How to reimagine artistic freedom, now that politics is out of the closet

The German essayist Hito Steyerl published the article "How Can Artistic Freedom Be Returned to Art?" in the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine , in which she puts forward an obvious hypothesis: while politics freed itself from its shackles, art remained immobilized . Years ago, politics played the game of pragmatism and self-imposed limits when projecting its feasibility ( realpolitik ), while art enjoyed, in principle, unlimited freedom. But now the equation has been reversed.

Politics has come out of the closet , going all out, without regard for excuses or limits; on the other hand, art and culture have hit the handbrake; lethargy, torpor, and lack of risk prevail today. People do just enough to fit in . At best, artistic scandals erupt that emulate those of political showbiz, with Instagram and TikTok as privileged spectators.

But let's go back to October 30, 1955, the day Martin Heidegger delivered the lecture "Serenity" in Messkirch, on the occasion of the 175th anniversary of the birth of the musician Conradin Kreutzer . There he postulated that there are two kinds of thinking: reflective, critical meditation , which requires dedication and effort to develop, although it "contributes nothing to everyday practice" or to ordinary business, and calculating thinking , characteristic of the empire of technology, unstoppable, which never stops (because it cannot) to reflect on the consequences of its actions (that is, on the meaning of what exists).

Heidegger then explains with lacerating lucidity that calculative thinking "remains a calculation even when it does not operate with numbers"; it is, in reality, a way of life in which technical objects concern us in the most intimate way : we have voluntarily become their servants.

At the end of the presentation, the author of Being and Time raises the stakes and warns: the greatest danger to humanity is not the explosion of the atomic bomb, but that calculating thought becomes naturalized and the only possible thought , as if deep, deferred, meditative reflection had never existed. The solution proposed by Heidegger is (like everything valuable) ambiguous: he knows that it would be "short-sighted" to condemn technical objects, but neither is it right to let them happily "devastate" us. We can then say yes and no to them at the same time ; we can allow them into our daily lives and at the same time leave them out; he calls this impossible balance Gelassenheit , serenity before things.

Seventy years later, the Heideggerian dystopia has become a reality . We have handed over our leisure and business, not to mention our entire lives, to our smartphones. Thanks to this unprecedented generosity, we are losing autonomy, skills (sense of place, memory, imagination), affection, and even the philosophical capacity to formulate questions; let's not forget that searching for information on Google requires typing three or four words. Furthermore, on the immediate horizon, artificial intelligence , always ready to make our lives easier (because its contempt for humanity is infinite), promises us access to the sweetness of a horrifying happiness without pain.

According to Steyerl, politics has pulverized political correctness . Tech moguls and rulers ensure a chainsaw for everyone. People applaud, satisfied by self-immolation, budget cuts, draconian adjustments, and democratic constraints. Of course, these figures are the product of multiple causes: political failures and disillusionment, congenital malaise, an archaic attraction to sacrifice —but they could also be conceived as a natural continuation of the system. Isn't Elon Musk the beloved son of the Woodstock hippies? Is there a relationship between the fascism (proto, neo, or pseudo, retreaded) of Marine Le Pen and Javier Milei and the enthusiastic slogans of the French May or the Cordobazo? Lacan seems to be right when he reproached young revolutionaries: "You aspire to a master. You will have one."

It is worth asking, along with Steyerl, perhaps in a conservative way, and why not a little nostalgic (it is no coincidence the medium where he writes nor the invitation to Heidegger to the invitation): how can we recover artistic freedom? And, more broadly, how can we recover freedom if nobody seems to want it? (Digression: the controversial Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, faced with the imminent rise of Hitler, asks himself in Mass Psychology of Fascism , back in 1933, why people, the people in general, ordinary, everyday citizens, whose lives pass by without pain or glory, are not only willing to accept fascism, not only do they not rebel against a criminal power, but, even more, are capable of desiring fascism as a way of life?

As fate would have it, on May 27 of that same year, Heidegger took office as Rector of the University of Freiburg, delivering a historic speech—the famous Rector's Speech—that would seal his ideological fate forever . At the end, the philosopher quotes Plato's Republic : "Everything great comes with risk," or, depending on the translation, "Everything great is in the midst of the storm," very similar, moreover, to the immortal verses of Hölderlin , an unavoidable reference for Heidegger: "Where danger grows, so does what saves."

In this "data-suffocated culture" (Steyerl dixit), everything has become flat, smooth, simple (commuters on the subway are divided, almost identically, between those who stare at their screens in amazement and those who sleep). Information imposes itself without reservation and destroys our analytical capacity: we struggle to distinguish the essential from the irrelevant . Cultural activities, in their adaptive zeal, seek to circumvent resistance (incomprehension, boredom, silence), and if by some miracle something of this order emerges, the lovers of political correctness and the hierarchs of pedagogy persist in liquidating it.

In her recent memoirs, Beatriz Sarlo , in an Adorno-like manner, declares: “Art is negativity, not full affirmation.” Sarlo asserts that difficulty and effort are inherent to art, and adds, “Art demands a work ethic.” How can we fail to recall the beloved Lezama Lima of The American Expression : “Only that which is difficult is stimulating; only the resistance that challenges us is capable of energizing, arousing, and sustaining our potential for knowledge.” If incomprehension mobilizes, understanding extinguishes desire. Thus, art and culture lose potency as access is facilitated (in a pedagogical sense). It's like Kant's parable about the swift dove, which imagines it can fly better without air resistance. Let's say it once and for all: to achieve happiness, even for a minute, we need to confront the elusive, something that surpasses us.

We're not Adorno fans, but such positivity (everything can be understood, communicated, explained) deserves to be questioned. Sarlo's memoirs are provocatively titled Not Understanding . It's true that the essayist's position seems extreme, old-fashioned, at odds with the established order—it's even more Adorno-esque than Adorno—but in this context of cultural anorexia (precisely when there have never been so many cultural activities as there are now), wouldn't it be a good bet to risk coming off badly or making a false step?

Art is committed not to the repetition of forms, that is, to formulas, but to the creation of unprecedented forms . Today, no one doubts it, the message precedes the form ("my work speaks of..."), dominates it, subdues it; hence Steyerl's position: "Form is stifled by content." We have entered the dark comfort zone of political art , whose social (and above all, artistic) effectiveness is almost nil, as it must be comprehensible to be effective; therefore, it requires the use of antiquated, repetitive forms that strike no blow to the world.

But what does it mean to create a new form? It means to disrupt people's sensibilities, to challenge standardized perception to open up new possibilities for forms, of which there was no awareness until now. A form is a possibility of meaning, far, far removed from closed significations: things are this way, the meaning of life is this or that. Culture must return to the path of risk and produce heterogeneous, unthinkable significations. It must, following Heidegger, and diminishing Adorno's presence, say yes and no to the status quo, to sow the soil with a visceral ambiguity that keeps viewers tense and dissatisfied—that is, attentive and eager—because a work of art means much more (and much less) than the meanings that can be extracted from it.

There are no magic recipes for reshaping the world; it's a crusade undertaken blindly, by the blind leading the blind, and pointing out, in the dark night, thanks to the faith of fiction, two or three points of incandescence.

In our closed world (plural, multiple, where there are as many truths as human beings), freedom and banality converge without borders; therefore, it is urgent to free the word freedom from degradation, to reclaim it, expose it, and shake it until the status quo (from left to right) explodes into a thousand pieces. And even if the pieces cannot be put back together, splinters of meaning will remain, remnants of experience, shards of the past, with which to rebuild the enthusiasm of a life together, on whose horizon a passion for the enigma and renewed dreams of glory will shine.