Can

one

talk

about

art

while

the

world

collapses?

What does it mean to talk about art as the world collapses, as the chronicle is reduced to an inventory of bodies? The question returns compulsively every time the world seems to be crumbling, every time the images of the present pile up like ruins and numbers replace faces, every time the word “dead” loses weight by the mere fact that it repeats itself relentlessly. We become accustomed, without meaning to, to the daily count, to headlines that last one day and are swallowed up by the next, to photographs that no longer hurt because they blur into one another. It is in this mechanism that too often social media, and with them certain journalism, slip into the rhetoric of emotion on command, in which every tragedy becomes material to be relaunched, packaged, and monetized. It is no longer testimony, but a strategy to remain visible, to gather likes, clicks, views. Suffering is slammed on the front page or in feeds as a commodity to be exhibited, consumed until it is emptied of meaning, reduced to a passing spectacle, a fetish to be shrugged off and forgotten. And so the temptation is certainly to think that talking about art in the midst of all this is out of place, an unnecessary luxury, a gesture one cannot afford. But it is not. Talking about art today, as yesterday, does not mean looking away from the catastrophe: it means preventing the catastrophe from erasing everything. Because when violence strikes it doesn’t just destroy bodies, it razes archives, libraries, museums, theaters, churches and all those structures that hold a collective memory. For to strike a people is to strike its images, its words, its traces as well. This is the logic of total war, which wants to annihilate not only life but also any possibility of remembering it.