Art & Creativity Quote by Jose Bergamin

Art that begs to be seen usually gets filed under noise. Bergamin’s line flips the modern attention economy on its head: the highest ambition of “true art” is not to perform its own importance, but to create the conditions in which attention becomes voluntary, even intimate. The paradox is the point. If a work is engineered to attract, it trains the audience to respond to signals - shock, novelty, branding - rather than to the thing itself. It wins the glance and loses the gaze.

“Tries not” matters, too. Bergamin isn’t romanticizing purity; he’s describing discipline. The artist has to resist the cheap tricks available in any era: ornament for ornament’s sake, moral grandstanding, cleverness that exists mainly to be recognized as clever. That restraint becomes a kind of ethical posture. The work trusts that meaning can travel without being shouted.

Bergamin, a Spanish writer formed by the upheavals of the early 20th century and the moral propaganda wars around the Spanish Civil War, knew how quickly art can be recruited into spectacle - by regimes, by movements, by markets. In that context, “not attracting attention” reads as a defense of interior freedom. The art that endures doesn’t announce itself as art; it lets you discover it and, in that discovery, makes you complicit. Noticed, here, isn’t fame. It’s recognition: the slow click when something quietly arranged reaches you and won’t leave.