november 03, 2026. words by suso barciela. Piece with artist magazine.
Nuccio Ordine said that “Reading a poem or listening to a symphony doesn’t increase GDP, but it saves us from barbarism.” It’s impossible not to crack a smile when I hear that, because we inevitably live in an era where absolutely EVERYTHING must serve some purpose.
A good starting point is to think that art doesn’t have to serve any purpose, in many respects. Everything must be sold, decorate, inspire, transform, change… and there comes a point when all this circus becomes utterly boring.
In so many words. And when I say nothing, I mean NOTHING.
It doesn’t have to sell products, it doesn’t have to beautify or improve anything, it doesn’t have to justify cultural budgets or make us feel like better people for going to an exhibition. In fact, we here know well about that art that gives you a punch in the gut and leaves you still, not quite knowing what to do or say with what you’ve just seen and felt. It’s as if just by existing it needed a reason to be or to constantly justify itself, and I swear it’s hard for me to understand this obsession with finding a use for everything, it’s just simply exhausting. It is and that’s it. It simply exists and is, without any intention beyond that.
“Desire ceases to be desire when it is achieved.”
If that argument is already harsh in life in general, when we extrapolate it to art and turn it into a tool, we domesticate it and we kill it. Too many galleries are full of works that shout their function from the outside, they try to throw you the hook of a work that, by some coincidence of life, fits perfectly with the decoration of your flat. Or else they give you the spiel that it represents the entrepreneurial spirit of their company… and when I see something like that I only feel like having a house in the countryside with a huge tomato plant.
Before, I think, it was pure desire, pure need to create or to contemplate… and now it’s another marketing strategy that, by the way, is completely burnt out. It’s already super late to realize that the true subversion of art lies in its uselessness, in being completely unnecessary and dispensable. But reducing art to those messages is to mutilate its legs. Fine, everyone uses those readings and those discourses, which really do exist; but you also have to be honest and admit that those places are usually full of explanatory labels that try to justify every work, and that’s not the point.
You can talk about what you’ve seen without much effort, sure, but you miss the essential, perhaps one of the most important aspects of this. Art has the capacity to confront you with yourself, it unsettles you, it asks you things you didn’t want and don’t want to hear. Mind you, with this I don’t mean that art is escapism or mere decoration, but rather quite the opposite. I mean that true art is uncomfortable. No work needs justification because beauty doesn’t need it, nor does curiosity. The experience of being alive and feeling something you didn’t know you could feel, even less so. A gross error to defend art as an exclusively educational or economic tool, because unconsciously we are accepting that by itself it isn’t worth anything, that it needs a “superior” purpose to deserve to exist. Actually, if you stop to think about it, the most powerful art is the one that exists without reason, the one that refuses to be useful… the one that doesn’t need anyone’s approval or interpretation.
Art as experience and stealthy resistance. A vague reminder that not everything in life has to serve a purpose. It is precisely what we need in a world that insists over and over on turning everything into a sellable product.
Piece with Artist MAGAZINE © november 2026
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Suso Barciela
