80 than I did in theorizing the network of bonds that holds together that generation of artists for whom I invented that denomination. And there is a passage from that book that sometimes comes to my mind and, if you allow me, I quote it literally: "Perhaps this is the primacy that must be recognized to the Italian art of the Tens over the neo-avantgardes and post-avantgardes of the second half of the twentieth century. Its existence is not due to a critical reading of the approach, but rather to a real poetic convergence. The art of the 1910s in Italy exists by virtue of a coherence that can be found in practice, and not in intentions. It exists by virtue of a coherence that has had no need for guardians and theorists. The art of the 1910s has been an orphan art, raised on the street, without fathers or educators. It is an art born of no one, and therefore, up to now, recognized by no one in its entirety as a phenomenon. This is probably the reason for the critical silence that has enfolded it (beyond the already mentioned thousand monographs, sometimes commissioned and paid by those ones directly involved). But, for this reason, it is a stronger, more robust art and, perhaps, more capable of leaving deep traces, which can also have an impact on the following decades"». «For this reason – counters Tosatti in a gentle but firm way – I contest the idea that a director is needed. The idea that art can be directed is a bluff. Even Celant is a much bigger myth than the man behind it. Instead, I believe that a critical generation is needed, as strong as the artistic one, to find the right balance in which everything can proliferate. At the time of Poor Art – and of the many other things that were happening at that time – there still was this balance. That is the secret». It is as if, in liquid modernity, that of being mavericks, flows in a current, were a precise stylistic feature attributable to the individual artists who populate it, and as if they – having become aware of their being nobody's children – could feel even freer to explore, with a certain sense of bright spleen, their condition of fluctuating identities. «If the modern problem of identity was how to construct an identity, the postmodern problem of identity is how to avoid fixation and keep the options open», wrote Zygmunt Bauman, according to whom being postmodern is also equivalent to being in progress, and in liquid modernity «Change is the only permanence and uncertainty the only certainty». This means that the search for identity in the postmodern is not only imaginable but also desirable, that its fixity is simply limiting and that, given an uncertain future, a great plastic capacity is needed more than ever. Just as it happens with water. The changes in state of water allow its shifting from solid to liquid to gaseous, and mutation is also the principal theme of the main exhibition of the just concluded Venice Art Biennale, or also of the philosophical thematization by Paul B. Preciado. «Art is transgender by definition», Tosatti glimpsed and wrote in an editorial dating back almost fifteen years ago. Between biologic and bionic, between identity and fluidity, between organic and synthetic, carnal and aquatic, opening new scenarios also to the liquid, amphibious ultra-reality of the metaverse. «Much of the metaverse depends on what we are capable of doing within the reality we are physically living. If we don't build good citizens within the physical reality, we will have barbarians within the metaverse as well. Different dimensions, in which the same responsibilities operate. We also see it in social media, a light metaverse full of hate, more than the one actually present in reality. We need to make sure that the places we are in may not primarily be safe, but rather sustainable places. The metaverse has many resources for all things related to identity issues. In reality it is possible to intervene on a sexual level, but if someone feels like a dolphin, is there any possible solution? Within metaverse, you can be a dolphin. Projection into digital reality further helps to overcome physical limitations. Art can play a role in this trans-dimensional scenario», he said recently. So I ask him which form he’d choose for himself, in the liquid realm of the metaverse: «It’s twenty years now that I am in the metaverse», he tells me. «That's what all the works I've spread around the world are. And my form is the invisible one of the architect». The very personal form I would give to Gian Maria Tosatti, in the fluid microcosm of the metaverse, partially supports his answer: Tosatti is for me that Lucifer that he himself made the protagonist of the third episode of his Seven Seasons of the Spirit, at the former general warehouses of the port of Naples. A Lucifer very similar to the Greek myth of Prometheus, so in love with humankind that he dared to rebel against God. A Lucifer as a sequel to the sacred narrative, set in a domestic environment where on the first floor water is boiling in the pot and walls are weeping, grounded for eternity in a gilded chamber with an aerosol, a book by Jules Verne and a notebook where to write and rewrite his own mistake. A Lucifer now aware of his flaw made believing he was doing good, outlined by Tosatti with indulgence and a certain kind of tenderness, because absolute evil for him does not lie in error, but in inertia. «Not: I am a fallen man, but: I am a man, and I am falling», wrote Harold Bloom referring precisely to Lucifer in The Anxiety of Influence (1973). I am reminded of the opening and closing sentence in Mathieu Kassowitz's La haine (1995): «It’s about a guy who falls off a skyscraper. On his way down past each floor, he keeps telling himself, “So far
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