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Ethical Manifesto of Marco Bertìn
The creativity market
Already in the 1950s, the American economist Victor Lebow argued:
“Our incredibly productive economy requires us to elevate consumerism to our lifestyle, to transform the purchase and use of goods into rituals, to make us look for our personal and spiritual fulfillment in consumerism. [...] We need more and more goods to be consumed, destroyed and replaced at an ever-increasing rate. We need people who eat, drink, dress, ride, live, in an increasingly complicated and, consequently, more and more expensive consumerism”.
We are aware that
The enormous pressure of the media, created by modern marketing and advertising, generates needs and dependencies even where there are none, and proposes products and services that meet those needs again and again, while always trying to create new ones to generate a hyper-production which needs constantly increasing expenditure;
Consumerism is not an anthropological necessity, but a social habit of elementary influence on the masses, to which we have been obsessively educated since childhood;
Industry exploits the natural desire of the human being to sustain itself.
The human subject feels happy when able to give value to what he produces and to what he possesses. The consumer model bases its own penetrating strategy on creating pseudo-unhappiness, trying to generate disinterest in individuals about what they already have, to push them to buy always new things (it pushes people to value what they do not have, making them give less value to what they already possess, creating illusory unhappiness to fill with new products offered by the market); moreover, in order to maximize profits, one tries to produce where the costs of workforce are lower, often creating conditions of true unhappiness in the less well-off classes. An obvious example is China’s production of Western culture objects, conflicting with and often anti-ideologic to the same popular culture that produces them, and hence objects to which Chinese workers can not give real value.
We are convinced that
An ethical and modern economy can not sink its roots into a model that brings in its name the reasons of its failure: “to consume” means to waste goods and resources without recovery;
The modern economy can not ignore the concept of sustainability and the respect for the environment and the people living in it and the model of consumerism is concerned with increasing the market economy and productivity, but does not care - with the same amount of solicitude - about the environmental consequences, refuse disposal, pollution and waste;
The free market is not to be confused with consumerism and while the former creates opportunities for the development of ideas and human creativity, the latter tends to consumer opulence as the only mechanism of economic growth;
Consumer awareness, the development of an economic ethics and a culture in favour of sustainable development are the key to laying the cultural foundations of a future economy that maintains the balance between the artificial world and the natural world.
We intend to act with an installation project of contemporary art where thousands of toys belonging to the ludic world of children and of western youths, rigorously produced in China, dominate in a very enchanting and scenographic manner.
They remind us how the new generations are too often left at the mercy of the media without any educational guidance, to learn unconsciuously how to internalize consumerism as a lifestyle, without cultivating the critical thinking, the knowledge of the consequences that hyper-productions have on the environment and often forgetting how it is more educating to grow with not ready-made toys that stimulate creativity and wits since the young age.
It is a challenge that ARTantide.com and Marco Bertin have decided to face with the aim of spreading memes (units of thought) and so to share with people the idea that educating new generations to critical awareness can bring to an economy attentive to the sustainable growth of markets and the planet without having to look for happiness in the shopping cart.
Verona, August 25, 2016
Last Museal Projects
2022 | Alem da Etica, Museum "De Arte de Blumenau". Blumenau, Brasil
2022 | The Times of Chimeras, National Pavilion of the Republic of Cameroon, 59. La Biennale di Venezia
2021 | XIII Florence Biennale, Fortezza da Basso, Florence (Italy)
2020 | ARTEOLOGIA - Oltre l'Etica, Archeological Museum of Vicenza (Italy)
2019 | Oltre l'Etica, Paranaense Museum, 14th International Biennale of Curitiba (Brasil)
2019 | Mental Recycling, Science Gallery Venice, Polo San Giobbe, Ca' Foscari University
2018 | ARTEOLOGIA, National Archeological Museum of Venice
