Thoughts: our art is the art of a revolutionary period

I've been transcribing and editing the words of
Lucio Fontana, John Reed, Constant Nieuwenhuys, Aleksandr Rodchenko and Guy Debord from their SITUATIONISM manifesto.

Why? 100 years later it is just as relevant as always.
But with the rise of crypto art… now more than ever.

Capitalist civilization, which has dominated the economic, political and cultural life of its continents, is in the process of extinction.

The total machinery of the bourgeoisie is in decay:
its philosophy, its literature and its art are bankrupt.

The bourgeoisie is no longer a progressive class,
and its ideas are no longer progressive ideas.

On the contrary: as the bourgeois world moves toward the abyss,
it reverts to the mysticism of the Middle Ages.

Fascism in politics is accompanied by neo-Catholicism in thinking.

Western art, once the celebrator for emperors and popes, is becoming an instrument of the glorification of bourgeois ideals.

There is now a prevailing economic crisis, which is placing greater and greater burden upon the mass of the world’s population.

This present crisis has stripped capitalism naked.

It stands more revealed than ever as a system of robbery and fraud, unemployment and terror, starvation and war.

What can be done to turn this disastrous situation around?

We are obliged to continue the evolution of art.

When an old world is dying; a new one awaits to be born.

The ideas are irrefutable.
They have always existed as seeds within the social fabric,
awaiting expression by artists and thinkers.

We now call upon all honest intellectuals, all writers and artists, to abandon decisively the treacherous illusion that art can exist for art’s sake,
or that the artist can remain remote from the historic conflicts,
in which all men must take sides.

We call upon them to break with bourgeois ideas which seek to conceal the violence and fraud, the corruption and decay of capitalist society. We urge them to forge a new art that shall be a weapon in the battle for a new and superior world.

Against the spectacle, our new culture introduces total participation.

Against particularized art, it will be a global collective practice.

And against preserved art, it is the organization of the directly lived moment.

So, in this period of change, the role of the artist can only be that of the revolutionary: it is his duty to destroy the last remnants of an empty, irksome aesthetic, arousing the creative instincts still slumbering unconsciously in the human mind.

OUR art is therefore the art of a revolutionary period!

We glorify the revolution aloud as the only engine of life.

We glorify the vibrations of the inventors.

Young and strong, we march with the flaming torches of the revolution. This is the place for the rebellious spirit.

Let us move. Forward.