Curatorview [Alfredo Cramerotti]

El Correos newspaper, 25 January 2011

Over the past six years Alfredo Cramerotti has written about the aesthetic merger of contemporary art and the news media. Drawing from his book Aesthetic Journalism: How to inform without informing (2009, Intellect), Cramerotti provocatively advances the idea that art and journalism are not separate forms of communication, but rather two sides of a unique activity , the production and distribution of images and information.

As aesthetic regimes, both journalism and artistic makes claims for the truth, albeit of a different kind. One is a coded system that speaks for the truth (or so it claims), the other a set of activities that questions itself at every step (or so it claims), thus making truth. Whereas journalism provides a view on the world ‘out there,’ as it ‘really’ is, art often presents a view on the view, truth posited as acts of (self)reflection. Cramerotti  will examine both as a types of truth production, as systems of information that defines truth in terms of the visible: producing not only what can be seen, but also what can be imagined, and thus imaged. As such, we start to get closer to the core of reality itself when we make our reality not a given, irreversible fact, but a possibility among many others.

The talk generated a principal question: is it possible to work with aesthetics and informatics, to be both reflective and precise? To both employ documentary techniques and journalistic methods while remaining self-reflecting and critical on those means? Ultimately, the artist’s work is not about delivering information but questioning it, reversing the tradition of both fields (art and journalism), to highlight both the aesthetic workings and trappings of reportage and the informational turn within current aesthetic production.