Christian Caliandro on Art as Antidote to Don DeLillo's Incandescent Future

In a recent essay on Artribune, Christian Caliandro (born 1979), contemporary art historian and professor at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze, revisits Don DeLillo's 2001 essay "In the Ruins of the Future" originally published in Harper's Bazaar. Caliandro argues that DeLillo's warnings about a "incandescent future" dominated by stock markets, multinational corporations, and consumer-robots have materialized into present reality. He notes that the world has shrunk, travel has decreased, and imagination has faltered under the weight of dystopian actuality. As an antidote, Caliandro turns to artist Giulio Paolini, citing his 1973 statement that "the work pre-exists the artist's intervention" and a 2022 text where Paolini asserts that art does not speak, is neither public nor social, and that the artist's mission is to guard an unfathomable secret. Caliandro proposes this notion of art as a silent, melancholic vocation as the only possible remedy to the incandescent future that has become the present. The essay references Interstellar (2014) and mentions William Gibson and Bruce Sterling as authors of dystopian fiction that now mirrors reality.