Those who have studied art history know well that, over the centuries, art has often served to represent the world and the events of its time, or to give voice to visions—sometimes religious, sometimes philosophical—that inhabited the artist’s soul. Among the many revolutions that art has undergone, one of the most disruptive occurred in 1917, when Marcel Duchamp presented an inverted urinal as a work of art, naming it Fountain. With this gesture, Duchamp inaugurated the concept of the ready-made: the ordinary object, decontextualized, that becomes art through the artist’s choice and intention.
From that moment on, the boundary with tradition became abyssal. The artwork emancipates itself from the object to become idea, gesture, intention. The artist no longer represents reality: they create it. As Thierry De Duve wrote, the ready-made is “a work that defines itself in the phrase: this is art.”
Let us forget the painter, hands covered in color, hunched over the canvas, or the sculptor immersed in marble dust. With the advent of Web3 and NFTs, the question becomes even more complex: art loses even its physicality. In this new immaterial and decentralized dimension, one inevitably asks: what remains, then, of art?
The critic Dino Formaggio offers a definition as simple as it is profound: “Art is what humans call art.” In this tautology lies the purest essence of the artistic gesture: the human need to give form to one’s feelings, to create beauty or unease, to recognize oneself in an image of the world that originates within.
But what about technique? In an era when art can be digital, conceptual, performative, or even automated, what is the role of craftsmanship, of skill? It is a well-known secret: many works, even in the past, were not physically executed by the artist who conceived them. Renaissance workshops, contemporary studios, sculptures commissioned to artisans—the gap between idea and execution has always existed. Technical skill, therefore, is only one of many tools at the disposal of artistic thought.
When we enter the realm of digital art, the discussion becomes even subtler. Artists are often evaluated based on their mastery of the medium—3D software, graphic tablets, generative programs—as if technical prowess alone were enough to guarantee an artwork’s aesthetic value. But art is not in the medium. Art lies in the invisible language that connects image to thought, creator to observer.
Take abstraction as an extreme example. Facing a Rothko painting, even those unfamiliar with the artist perceive a force that cannot be explained by technique: a mysterious harmony that speaks directly to the deepest part of us. It cannot be described; it is felt. Like the taste of chocolate—impossible to explain, immediately recognizable. And like chocolate, art can be sweet, ephemeral, or, like a rare truffle, capable of sending into ecstasy those ready to truly savor it.
Art, ultimately, is this: an invisible flow of poetry that connects two consciousnesses through a work. The more trained the eye, the more open the soul, the deeper the resonance.
As for technique… let us happily leave it to the artisans.
