This chapter deals with an intriguing theme: the relationship between the arts, artists, and creativity. New technologies remain in the background. A detailed analysis of the new forms of art connected with the use of digital technologies would have deserved much more space and, above all, a great effort. Furthermore, any philosophical discourse on the meaning and purpose of art has been avoided in order to focus on the relationship between the arts, artists, and creativity. In the popular view, artists are seen as being creative individuals. It follows that it is often obligatory for an artist to demonstrate their originality, even through paradoxical forms of expression. Irreverence, protest, insolence, derision, arrogance, mockery, discomfort, and disgust are often contemporary artists' basic ingredients to build their artistic productions. Technology can help them to express their originality hyperbolically. Rather than providing answers, this chapter explores how creative ability finds its most natural expression in art.
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Often, the desire for originality at any cost, the need to please an ideology, or the material interest in earning money influence artistic productions. For this reason, the world of the arts is varied and full of contradictions. Many of those who affirm the death of art do not disdain the position, paid, of an artistic director or the title of art critic.
The world of art is complex, populated by numerous subjects: the artists who produce the works, the critics who judge their artefacts, and the merchants who market and disseminate them. Finally, one must not forget the category of users, who should be the consumers of the work. Each of these different broad categories of subjects include, in turn, a host of other subjects. For example, the category of artist includes both those who compose a work and those who perform it, as in the case of music or drama productions. All works that include a performance, such as opera, drama, and cinema, require interpreters, set designers, and directors. All these roles belong to the many-fold category of artist.
Evidence of the complexity underlying the world of arts can be found in the expressions that associate the word ‘art’ with a vast array of other words: the art of war, the art of management, the art of teaching, the art of leadership, the art of power, and a plethora of other similar expressions.
The term art originates from the Latin word ars, meaning art, skill, or craft. Nowadays, however, any definition of art has to consider certain main aspects such as originality, fantasy, technical ability, and, of course, creativity.
In the Republic and elsewhere, Plato held that the arts are representational or mimetic (sometimes translated as “imitative”). Artworks are ontologically dependent on imitations of, and therefore inferior to, ordinary physical objects.
Several centuries later, Kant distinguished between art and fine art. The latter, which Kant called the art of genius, is “a kind of representation that is purposive in itself and, though without an end, nevertheless promotes the cultivation of the mental powers for sociable communication” (Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, Guyer translation, section 44, 46).
When fully unpacked, the definition of art has representational, formalist, and expressivist elements. It focuses as much on the creative activity of the artistic genius (who, according to Kant, possesses an innate mental aptitude through which nature gives the rule to art) as on the actual artworks produced by that activity.
However, what about the originality, innovation, and creativity of many Western contemporary artists?
The artistic work of many contemporary opera directors, for example, surely opens a discourse concerning originality and innovation in the arts. In fact, in several contemporary directions of operas, the desecrating spirit is unleashed. Any censorial limitation of artistic expression is not, of course, acceptable, but observing the works of contemporary opera directors, certain questions may arise concerning the quality and value of originality and innovation of an artwork, and it is not always easy to evaluate the effectiveness and value of the directors’ artistic input. How, one might ask, should we evaluate the recent work by Damiano Micheletto (2021, Rome, Circo Massimo), who distorted Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto by setting it, as shown in Figure 1, amongst prostitutes and pimps, parked cars, a carousel, mobile cameras, films, and other elements that seek to draw the opera into step with contemporary society? And what about the Italian director and playwright Leo Muscato, who in Bizet’s Carmen staged at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino (2018), reworked the opera’s finale, to have Carmen kill Don Jose as a protest against femicide? Yet other directors have reimagined Mozart’s Don Giovanni as gay, or Rossini’s Cenerantola as a poor masochist female. In this regard, the works of the Spanish director Calixto Bieito are famous. In his direction of Verdi’s Ballo in maschera, he placed the choristers on toilet bowls and inserted a fatal gay sodomy. Nevertheless, Bieito’s original masterpiece was his direction of Verdi’s Traviata, with his portrayal of a lesbian relationship between Violetta and her maid Annina, and in which Violetta simulates her own death from consumption in order to escape the attentions of the two Germonts, father and son.