The latest Western tradition has bequeathed to our era a very specific image of the artist. It is a creative and talented person who, through his art, expresses not only himself but also humanity as a whole. However, the price of genius is heavy. The artist-Prometheus is eccentric, melancholic, and self-destructive. From Michelangelo to Van Gogh and Pollock, such a stereotype is consistently reproduced throughout the history of art. But is this really the case? Is idiosyncrasy and boundary-breaking behavior a prerequisite for artistic creativity or characteristics of a historical type that emerges in recent years? And if the latter version is true, what environment gave birth to, nurtured, and ultimately rejected this Promethean artistic model?
This book examines the historical trajectory of the artist, from Romanticism to the present day, and analyzes the artistic developments of the modern and contemporary periods. At the same time, it highlights the institutional shifts according to which the artist gives meaning to his activity and constructs his identity.
The Romantic and the modern artist, the culmination but also the swan song of the academic art system, gives way to the avant-garde artist. His new art cultivates the utopian vision of a new society, while simultaneously contributing to the formation of a new market that continues to sustain the artistic myth. Only in the late post-war period will the artist be called upon to face, for the first time in his long history, a new given: his own death. Does this fact signify a liberating perspective or is it simply a rearticulation of the terms of the formation of urban subjectivity itself?
The answer to this question concerns not only the contemporary artist but also the contemporary viewer.