The "Trilemma" of art

To exist as a free entity issued by the aesthetic conscience, without depending on conditions outside personality that deform or mediate it; to be born marked by a faith that is distant from its essential expressive and cultural nature; or to serve only adornment, ostentation, certain financial transactions and strange entertainment, they all constitute alternatives to the contemporary drama experienced by artistic creation. Hence the conflict of having to choose between producing a sincere outcome or otherwise manufacture what is guaranteed to be successful and spectacular, showing what is made with a singular vision or to be fashionable and join “business productions” that disguise themselves as very “up-to-the-minute," attend events that show legitimate paths of imagination scattered around the world or partake systematically in the alienated circuits of consumption with their huge "supermarkets" so called Art Fairs.

Our Biennial, with its thirteenth edition this 2019, took up the best signs of its previous editions and assumed renewal, geopolitical, communicational, and endogenous concerns of spectacular design and about the link between the public and the work of art, which is typical of artists from a multitude of ethnicities and nationalities. A serious and dispassionate study of the Biennial organized by Cuba would show the ups and downs of its permanence, the link with vital circumstances of the country, as well as the complex integration in it of forecasts, passions and problems of planetary scope.