The Creative Daemon (δαίμων) and the Hyper-Intellection of Art

We live in a time full of expressive possibilities, and we have unprecedented access to a tendentially infinite collection of information. However, for this very reason, we never before suffered such tremendous “anxiety of influence”, to use the title of Harold Bloom's seminal work (1973). Not only because of this informational overabundance but also, in a way, as a hangover for all the vanguards that in the twentieth century redefined all frontiers of artistic expression and went far beyond them, almost to the apparent exhaustion of all the radical possibilities of Art. To these questions we will try to give one possible answer, pointing a direction or path that can integrate, in the same dynamic approach, the creative impulse, the daemonic dimension (from the Greek δαίμων, a spirit that can guide us) so well identified by the Greek Culture of antiquity, with the seemingly overwhelming informational availability of the present. In short, the answer will be to look at the expressive dimension under the filter of a creative (ie, daemonic) hyper-intellection, in the sense that if the whole creative impulse comes from an irrational drive it also requires, with the same intensity, to be guided by a filter of a pan-optic understanding of the artistic world, either in the current perspective of the landscape of contemporaneity or in a diachronic approach, that is, with a historical understanding of Culture.