Dedicata al mondo dell’arte WUF è pensata come un dispositivo contemporaneo di connessione tra giornalisti e protagonisti dello scenario artistico e ha debuttato con uno speciale appuntamento e due intense giornate di attività martedì 11 e mercoledì 12 giugno 2024. La nuova organizzazione WUF (We Understand the Future) è dedicata a connettere voci creative e valorizzare progetti artistici emergenti attraverso un approccio guidato dall’arte e dalla tecnologia. L’edizione inaugurale prende vita con un evento esclusivo per la stampa realizzato negli spazi dell’iconico Bar Rouge, con la partnership di ArtsLife e de La Lettura de Il Corriere della Sera.
La parola ai protagonisti: PAUL SEARS
“The reason I do it is really honestly because I have no choice.”
Well, thank you for being here and for making this interview for WUF. Can you please present your research, your artistic research, in a short way?”
Thank you. Well, thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here, and I will try to introduce myself and my ideas in as short a way as possible if I can. In three words: I was born in London in 1960. I went to a prestigious English university, Cambridge University, where I studied French and Italian. Then I had a year off in Italy in 1981, and I’m still doing that year off. So it’s the longest year off in the history of academia in the UK. I found myself in the music business, creative and then management and publishing, but all the time, I knew that I was an artist. There was a kind of urgency, and I suddenly unleashed the artist within me very, very recently, when I was around 60 years old, two or three years ago. So I’m what the English call a very, very, very late bloomer. And so I affectionately and perhaps in a politically incorrect provocative way call it my coming out. I’m now letting the world know that I am an artist.
Okay, and you spoke about this necessity of producing your art and making your art. How do you feel in this freedom of making art?
**Artista:** The reason I do it is really honestly because I have no choice. I really, really need to do it, and it’s an existential thing. And that’s why I think what I would like my art to do is to keep people company and to make people feel a little less lonely. Maybe there is something that they can identify with, something that they can hang on to, something that grows within them that creates meaning for them. This is because we live in a very, very complicated world. It’s not a coincidence that there is a very widespread international conservative backlash because the future is, on one very simple level, very frightening. There’s artificial intelligence that, as Yuval Noah Harari said, has cracked the operating system of mankind. There are problems of ecology and all these kinds of things. So, if you are not a religious person, which is my case, I don’t believe in any religion, you have to find something to cling on to. So I want art to be about the big themes that it always has been about. I want it to be about life, death, love, fear, anger, and that’s why I do it.
And you mentioned artificial intelligence. What is your relationship with new technologies in art?
It’s an interesting question because in my pre-artist professional career as a manager and publisher in the music business, I’ve had to think about the effect of artificial intelligence on the way music is made and on the way intellectual property can be defended. It’s a bit technical and a little bit boring. Actually, just a couple of days ago, I was invited to speak on a podcast about artificial intelligence in the music business, so that’s something that I think about a lot. But in my own artistic actions, in a sense, it’s what has liberated me because I am probably the least talented artist technically in the world. I can’t draw, I can’t dance, I can’t sing, and I can’t make sculptures. I’m not very good with my hands, but what I can do is write and play with words and think about words. Because of artificial intelligence, there are various programs and apps that help you make images out of words through prompts, and then you can do all sorts of things. So I can now battle with technology and the machine. It’s me against the robot or me with the robot in a kind of mortal embrace to try and produce meaning. I wouldn’t be able to do what I do without a computer and everything new that you can do on a computer every single day.
And you stated that you always start from the text.
Yes, that’s because I am essentially a writer, and I don’t have the focus or the concentration to write anything that is longer than a very short poem. So I couldn’t write a novel or even a short novel. What I started doing and have been doing for years is writing aphorisms. I sometimes call them aphorisms, I sometimes call them one-sentence novels, which is just me winking at a Guatemalan writer called Augusto Monterroso who actually does publish one-sentence novels. They’re really good. Because I can talk to Midjourney and all sorts of other programs, I can now find ways of writing illustrated aphorisms. William Blake illustrated—I don’t know what he illustrated, maybe Milton’s Paradise Lost or Dante’s Divine Comedy. The idea of illustrating words is a very old idea with a very long tradition. But now the way letters as a sign can interact with the way you can make images, there are all sorts of new opportunities that technology opens up that I really like. One thing, however, that I’m very wary of is what I call the special effects risk of technology. To explain what I mean, I’ve never liked movies that are just based on special effects. Something like Jurassic Park—Jurassic Park is a terrible movie with a terrible plot, but you’re just supposed to go, “Wow, look at those dinosaurs, they’re so realistic, I’m scared. Aren’t they clever the way they made it?” Or those space movies where you put on your 3D glasses and you have George Clooney or somebody in space orbiting and there’s no real plot. There’s no there; there is nothing that is about anything really. It’s just the special effect is an end in itself. What the technology for making and manufacturing images offers now on the computer makes it possible to create images that are very, very impressive. You go, “Wow,” but then the day after, you’ve forgotten them. So whatever I do, and I don’t really care what people think because I’m going to do it anyway, but if somebody likes it, I want it to keep them company as I said before. I want it to be deep.
And how do you, for professional reasons, work with a lot of artists? Do you have something like an echo of the work of other artists? How is the relationship with the artistic environment?
My professional life in the music business involves a lot of electronic music, club music, pop music, hip-hop music, and occasionally some contemporary classical. My job as a kind of creative strategic manager has always been to try and help those artists define their goals and help them reach their goals by having an empathetic relationship with them, getting in tune and on the same wavelength. That will need some post-production, guys. Helping them reach their goals. If I were trying to be a singer or a guitar player or a DJ or a rapper, it would be kind of odd. They see me suddenly at the age of 60 having looked after their careers for 40 years and now wanting to do that too. That would be very odd, I think. But because what I do is actually completely different, it just happens to be called art because you can call anything art. It’s actually fairly parallel. Although in the work that I’m going to present shortly called “Karaoke,” there is a musical element.
Can you speak about “Karaoke” and future projects?
Yes, “Karaoke” is the name of a work that I call a physical-digital musical work because it happens on various layers. I don’t want to give too much away because if I were able to explain everything that I wanted to explain, I probably wouldn’t make art. There’s always something that you do and you’re never quite sure why, thank goodness. But this started off as a reflection on social media. I took a phrase which is an oxymoron, a paradox, which is “social media: now we can all be lonely together.” I arranged that phrase with black letters on a white background as if it were the test for your eyesight when you need to renew your driving license. Then I thought, “Well, what’s my problem with social media?” My problem with a certain specific use of platforms like Instagram and TikTok is that there is a false idea of sharing. Now I’m sharing what I’m doing with you, follower, apart from the fact that I hate the word “follower.” I don’t want to follow anyone, and I don’t want anybody to follow me. But apart from that, I got annoyed by this concept of sharing because it seemed so profoundly manipulative. So I just thought, “What is real sharing in my world, in my vision? What is the opposite of that?” I thought it’s really good musicians improvising. Why improvising? Because they are sharing the recreation of a piece of music which wasn’t there before and won’t be there afterwards. They’re really sharing something. If you’re in the listening public and listening to them and watching them and participating in the event, you’re also sharing the experience. You have to map your way in that music that is happening because you’ve never heard it before, and you have to find the patterns and work out the meaning for yourself. Which is different from going to a wonderful concert of a Beethoven Sonata or concerto or symphony that you might know very well, which is a very exhilarating, exciting experience. But a lot of the emotion is because you are on familiar ground, which is the same in pop music. People love to go to concerts to hear Ed Sheeran or even Bob Dylan play the songs that they know already. Improvisation is different. It’s difficult, and you really have to want to share and want to be in that space. This probably says a lot about me because I think that’s the opposite of an Instagram influencer saying, “I want to share my fantastic lifestyle with you while I sell your data
to somebody and then get a brand partnership with somebody to make money.” So that’s my idea of antithesis, and that’s part of what “Karaoke” is about.
And “Karaoke” also has some references with the history of art, with Fluxus. How do you take something that is from art history to the present in a new way?
When I thought of the “Karaoke” thing, I wanted to create a happening. I thought “happening” was such a kind of inward in the 60s and in the Fluxus movements. The basic idea was that some crazy stuff can happen now, and you don’t know what it is exactly. I have a vague memory of Yoko Ono cutting her clothes off in an art gallery in front of an audience as a great charade. Or those Fluxus-related composers like John Cage in one phase. Maybe yes, maybe no, the critics never seem to agree how Fluxus John Cage was. I don’t really care. I thought, “Hey, that’s exactly it. That’s the language that can help me express what I want to express about sharing because I can use the idea of happening, of improvisation, of elements of surprise, elements of awkwardness.” All those things that they had and the lovely idea of something that is not there, and then it’s there, and then it’s not there again. But also mix it with the physical work of the phrase that’s organized, and there is a digital animated version where the letters move, which is an NFT art if you want. So you get the technology, you get the digital art, you get the physical art, and you get the happening. It’s kind of “Hey Fluxus, I’m taking you into Midjourney land,” and it only lasts 20-25 minutes.
And another question. You say everything is about everything. How do you think this idea can shape or interact with the future?
“Everything is about everything” is just one of my latest aphorisms, which actually might be a little bit trite as an aphorism, but the truth is that I really, really like “everything is about everything” because it just means that every single thing is about all things, and all things contain every single thing, which is a very ancient idea. But it’s good to be able to say it in four words, and the first word and the fourth word are the same: “everything is about everything.” I think that why it’s relevant to the future is because if we don’t understand now that we really are all connected—you don’t have to be a Zen Buddhist monk or some Asian spiritual guru to say we are all part of a connected universe. You can say that if you want, you can believe that if you want, but on a very literal level, we are all connected. Our destinies depend on universal moral decisions that we take as a species of over-intelligent, rather presumptuous mammals on this very small planet which is getting hotter and hotter. So we have to understand that everything is about everything.
Yes, and can I ask you what you think about the art market, the relationship between the art market and creative freedom, artist freedom?
I am so lucky, I am so spoiled because coming to this at my age when most people retire and enjoy, if they can, kind of enjoy mending bicycles or whatever people do when they retire. I can actually just enjoy the total freedom of doing what I want to do. I have the good fortune of working with a group of people who support me and want to help me, which is what I have done for 40 years with my musical artists. So I suddenly find myself on the opposite side of the fence and being helped and supported to reach my objectives. But I just don’t care. I really do not care. I hope that I make tons and tons of money out of my art, but if I don’t make a single euro, I don’t care. It’s not my problem.
Okay, thank you. And about the future, how do you see the future of art and how art can help the world in some way?
It’s difficult to answer that question in three sentences. I’ve got to be honest. Personally, in my own theorizing of how art works, I believe that art is very culture-based. By that, I mean that there isn’t very much universal art in my opinion. It’s an opinion a lot of people disagree with, but I just don’t think that it’s easy to appreciate, say, what we Brits call “Monet” and you Italians call “L’Onda” without some background, some context. Or the Sistine Chapel without some information, without a cultural heritage. I don’t think it’s necessarily universal to the species in a meaningful way. Yes, there is symmetry. You can look at patterns and try to map those patterns onto neural bits and pieces of the brain lighting up when neuroscientists try to look at what’s happening in our brains when we perceive things. Yes, you can do all of that, but I don’t think there is very much that is universal. I think art is mainly cultural. What it should do, or what I would like it to do, is be a voice of our conscience. That’s why I say that I want it to be about things like the fear of death, about illness, about love and happiness, not just about special effects. The special effects and the technology have to be at the service of our humanity. That’s why I’m permanently arm wrestling with artificial intelligence and technology, saying, “I am human, I am human, I am human.” I will train you however clever you think you are. I probably didn’t answer the question directly, but I never do.
It was very, very interesting. Thank you.
Thank you.
