WHAT | WHO | WHERE | WHY

21.03.2025

The Coordinates of Contemporary Art in an Era of Transition

Art, historically anchored to defined boundaries of medium, place, and function, now moves within a horizon without fixed coordinates, questioning its own essence, its protagonists, its spaces, and its purpose. What defines artistic language today? Who are the actors shaping this new scene? Where does artistic production position itself in the age of hyperconnection? And, most importantly, why does art continue to redefine itself?

These questions are not just starting points but serve as the Cartesian axes of an inquiry into the present state of art and its future trajectories.

WHAT | The Transformation of Artistic Language

Art has always operated through an evolving lexicon: from classical naturalism to avant-garde ruptures, up to today’s digital dematerialization. The what of art now exists in a state of permanent instability, where the boundary between traditional media and new languages is blurring to the point of dissolving.

If Duchamp once dismantled the concept of the artwork with the ready-made, today the artistic gesture moves toward an ever- deepening hybridization of materials, data, and interactions.

Painting converses with artificial intelligence, sculpture merges with coding, and performance extends into augmented reality. There are no longer canonical forms but processes in continuous renegotiation. The what is no longer just an artistic object but a system of relationships that is constantly being constructed and deconstructed.

 

WHO | The New Status of the Artist

Who is the artist today? This seemingly simple question has become an open-ended issue. While the Renaissance consecrated the individual genius and the 20th century saw the artist become a conceptual medium (from Beuys and his social sculpture to Warhol and the reproducibility of pop), today we witness a crisis of authorship.

In the contemporary landscape, the who of art is no longer a single subject but a plurality of hybrid figures: artists working in collectives, artificial intelligences generating images, and platforms decentralizing creative production. The artist is no longer an isolated entity but a node in a network of interdisciplinary connections. Even the audience itself becomes a co-author, in a system that blurs the lines between creator, interpreter, and viewer.

WHERE | The Collapse of the Exhibition Space

Where does art take place today? If museums and galleries once defined the legitimate space of artistic production, the where now moves across multiple dimensions.

From the white cubes of modernism to the site-specific interventions of Land Art, the relationship between art and space has always been a key element of visual research. However, in the era of digitalization and interconnection, art is no longer bound to a physical location: it spreads across the web, manifests in virtual reality, dematerializes into NFTs, or embeds itself within the visual information flows of daily life.

 

Can art still be contained within a traditional space, or has it transformed into a phenomenon that exists everywhere and nowhere? The where remains an open question, reflecting the tension between the need for physicality and the push toward immateriality.

WHY | The Meaning of Art in a Fragmented World

Every era has answered the why of art with different motivations

—from the celebration of the sacred to social critique, from the search for the absolute to postmodern nihilism. Today, we find ourselves in a moment of profound ambiguity.

In an age where everything is visible, shared, and reproducible, why does art continue to exist? Is it still a language of resistance? A tool for decoding the present? Or has it been fully assimilated into the logics of the market and entertainment?

From the Futurist Manifesto of 1909, which declared the necessity of an art fused with speed and industry, to Pop Art, which redefined the boundary between art and consumerism, every artistic revolution has sought to answer the why with a clear positioning. Today, however, there is no singular answer: art is simultaneously a critical tool and a cultural product, a participatory experience and a programmed algorithm.

Perhaps it is precisely the absence of a definitive answer that makes the why of art more necessary than ever. Art continues to redefine itself because the world itself is in constant flux, and its role—both past and present—is not to provide certainties but to open new questions.

An Open Manifesto on the Art of Today

 

“What | Who | Where | Why” is not just a title but a critical device inviting us to explore the new coordinates of contemporary art. Between historical continuity and rupture, between physical and digital space, between authorship and collective participation, this exhibition does not offer definitive answers but a space for reflection where every viewer is called to question the trajectories of art in the present and the future.

Concept by Silvia Grassi Senior Art Curator