Verba Mundi for La Lettura

A special edition of the La Lettura supplement, which granted access to the digital certificate of authenticity for the artwork entitled “Verba Mundi,” was on Italian newsstands from 20 February 2024 for one month.

In his landmark volume Il divenire delle arti (The Becoming of the Arts), the eminent critic Gillo Dorfles carried out a precise survey of artistic languages, outlining a method for observing what he called the “oscillations of taste”; at the same time he philosophically—and materially—investigated the relationship between image and imagination, between universal and individual symbols, and the values that distinguish the arts through their expressive means. The cover of la Lettura issue 638 (18 February) therefore marked a fresh and, we believed, highly significant step in capturing the zeitgeist, the very compass that had guided our work.

Andrea Bonaceto’s cover for la Lettura #638

The artist Andrea Bonaceto (Pisa, 1989) had already become one of the most internationally recognised digital artists. His practice—still operating within a niche—embodied the new frontier of contemporary art: creators who worked chiefly with digital languages, often interacting with the vast web, and who were now venturing even further by exploiting Artificial Intelligence’s creative possibilities. Fittingly, the cover that readers first saw in its traditional paper form on Sunday, 18 February, could from Tuesday, 20 February, also be purchased for €10 in a digital edition enriched with a digital certificate of authenticity, turning the cover itself into a genuine collector’s item.

The artwork “Verba Mundi,” reproduced on that cover, explored the dichotomy between humanity and Artificial Intelligence, placing the human being at the centre of Bonaceto’s enquiry. Conceptually, he analysed the dialogue between man and machine—between Psiche and Technè—and offered an innovative language of interaction between artist and audience. The emergence of works whose meaning was completed or altered by the public’s participation had already been outlining a new artistic grammar.

This tendency had meanwhile been spreading. In Venice, at Punta della Dogana, Pierre Huyghe, under the curatorship of Anne Stenne, developed a project that occupied the entire building, transforming it into a responsive platform that conversed with visitors and introduced new characters and narratives. Since his earliest pieces, Huyghe had adopted a non‑human perspective, questioning subjectivities beyond the biological; his fictions served as gateways to the possible and the impossible, to what might or might not be—between the human and the inhuman—thus challenging the reality before us. Other artists had already pursued this dialogue between work and viewer, human and non‑human, but the intervention of AI—recall our issue 500 cover, created by the robot artist Ai‑Da—had begun to open new conceptual and generative dimensions concerning the very nature of the artwork, along with its contaminations, dérives and fascinations.

Returning to Bonaceto: the central section of “Verba Mundi”—dense with figures reminiscent of Alighiero Boetti’s celebrated Tutto cycle—was hand‑drawn, whereas the outer part was generated by AI. The algorithm layered years of the artist’s own imagery, converting them into an abstract dimension, just as abstraction manifests in our minds when memory dissolves. The central figures referred to Bonaceto’s personal lexicon: the palimpsest of a new alphabet (imagine Egyptian hieroglyphs) that would acquire meaning over time through the future digital interaction of its viewers. Starting Tuesday, 20 February, and for one month, collectors could purchase the limited edition of la Lettura #638; by scanning the QR code on the cover with the Corriere Art Collection smartphone app, they obtained an NFT that certified the work’s authenticity and displayed it within the app. In this instance, the NFT functioned purely as a certificate of authenticity for a physical artefact.

In this way the digital collection came to life. Back in the 1960s, Nam June Paik had observed that “just as collage had replaced oil painting, the cathode‑ray tube would replace the canvas.” Decades later, Bill Viola urged artists to “look beneath the surface and unleash the visual potential of the electronic image.” As a master poet of moving imagery, he did so with emotional power. Meanwhile the entire realm of digital creation (and NFTs) surged forward—at times decisively, at times controversially—through territories of spectacle and market. Two examples suffice: the vast speculation surrounding Beeple (whose NFT sold for $69 million) and the immersive images of Refik Anadol, the most prominent AI artist to date and the first to bring AI‑generated digital art into the MoMA’s permanent collection.

Artistic production has always unfolded on shifting, often arduous ground. As the influential critic Jerry Saltz reminded us in his instructive book How to Be an Artist, the art world is “a true viper’s nest.” For that reason, Saltz urged anyone approaching this fascinating yet treacherous milieu to cultivate one fundamental virtue: courage—“a desperate leap that will carry you straight into the arms of the angels of creation.” The digital realm has demanded exactly the same boldness.