Art has followed the evolution of human intelligence for millennia. Well before writing, art records intelligence, extracts it from the body, makes it shareable, often transportable and eternal. It is not, however, verbal intelligence, as in the case of the alphabet, but visual intelligence, or, more broadly speaking, bodily intelligence. Scholars of paleoanthropology trace the oldest art forms to a performative context involving multiple senses: the Lascaux cave paintings were probably part of multi-sensory rituals that have been lost forever. But even just the visual component, which we can still admire today, provokes powerful reactions, leads our synapses back to that original world, somehow reactivating in us the intelligence of the first Homo Sapiens.
This mysterious power that art has to engage our minds through physical objects has remained unchanged, with its deep connection between language and images. Indeed, in recent decades, the physicality of the artwork has been enhanced and has become central to more recent art movements. Just think of the materiality and gesturality of post-World War II informal painting, the presence of objects, environments and performance in arte povera, and the expansion of works into the landscape with Land Art. Art maintains and will maintain its autonomy from artificial intelligence precisely because of its “logosomatic” nature, that is, of bodily thought, concretized in artworks.
Italiano