Does art repudiate the substance in search of freedom?

"The medium is the message", whenever we wonder about the meaning of art today, I remember this expression stated by Marshall McLuhan in the '60. A phrase that contains the possible key to understanding every artistic era: every tool used to make art, for which ultimately communication, goes far beyond the content it wants to transmit, that is, it has effects on the person at 360 degrees. Both on a personal and collective level.

An example above all, always according to McLuhan was the invention of movable type printing that definitively sanctioned the birth of modern man in which the predominant sense was sight: a society based above all on seeing was born.

But the printing press, as he already explains in his 1962 essay (The Gutenberg Galaxy) has already been overcome. By whom? From the almighty TV and new media: the involvement of the person is total, it is not just a matter of reading something (a book) or listening (the radio), but of being literally absorbed into this 24-hour active means of communication.

Then came the internet and now, especially the new generations, are totally "taken" by the tools of the network that literally make up their world. The involvement is even more total, massive, continuous, also thanks to the almost symbiotic relationship with smartphones.

With the overcoming of the Gutenberg galaxy, according to McLuhan we enter a new tribalism, the global one, everything turns out to be a single large village in which geographical distances no longer matter, and often, not even the diversity of thought, not infrequently victim of a flattening operated by the dominant thought.

Doesn't the phenomenon of Pop Art tell us the same thing? The total immersion in the visual art "of things", colors that shine, consumer objects elevated to a work of art, repeated, revisited, oversized.

It was the triumph of "seeing", the attestation of the supremacy of the organ of sight.

And then all this was overcome, or one would say "chewed, swallowed", and then set aside, as after an indigestion, that certain foods can no longer even be seen from afar.

From the '70 onwards, art has tried and still tries to beat new expressive paths moving between performances, installations, video-art. It is as if he were trying to get out of the world of objects, or in general of matter, because everything has already been said, lived, seen, touched.

Trying to free ourselves from the "already existing" ends up falling into the flow in which we all fall, as if there were a wave that carries everything with it, a force that dematerializes everything. We have taken a bath of decades in matter and now we deny it, we want to abstract ourselves from it, in ways of which perhaps we are not aware.

"The Internet of Things" thinks about it, or perhaps it would be better to say, "The Internet of people", "The Internet of Life": everything becomes more and more volatile, elusive and art seems to want to reflect this inconsistency.

Can digital art be defined as the most extreme attempt to get out of things? Out of materiality? This process of dematerialization wants to go towards what? Towards greater freedom? Is it succeeding?

Because the impression is that the denial of everything that is "touched" that is happening in every area of life, goes more towards a mass homologation and not in favor of a greater expression of individual freedoms.

How does art fit into this process? Do you try to carve out digital spaces where identities meet and confront each other or move inside a fence without knowing it?

There is no true art without freedom or without longing for it.

Miriam Fusconi