Art in the age of the authorless image

Roberto Rosso, professor Academy of Fine Arts of Brera

In an era marked by the increasing automation of visual production and the widespread use of artificial intelligence, a crucial reflection on the fate of the image, art and the human gaze emerges. The text investigates the progressive overlap between distinct languages, particularly between photography – understood as a trace of the real, memory and presence – and generated or manipulated images, which imitate its aesthetics without sharing its experiential origin.
At the heart of the analysis is the question of authorship: when the image becomes separated from human gesture, inner necessity and expressive responsibility, can it still retain authentic meaning? The reflection proposes a fundamental distinction between that which bears witness to the real and that which represents or substitutes for it, questioning the value of images devoid of experiential rootedness.
The result is a call to recover a critical awareness of the gaze, understood as a disciplined and responsible practice. In a context that risks losing the sense of memory and trace, questioning the image becomes a way of questioning man himself and his relationship with truth, language and reality.