The Reading of the Future

Why should art be read only as a creator and not as a consumer? Why wouldn't we want to meet the artist as an individual within their creation, but rather as demonstrating a method - that is, as learners and not as experiencers? On the reason why so many great artists are small villains in their personal lives

Michelangelo's only self-portrait - as a flayed skin  (Source)

A text doesn't teach you the content of the text, but rather teaches you how to write like it, and the content of the text is a particular case of this learning. It teaches a certain form of creativity, a method of writing, and this is the difference between the approach of reading and that of learning. In other words, this is the type of reading suitable for the age of learning, reading aimed at learning a certain way of activity, a certain creativity, and not specific content. Certainly not communication with a specific person, unless it's communication with them as a literature teacher, namely learning.

What we learn from the history of writing is that individualism is crap. The concept of the artist ruined art, just as the concept of the author ruined literature. Better a painter, a writer. The moment the artist himself became the subject, it was the beginning of the end, and gave a biographical reading to every work (one of its vulgar peaks being identity politics art).

What happened is that the moment art became sophisticated as a tool of expression, for example painting (this happened less in architecture, for instance), then from a craftsman like Michelangelo who painted himself only as a flayed skin, with Caravaggio he himself is already a character in many paintings, and with Rembrandt he is already the subject of many paintings, and with Van Gogh he is already the only subject that has a cumulative mythical narrative meaning. It was precisely from the success of art that the megalomania grew, ending in hubris and artistic tragedy.

Self-aggrandizement is ugly. And it attracted countless parasites and people with ego problems and lack of talent and charlatanism or self-marketing abilities to the field of art, all the flies were drawn to the crap. Therefore, celebrity culture of all kinds should now attract the flies, and not art, so that art can be cleansed of being a toilet. The problem is that the flies have also multiplied. And so despite its diminished attraction as crap, they still flood the field. Painting should be practiced only by those who know how to paint and have exceptional talent in painting (and have also learned to paint and practiced painting), and not by any artist.