Christian Caliandro critiques reduction of art to captions and messages

Christian Caliandro argues that contemporary art is increasingly reduced to its supposed content or message, a trend he calls 'contenutismo-cronachismo.' He contends that language, style, and form are being treated as obstacles rather than resources, with artworks expected to be immediately legible and decipherable. This oversimplification, he writes, erodes ambiguity, contradiction, and indeterminacy—the very territory where language operates. Caliandro warns that this approach perpetuates a simplistic 'us vs. them' dichotomy, citing Primo Levi's 'I sommersi e i salvati' (1986). He quotes Giulio Paolini's 'Antefatto' (from Paola Barocchi's 'Storia moderna dell'arte in Italia', Einaudi 1992) to argue that the author is merely a bearer of the work. The piece, published on Artribune, criticizes the demand for art to take a clear stance and be easily readable, which he sees as a broader difficulty in accepting forms of experience that resist reduction to information or opinion.