"Stupidity" Minus Habens
Luciano Fabro

After reading the start of a Musil lecture on stupidity given in the 1930s, I can't resist quoting from it:
"Anyone, these days, who would have the audacity to talk about stupidity would be running serious risks: such audacity may actually be interpreted as arrogance, or, in a nutshell, as an attempt aimed at upsetting the development of our age", and he carries on: "If stupidity did not resemble progress, talent, hope and improvement quite so perfectly, nobody would want to be stupid".
This said, it is natural to think that everything has been said. But it is precisely because these words seem to be tailor-made that we are prompted to tackle some checking of our own selves, reassured by the French expression: "Bˆte comme un peintre" or, literally, "As stupid as a painter". Whereas it would be more complicated to broach the argument with the term "Pittore" (Painter), in its Italian sense, which lends it authority and which dictates a way of looking at stupidity cast from too lofty a perch, were it not for the fact that all this authority perished in the 1930s, with Fascism.
Since the 1930s, however, up until the present, time has indeed passed, my own time has passed, and the time of my generation, springing from the stupidity of 1930s' rhetoric, has been weaned in the stupidity of war, for it spent its teenage years in the stupidity of the cold war.
I remember the 1950s as being sad years; they resembled the 1930s in an elderly version, full of debates whose intent was to smother repression.
Abstract artists, realist artists, purists, committed and concrete artists, functionalists, serial artists, traditionalists, progressive artists... while they started all over again to make still lifes or little squares, they all had their memory blemished by horrible things, and many, too, were responsible for these horrible things. But the most ridiculous were those who wore existential grimaces, just as before the war they had sported muscles and banners.
What came out of this situation was a callus, a callus that grew thicker with time--a callus on the sensors of stupidity.
If the Enlightenment wound up in the century of melancholy, it was logical enough the century of melancholy should wind up in the century of stupidity, due to the fact--as Musil noted--that what is involved is something resembling progress.
Except that the sign was reversed.
Previously, it was a duty of art to set up all manner of quotients: religiosity, eroticism, technique, language, thought, sensibility, feeling, observation, gesture, politics... while, nowadays, it seems that there is a trend towards pointing to any type of minima quotients. But what might also be involved is a repeated irresponsibility, or a calcification of feeling, politics, observation, religiosity, gesture, thought, eroticism, technology, and language.
But any external position in relation to stupidity is inappropriate, just as it is inappropriate to take up a position against a handicap. And, given that an imperfect work of art is nothing other than a handicapped work of art, it is not good to stress artistic stupidity. All the more so because we find it in successful works, or works at least reckoned to be successful. For if modern stupidity exists, these works must remain within us in an exemplary way.
I shall now take two masterpieces to illustrate this argument:
Guernica for sensibility, Brillo for intelligence.
When I was still a kid, we gathered in winter in the warmth of a stable to listen to nightmarish stories, told by old timers: with Guernica, we are very close to images which would plunge me into fantasy, my eyes wide open. An illustration of an histoire noire.
Too little for too much.
To make a pile of boxes the outermost limit of an idea, while a box is always regarded as the starting point for deciding about a subject.
Brillo seems to be to be too much for too little.
If you skim off intelligence, all that remains is sensibility; if you skim off sensibility, all that remains is intelligence. As the result of a strange economy or parsimony for these two centuries, art has felt itself obliged to skim off one or the other. The succession of such actions has done away with any possible synthesis, and left us with a clean slate. It is on the clean slate that people have been plugging their mixtures.
Modern stupidity is indifference, not to say enthusiastic indifference.
Acclaim is a cocktail where Enthusiasm is mixed with Indifference, for, on the one hand, things are as they are, there is no longer a great deal of faith or hope, which is why indifference is regarded as insurmountable, and on the other hand somebody said that everything starts from enthusiasm, so enthusiasm to the fore--which is invariably an act of generosity, from which we swiftly expect an act of recognition. In other words, all this has no logic other than a psychological logic, but because none of us has weapons with which to defend logic, psychology knows very well how to defend itself all on its own.
I, too, started to queue  for a little recognition when, in the 1960s or thereabouts, I brought the onlooker into play--he was then called the "pleasure-seeker"--as one of the components of a work of art. And I thought I was doing something sincere and generous. I realized right away that, as a good modern artist, I stole something substantial from the work: intelligence and sensibility, and gave them to any old person--to the modern spectator, in a hurry and enthusiastically indifferent. I am possibly still living on this error of judgement or on this "cattle rustling", but this in no way detracts from the fact that there is something criminal about all this and that there is something immensely tiring about living this situation in a dignified way.
But the most famous cocktail is undoubtedly the ready made, the cocktail that implies dependence and habituation. Its association with archaeology ennobles it beyond everything else, its resolve in free will allows it to negotiate the pit existing between experience and transcendental speculation. A shudder that only an amateur can allow himself.
It is only recently that the breed of the amateur has been selected--a cross between leisure and predisposition, a real cocktail between determination and powerlessness.
"There are no professionals in art any more!", goes hand in hand with "Art is made for the less gifted!".
When I was a kid, we used the expression "Arms stolen from the farm" for less gifted people.
The century that started out with "as stupid as a painter" ends up with "arms stolen from art". 
Here we are holding forth while the populace continues to laugh at us.
But this time around, it might well be right, given that the amateur is a man of the people who makes art to have a laugh.
And up to this point everything is fine, or at least this is what it looks like, or this is what we want people to think; except that there is a shadow hanging larger and larger over us, the shadow of boredom. For the amateur--and it's very nice of him--is boring, he is always boring, and he's boring above all because he's an embarrassment. To the point of letting us down, he embarrasses us with his amateurism, his altogether personal enthusiasm, and his request to take part. His untrammelled optimism oozes tragedy through every pore. Behind his art, you sense a desperate attempt at redemption, more psychological than social, but more social than ideological, and more ideological that really definitive.
Artistic amateurism, in this latter half of the century in particular, seems to be the grave of the 19th century class struggle, the settling of accounts with liberal materialism.
In his introduction to The Portrait of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde wrote: "Revealing art and concealing the artist is the aim of art";  How are we to reconcile this with the amateur's empassioned self-promotion?
The other day, in Frankfurt, I once again raised the issue in front of Friedrick and Caroline Goes Upstairs, Degas with Le stupre, and Vermeer with The Geographer. We agreed that the intelligence of normality or the ordinary and the extraordinariness of art, there is a kind of boundary occupied by stupidity, which protects either territory from becoming contaminated.
Milan, 13 October 1998
Translated from the French by Simon Pleasance & Fronza Woods