Luca Siniscalco is an Italian academic whose work I follow with interest. He continues to produce work in many fields, including contemporary German philosophy and literature, aesthetics, contemporary art, symbolism, and philosophy of religion. We spoke with him about the transformation of art and the role played by artificial intelligence in this process.

In today’s world, everything from biological identities to artistic identities is being “uprooted” from its origins. What does this uprooting signify, and how does it affect the functions of art? 

Western philosophy has interpreted the radical mentioned process through various frameworks: Marxist theory speaks of “alienation”, while Nietzsche diagnoses this condition as the tragic event of “nihilism”. In any case, both capture a virulent dualistic dynamic wherein the unity of beings is progressively fragmented. Modernity inaugurated this trajectory, marked by Max Weber’s notion of the “disenchantment of the world” and its instrumental rationalization. Postmodernity, in turn, directs critical modern logocentric reason against the principles and values of modernity itself, further accelerating fragmentation and ontological instability. 

This transformation profoundly impacts the realm of art itself, particularly in the ontological status of the artistic images. In pre-modern, traditional civilizations, the essence, form and function of art was inseparable from the sacred and was expressed through symbolic images in which the particular and the universal coincided. With modernity, these images undergo a process of materialization and secularization, stripped of their transcendent roots and reduced to immanent, historical and natural dimensions. Furthermore, in postmodernity, even this immanent grounding is lost: images appear as rhizomatic phantoms – unmoored, placeless, and protean. What emerges is an aesthetic landscape of aeriform simulacra, wherein the essence of beings radiates a vacuous nothingness – triumph, one might say, of the meme-age.

Expressed in traditionalist, Guénonian terms, the “Great Wall” that once shielded the human world and protected it against the intrusion of telluric influences has crumbled. While modernity’s materialization of the world – an event of ontological “solidification” of the sensory world – blocked the access to the transcendent, postmodernity’s “fissures” open portals to both higher and lower ontological realms. Thus, we witness a return of the numinous in distorted forms, those of “second religiosity” (O. Spengler). This process, however, does not only impact the imaginative atmosphere of which several contemporary socio-cultural leading phenomena are endowed (the myths of the postmodern world, from the cult of ideological ecologism to the gnostic apocalypses of certain pop culture and the Manichean spirituality of “wokeism”). Fortunately, it also emerges within the desire of numerous artists, less and less outsiders, increasingly visible in the cultural mainstream, to foster the aesthetic manifestation of the sacred, rebuilding bridges with forms of vertical metaphysics and overcoming the interregnum of nihilism.

In this complex scenario, two broad tendencies in contemporary art, can be discerned: one that furthers the “uprooting” process by embracing and even accelerating radical autonomy and fragmentation; and another that seeks to reverse this epochal dynamic, reanchoring art in the metaphysical, and allowing the Origin to manifest through new shapes. As Gustav Mahler put it, “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire”. Art, then, may still serve as a vessel for this sacred fire.

Nowadays, anything declared as art or labeled as an artwork is widely accepted as such. How do the anomalies produced by modernity manifest in the ways artworks are created and consumed? 

As already introduced, on a more radical plane than the formal one, a genuine ontological transformation has invested the work of art – a transformation that is far more relevant compared to the specific and sectorial modifications occurred to its stylistic and technical domain. Once embedded in ritual and cultic functions, art has become autonomous – severed from its sacred and metaphysical grounding. Its legitimacy now derives from criteria such as novelty, provocation, irony, morality, socio-political engagement, conceptual cleverness, and so forth. Furthermore, with the triumph of subjectivism, the work of art is no longer valued for its intrinsic or revelatory qualities, but for the capacity of an agent – be it artist, curator, or market system – to frame it as art. This is the essence of what has come to be called the “contemporary art system”: a network of legitimizing agents that determines aesthetic value, market price, and consumption practices.

This subjectivist turn risks conflating the domain of art with other, adjacent but distinct practices – graphic design, marketing, or even theoretical discourse – especially in genres of conceptual art where the sensual and material presence is supplanted by intellectual propositions. When coupled with capitalist commodification, digital virtualization, and the cognitive overload characteristic of late modernity, the contemporary art scene takes on a tragic character.

With the withdrawal of religion from the social sphere, art and culture seem to assume a substitutive function. Does this position art as a mere “tool”? What implications does this instrumentalization of art hold for social values and creative freedom? 

What you correctly call “the withdrawal of religion from the social sphere” is connected to the secularization process. In the modern age, profane art, as part of humanistic and secular culture, has somehow substituted religion in offering cultural instruments to humanity to grasp, order, and interpret reality – at least in its phenomenal and material sphere. Yet, with the collapse of modern cultural canons under the weight of postmodern fragmentation, art itself has become implicated in the general cultural crisis, being no longer able to provide a comprehensive communal tool to decipher complex global reality. 

Nevertheless, art retains a latent potentiality due to its originary link to the sacred, as captured by Walter Benjamin’s concept of the aura. This opens the possibility, at least theoretically, for a counter-movement: one that seeks to restore a unity between creative freedom and metaphysical grounding. This is perhaps the central challenge of art in the post-secular age.

What does the concept of “art” correspond to in today’s context? Given that modern society considers not only the aesthetic and cultural dimensions but also the political, economic, and ideological aspects, how is the function of art evolving? 

Contemporary art is defined not by stylistic coherence but by pluralism, fragmentation, and even contradiction. The contemporary academic milieu has largely abandoned the metaphysical question “What is art?” in favor of performative definitions. As Dino Formaggio noted, “Art is everything that men call art.”

This performative openness allows for diverse and even oppositional currents within the field. While the dominant trend often reflects postmodern irony, dematerialization, and aesthetic nominalism, there is a growing presence – both in academic discourse and artistic practice – of movements that seek re-symbolization, new mythologies, and a re-enchantment of the world. Despite not being valorized in mainstream culture and media, this attitude is broadly spread in the way artists understand their own role and cultural vocation.

From this perspective, there emerges the return to an artistic qualitative and abyssal function, capable of evoking forms and meanings. Aesthetics, in this context, is increasingly understood not merely as a theory of perception but as a theory of disclosure – an “unveiling” of Being (Ereignis in Heidegger’s terms). Art becomes a formative power: one that draws meaning from the formless and organizes it into symbolic configurations. Thus, the artistic event may serve as an ontological act: a gesture toward the Origin, toward that unfounded foundation from which all manifestation proceeds. As I have argued elsewhere (e.g., L’immagine come ponte. Un’estetica del sovrasensibile, 2019), symbolic art functions as a bridge between the visible and the invisible.

How can the inclusion of artificial intelligence in art production processes be evaluated within Heidegger’s critique of technology? In what ways does AI transform perceptions of the essence of art and the artist’s creativity, and what existential and ethical questions does this transformation bring to the forefront?

The inclusion of AI in art production invites critical reflection, particularly in light of Heidegger’s critique of technology. For Heidegger, the essence of modern technology is not itself technological but resides in its enframing nature (Gestell, “the Framework”), which reduces beings to mere standing-reserve (Bestand) – resources to be exploited. Indeed, in Heidegger’s theory, the ambivalent “supra-human” character of technology is part of Western (and thus, now global) destiny. It can therefore represent also an opportunity for that part of humanity which will be able to transcend its already given biological nature, which moreover originally included also a technical instinct. The danger of Gestell thus hides a “saving power” (das Rettende).

AI, as a culmination of modern technicity, is not a neutral tool but a manifestation of an underlying worldview – one that prioritizes efficiency, optimization, and control. It operates in the “subtle” realm of virtuality, fulfilling Ernst Jünger’s prophecy of an “earth spiritualization” (Erdvergeistigung). As such, AI is both the apogee of the will to power and the threshold of its potential overcoming. Its algorithmic creativity gestures toward a return to chaos—perhaps a digital echo of the Greek Chaos—from which new symbolic orders might arise.

It is from this dynamic and rhizomatic power that AI proceeds, perhaps overcoming the merely materialistic driving forces of that modern technology criticized by Heidegger. As already seen when mentioning Guénon’s theory, our world seems to reevoke – although often in reversed and perverted forms – traditional archetypes.

And if, therefore, matter is also quality, if matter is also form, then matter will also make evident this quality of its own, which is to a certain extent connected with the spiritual dimension. And the evidence of matter can only be its aesthetics.

In the postmodern, liquefied age, also matter liquefies: AI contributes to the process.

AI also destabilizes the artwork’s aura by collapsing the distance between creation and reproduction. Yet this loss is not necessarily irreversible. As Benjamin noted in his reflections on the “sex appeal of the inorganic,” digital forms may still produce aesthetic fascination. What matters is not whether AI is “truly” creative, but how we relate to it – whether we approach it with symbolic intelligence, capable of reorienting its output toward deeper metaphysical meaning.

The risk of confusing sensual gratification with the goal of art, forgetting its sapiential, symbolic and spiritual dimension, the trivialization of culture, subtracted from its tragic-existential dimension and reduced to entertainment, are results of technical reproducibility when it identifies itself tout court with the reproducibility of liquid Capital – which is accompanied, not by chance, by the process which Yves Michaud defined as “the vaporization of art”. But does not the general aesthetic, cultural and spiritual situation already appear like this? Quoting Prof. Derrick de Kerckhove, from a recent interview: “Only a very small percentage of society will escape the siren song of GenAI. Add to this the fact that most people rely on their smartphones to remember, think and orient themselves in space, and you get a society that does not think at all. But this may not be such a bad thing after all. Large language models (LLM) will straighten out the average person’s thinking and leave those who do not overuse them in the role of true creators”. The latter could become the “sheperd of Being” (der Hirt des Seins) – to mention Heidegger’s lexicon – by acting as “curator” of algorithmic flows, and transfiguring the technical act (techne) into a poetical one (poiesis) capable of bringing beings forth, revealing their truth.

To resist the trivialization of art into mere entertainment or algorithmic spectacle, artists must reaffirm art’s sapiential and symbolic vocation. This may require not rejecting AI, but integrating it into an “archeofuturist” (Guillaume Faye) vision that re-enchants technique through mythopoetic imagination. Yuk Hui’s theory of “cosmotechnics” – the idea that different civilizations embed moral and cosmological values in their technologies – offers a powerful framework for such reimagination. Recognizing the metaphysical pluralism latent in different technological paradigms could open new ontological paths for art and culture in the age of generative AI.