In NY

Being sick is often a good chance to stay alone with yourself, without an agenda to fulfill. Being stuck in a city because your flight leaves only 24 hours later is a more pleasant way to obtain the same goal. And if the city is then NY, it might be a blessing.

The temptation to eat hamburgers in my hotel room, typing on this computer all the time, had to be resisted. And it was. I went for a long walk and then checked what's new in American Contemporary Art. My lucky day: the Whitney Museum houses one of the world's foremost collections of twentieth-century American art, and the Biennial was on.

Unmissable, if one is around. Not only for the single pieces (I enjoyed many of them, especially Walead Beshty, Jedediah Caesar, Charles Long) but also for the overview it affords on today's America art. Not many novelties, perhaps even a lack of clear ideas and purpose, but a tangible sense of search for new ways of expressions.

Probably most of the objects will soon (one hope) be forgotten. And the usual, obsessive, self-referential mumbling of people who have nothing to say, but think that saying this much, in some smart-assish way, can fill the gap, makes one puke. Who cares! Shut-up, please. Don't waste broadband. White noise and zeros acquire meaning only when there is a message or ones to which they can be contrasted. But then, it is the curators' fault if sometimes silence is not respected (Frances Stark).

One simple thing that seems to have been lost is a clear grasp of the inevitably informational nature of art. Art is a form of communication, where there is

• a sender,
  
• a message,
  
• a code,
  
• an encoding process,
  
• a medium,
  
• a communication,
  
• a receiver, and
  
• a final decoding by a receiver.

The sender might be less obvious than it looks (it's the artist, or the museum that ordered the piece, the foundation that provided financial support for it, the Church or Party or Business that commissioned it, the culture that actually produced it...). The message has often many layers and meanings. And the receiver may be hardly identifiable. But these, as well as the other components, are there anyway, whether the artist likes it or not. And the only way to eliminate them is to stop being an artist and going for a walk.

So it is bad, tricky, perhaps disingenuous or simply silly and meaningless to try to avoid the informational nature of art. All rules can be broken but the rule that there will be rules, such as the rule of breaking all rules. Trivial and inevitable truism. One may wish to disrespect, bypass, destroy, annihilate, overcome, disregard, chew and spit out the informational model... but all in vain, for no art is possible without such a structure, let alone an art that denies it.

The best expressions of contemporary art seems to me those that take new and further advantage of the informational model, with innovative techniques, contents, a diversificatoin of senders and receivers, of codes and encoding/decoding processes. Seen in this way, visual-artistic expressions are boundless as music and literature are. The only trouble is that you need to have something interesting to say. And this is not common.

Walking back. A ruminating reflection on silence. On how we miss it so much. Because we cannot listen to ourselves and hence we become strangers to ourselves. The park was blasted by salsa music to force people to jump and exercise at the rhythm of a different kind of sunshine. It ruined the atmosphere.