I then free from the critical field of these pages the idea that sustainability in art is equivalent to political correctness, and I accept Galanter's definition of complex or sustainable art in the sense of underlining, in words, what art does by its very nature: to bring to light an urgency, present or imminent, through a vision, even if it is ferocious – and there is no doubt that the Cathedral of the UN 2030 Agenda, is a florilegium of emergencies, if we ask for salvation. Following the metaphor of this path, if art is water, the artistic gesture is dowsing. «The artist has a role – whether it is moral or immoral, that is another matter. Kind of like the prophets of tragedy and epic: sometimes they are loved, sometimes fought, sometimes chained, still other times they manage to save someone's fate. The artist is always a Tiresias, someone who knows not because he is an
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