Curiosities

On Art Again, Despite Everything

Gianni Sarcone

The word art, in the sense we give it today, has no exact equivalent in ancient Greek. The Greeks used téchnē (τέχνη), a term far broader than our word technique. It referred to the knowledge and skill required to make something well, with a clear purpose and a command of the means to achieve it.

The value of a work was also measured by its aretḗ: its excellence in fulfilling its purpose. The Greek word agathós, meaning “good,” could describe something or someone performing their role well: a soldier who showed courage in battle, or a craftsperson who gave a material the form best suited to its purpose.

In this way of thinking, beauty and goodness were not entirely separate. Quality was not an ornament added to usefulness; it was the fullest expression of a thing’s purpose.

In ancient Rome, ars referred to skills acquired through study, practice, and experience, while ingenium described natural gifts and innate talent. Art, then, was not merely a matter of inspiration. It also required knowledge, discipline, and mastery of one’s craft.

Even today, the words master and maestro, both derived from the Latin magister, reflect this older ideal of artistic excellence. They describe someone who has developed exceptional skill through knowledge, practice, and experience.

In the past, we tended to admire what an artist could do: their skill, their command of their craft, their technical mastery—or, at its worst, technique for technique’s sake. Today, what seems to matter more is the ability to surprise us: the unprecedented, the unexpected, the breaking of conventions. The source of wonder has shifted from mastery to novelty, from what an artist can accomplish to what no one has seen before.

Personally, I have no problem with that shift. Technique matters, but when it becomes an end in itself, it can get in the way of the very thing it should serve: the pleasure of experiencing a work of art on our own terms, without being told what to see or how to feel. After all, true mastery does not always mean showing off what you can do. Sometimes, it means knowing when to stop proving it.

And as a final thought, let’s be honest: these days, what often matters most is not what the artist can do, but whose name appears on the work. Believe me, an authenticated signature can carry more weight than the art itself. There’s even a Greek-derived word for it: autograph. Just my two cents.

Komorebi: The Beauty of Passing Moments

Gianni Sarcone

With age, I have developed a quiet awareness—a deliberate minimalism that allows me to step back from the current of life, much as an artist steps back from a canvas to see it whole. I am a solitary person by nature. I have little appetite for the frenzy of our times: the endless accumulation of possessions, the demands of social obligations, or the constant stream of noise competing for our attention. I prefer distance, silence, and the freedom to observe without being swept along.

There is a Japanese word that captures something of what I feel: komorebi (木漏れ日).

It describes sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees, scattering shifting patterns of light and shadow across the ground. Yet it also speaks to me of the fleeting beauty of things that cannot be held still. It stirs a quiet blend of serenity and melancholy, a feeling that passes through my senses and reaches the deepest part of my being, where I feel closest to my true self.

Komorebi brings to mind Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Both touch on light, shadow, and the limits of human perception. Yet while Plato urges us to look beyond appearances, I find myself lingering over them.

A breeze moves the branches, the light shifts, and the pattern changes. What appears in one moment will never be exactly the same again. Nothing needs to be captured, explained, or possessed. I only need to be there to witness it.

Beauty has less to do with permanence than with attention. A moment does not lose its value because it passes; its transience is part of what makes it matter.

We spend so much of our lives trying to hold on to people, places, feelings, and even former versions of ourselves that no longer exist. Yet life, like sunlight through the leaves, is always moving. What slips away may never return, but we have known it, if only for a moment.

To notice komorebi is to pause and recognize that impermanence is not the enemy of beauty. It is inseparable from it.

The light filters through. The leaves move. For a fleeting moment, the world is simply as it is.

That is enough.

Ceci n’est pas une perspective

Gianni Sarcone

An impossible orange structure embedded in a surreal, Magritte-like painting.

This image is part of a book project exploring visual illusions through paintings inspired by the styles of well-known artists. The idea is to revisit familiar artistic languages—Magritte, Picasso, and others—through invented works that play with visual illusions, perspective, and perceptual paradoxes.

I’m developing this as a richly illustrated book for a broad audience interested in art, perception, and visual thinking.

I’d be interested in hearing from publishers or art-book editors who might like to explore the project.

Interference Photography: When Color Is No Longer a Dye, but a Structure

Gianni Sarcone

In 1891, French physicist Gabriel Lippmann invented interference photography, a process that could capture color without using dyes or pigments. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1908 for this work.

The principle is simple but remarkable. Light passes through an extremely fine-grained photosensitive emulsion and is reflected by a layer of mercury behind it. The incoming and reflected waves interfere, producing standing waves whose structure varies with the wavelengths of light. This microscopic interference pattern is recorded in the emulsion.

An interference photograph of a bouquet of flowers from the Lippmann Collection, preserved at Sorbonne University.

When the plate is later illuminated, its microscopic structure diffracts and reflects selected wavelengths, reproducing the colors of the original scene. Unlike conventional three-color photography, which reconstructs color from three components, Lippmann’s process stores the color information as a physical structure of interference.

The process, however, was technically demanding and never became practical for widespread photography. In 1907, the Lumière brothers introduced the Autochrome, which became the first widely successful commercial color photography process based on three-color principles.

Lippmann photography had one important advantage, though: because it used no dyes, its colors were not subject to fading caused by the deterioration of colorants over time.

And the old idea has found a new life. Researchers have adapted the principle of Lippmann’s standing waves for long-term archival data storage. In 2019, experimental storage plates were exposed to cosmic radiation aboard the International Space Station for nine months, with no detectable degradation of the stored data.

From recording color to preserving information in space, the same principle still has something to say: sometimes the most durable way to store information is to make it part of the structure itself.

☞ Further reading.

Sarcone: The Willow

Gianni Sarcone

My surname Sarcone, attested as early as circa 1150, may reflect a phytotoponym derived from the Latin salix, salĭcis, “willow,” with the collective or augmentative suffix -ōne. A possible evolution is salicōne → salicone → sar(i)cone, through the phonetic changes that shaped the name over time.

I like to think that my name is connected to nature, and especially to this magnificent tree: the willow. The willow has always fascinated me for its resilience, flexibility, and capacity for renewal. It bends without breaking, withstands the wind, and grows back vigorously after being cut. Its strength comes from its flexibility.

That symbolism speaks to me. Life constantly changes, and resisting every change is not necessarily a sign of strength. Sometimes you have to bend, adapt, and keep going without losing your roots.

The willow is also traditionally associated with the cycles of the Moon, imagination, dreams, intuition, and flexibility of mind. I find these associations particularly fitting, since much of my work concerns perception, imagination, and the strange ways in which the mind constructs what we call reality.

My name also has an ancient Indo-European root. Salix is related to the Indo-European root *səlik, with cognates such as Greek helíkē and related forms in Celtic and Germanic languages.

I like the idea that a surname can carry such a long memory. A few letters inherited from the past can still evoke a tree, its roots, its branches, its movement in the wind—and, in some small way, the person who carries its name.

Sarcone: the willow. Rooted, flexible, resilient, and always capable of growing again.

Kinegrams: Optical Animations from Static Images

Gianni Sarcone

Two monks stood outside a temple, watching its flag wave in the wind.
“The flag moves,” said one.
“No, the wind moves,” said the other.A third monk smiled:
“Neither moves. Your mind moves.”

Back in the early 2000s, I ran a few public art workshops exploring a deceptively simple idea: a printed image does not have to move to appear animated.

The trick is a kinegram—a static image transformed into a precise pattern of lines. Place a special acetate screen over it, and the hidden movement suddenly appears.

No electronics. No screen. No animation software. Just a carefully calculated pattern and a bit of moiré.

In these workshops, we experimented with:
• concentric circles
• simple radial patterns
• geometric textures

The resulting kinegrams produce seamless, looping animations from completely static printed images. If you’re interested in exploring the technique or collaborating, feel free to contact me.

☞ More on kinegrams.

The Exposure of Time

Gianni Sarcone

Not so long ago, before the digital age, photographs were fixed on silver gelatin photographic paper. But there are other, far more powerful mediums capable of freezing a moment — sometimes even an entire civilization — in space and time: ash and forest.

Take Pompeii. In AD 79, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius abruptly brought life in the city to a halt, burying its streets, houses, and inhabitants beneath volcanic debris. Pompeii became, in a sense, a three-dimensional photograph of a precise moment in time. Walking through its streets today, we can still see traces of everyday life interrupted: decorated houses, shops, familiar objects, inscriptions on the walls. Everything seems to tell us what was happening just moments before time stopped: the bustle of the streets, voices mingling, merchants calling out to passersby, children crying, lovers meeting away from prying eyes. As if all those lives had been imprinted in stone.

Then there are the Maya cities, such as Palenque. Here, the shutter seems to have worked much more slowly. It did not capture a single moment, but the gradual disappearance of an entire civilization. After the city was abandoned, the tropical forest slowly covered its temples, palaces, and plazas, until it almost completely absorbed them.

At Pompeii, ash stopped time. In the Maya cities, it was the forest that covered it.

Two very different ways of preserving the past: one through a sudden interruption, the other through the slow return of nature. In both cases, what we discover today bears a strange resemblance to a photographic image — except that here, the image is three-dimensional, and its frame is time itself.

And there is something quite extraordinary about that: time, which normally erases everything, has left an image behind. An image without film, without a camera, without a photographer.

And perhaps that is the most haunting photograph of all: one that no one ever took, but that time itself developed.

Pompei
Pompeii
Palenque
Palenque

YAACOV AGAM — YOU NEVER SEE IT ALL

Gianni Sarcone

“When I finish a work, it is just starting.” — Yaacov Agam

One of my favorite Op Art artists and a true visionary, Yaacov Agam (Hebrew: יעקב אגם) was a pioneer of kinetic and Op Art. His work explored movement, color, time, and perception, making the viewer an active part of the artwork rather than a passive observer.

Born in Rishon LeZion in 1928, Agam studied at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem and later with Johannes Itten in Zurich. He moved to Paris in 1951, where he became one of the leading figures of the European avant-garde. His first solo exhibition was held there in 1953.

Agam died in June 2026, at 98, after receiving the Israel Prize for Visual Arts. His work is represented in major museums around the world.

Among his most remarkable achievements is the Salon Agam, commissioned by President Georges Pompidou for the private apartments of the Élysée Palace and created between 1972 and 1974. Now in the collection of the Centre Pompidou, it is essentially a kinetic environment: walls, doors, ceiling, carpet, color and geometric forms change as the viewer moves through the space.

Agam understood something fundamental about visual art: the work is not always what you see. It is also what happens when you move, look again, and see something different.

Is Nature Already a Work of Art?

Gianni Sarcone

Art may not be exclusively a human affair. Nature has its own creative force and aesthetic power. Crystals, shells, clouds, and landscapes produce forms and patterns that we often find as fascinating as works made by artists.

Without disturbing Kant too much—and his somewhat dated distinction between natural and artistic beauty—where does art actually begin?

Nature: the original artist?

Nature creates without any apparent intention. It does not try to please us or express an idea, yet it can produce forms of extraordinary complexity and beauty.

  • Spontaneous beauty: Crystals, landscapes, spirals, symmetries, and biological patterns can display structures we perceive as beautiful.
  • Creation without a plan: Nature produces forms without an artist, a blueprint, or even an audience.
  • Our first inspiration: From the beginning, humans have observed, imitated, and transformed natural forms into their own creations.

For Kant, this is precisely where the difference lies: a work of art involves intention and a concept of what it is supposed to be, whereas natural beauty can be appreciated without knowing any purpose behind what we see.

But is intention really necessary?

Does art require intention?

The idea that we must know what an artist intended in order to understand or judge a work has been questioned for a long time. In 1946, William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley famously called the attempt to use an author’s intention as the basis for interpretation the “intentional fallacy.”

And art can go even further.

It can be improvised, accidental, discovered rather than made. It can emerge from a chance encounter between an object and a particular way of looking at it.

Leonardo da Vinci already understood this. He suggested looking at stains and irregular patterns on old walls because they could trigger visions of landscapes, battles, figures, and strange compositions. Chance could become a generator of images.

In other words, the work is not always entirely in the object.

Sometimes, it appears in the eye of the beholder.

Take a stone polished by the sea. It might suddenly remind you of a sculpture by Henry Moore. Nobody sculpted it. Nobody intended it to represent anything. Yet your brain detects a form, gives it meaning, and perhaps even sees a sculpture.

So—is it art?

From found object to readymade

With Marcel Duchamp, things get even more complicated.

The readymade takes an existing object, removes it from its ordinary context, and presents it as art. Duchamp began exploring this idea as early as 1913 with Bicycle Wheel.

The object itself may have little or nothing to do with traditional ideas of beauty. What changes is the context, the choice, and the way we look at it.

Art therefore moves, at least in part, from something made by the artist to something that can be selected, discovered, and reframed by the artist.

And this makes the boundary between creating and discovering surprisingly thin.

A natural form can resemble a sculpture. A stain can become a landscape. An ordinary object can become a work of art. And sometimes a work becomes art only because someone recognizes it as such.

Perhaps the artist does not always create something from nothing.

Sometimes, the artist does something more subtle:

he reveals what everyone else was looking at but never saw.

So where, exactly, do we draw the line between art and non-art?

And ultimately, what makes something art: the object, the artist’s intention, or the eye of the beholder?

Newspeak and Esperanto: When Simplifying Language Simplifies Thought

Gianni Sarcone

At first glance, Orwell’s Newspeak in 1984 and Esperanto seem to have little in common. One is the fictional language of a totalitarian regime; the other was created by L. L. Zamenhof as an international language designed to make communication easier between people from different countries.

Yet they share an interesting structural principle: the simplification of language through regularity and word formation.

In Newspeak:

good → ungood → plusgood → doubleplusgood

Instead of good, bad, better, or excellent, one basic word does much of the work through prefixes and modifiers.

A surprisingly similar pattern exists in Esperanto:

bona → malbona → pli bona → bonega

good → bad → better → excellent.

The resemblance is structural, but the intentions are radically different. Esperanto uses regularity to make a language easier to learn and to generate words without memorizing endless irregular forms. Zamenhof’s aim was not to restrict thought, but to facilitate international communication.

Newspeak, by contrast, is designed to reduce the space in which thought can operate. Its ultimate purpose is not merely to simplify communication, but to make certain ideas increasingly difficult—or eventually impossible—to formulate.

There is, however, an intriguing historical footnote.

For decades, it has been speculated that Orwell’s antagonism toward his aunt’s husband, Eugène Lanti, a French socialist and prominent Esperanto speaker, may have influenced his conception of Newspeak. The claim remains speculative, not an established fact. But the story is fascinating in its own right because it leads back to the 1920s and 1930s, when many people on the political left regarded Esperanto as more than a neutral language: they saw it as a vehicle for international solidarity, social change, and working-class emancipation.

That makes the apparent linguistic connection even more intriguing—but it is important not to confuse historical speculation with evidence.

The deeper issue lies elsewhere.

A language does not merely describe thought. It also provides many of the distinctions through which we organize it.

Words do not correspond one-to-one with things or ideas. They exist within a network of synonyms, antonyms, associations, contrasts, and cultural practices. Meaning is therefore, in an important sense, holistic: a word cannot be fully understood in isolation from the larger linguistic system in which it lives.

If excellent, remarkable, magnificent, admirable, and exceptional are all reduced to variations of good, we have not merely simplified the dictionary. We have reduced the palette of distinctions available to us.

Of course, structural simplicity does not automatically produce impoverished thinking. Esperanto is a good example: a language can be highly regular and economical while remaining capable of expressing complex ideas. The danger begins when simplification stops removing unnecessary complexity and starts removing meaningful distinctions.

And that is perhaps the point worth remembering:

Distinctions matter.

So don’t be afraid of linguistic complexity. When you write, use a good thesaurus. Look at the synonyms and antonyms. Explore the neighboring words and the subtle differences between them. Then choose the word that says exactly what you mean.

Because language is not beautiful despite its complexity.

Language is beautiful because of it.