Defined in an immemorial and tireless way as "the art of the possible" , we think of politics in terms of what can be done with it but we turn our gaze towards what it has of art.

As is well known, since the 20th century the seven fine arts have been architecture, painting, sculpture, music, literature, dance, and film, the latter being the most recently added. As can be seen, politics is not among them, and there is no doubt that proposing otherwise, at least provisionally, might be extraordinarily forced.

At first glance, politics, as we know it, but above all as we practice it, is very far from the cooperative creation dynamic typical of the art world, so much so that it could even be defined as having an inverse logic, not creative cooperation but predictable destruction ; in politics, positive sum games, those in which some win only if everyone else wins at the same time, do not usually prosper.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. In our 20th-century politics, winning in the 21st century is only conceivable through the defeat of others , generally seen more as enemies than as rivals, adversaries, or antagonists, whether from other parties or one's own. In fact, the entire language of politics, its entire discourse, its entire narrative is permeated with terms from the world of warfare , from the semantic field of war: battle, fight, win, lose, power, triumph, victory, defeat, vanguard, rearguard, military, militant, ambush, strong, weak, prisoners, trench, leader, conquer, retreat, attack, defend, counterattack, destroy, undermine, threaten…

In a now-classic work of late 20th-century linguistics, *Metaphors We Live By*, Georges Lakoff and Mark Johnson propose that reality is "given to us" according to the set of words we use to express it and the meaning of those words, that set of metaphors. If we choose for politics the same set of terms used to describe armed conflicts, it should come as no surprise that politics ends up being one of them, a war among others, in which the only possible resolution of disputes is the elimination of one of the contenders.

What if, on the contrary, politics drew its metaphors from the world of fine arts? What if doing politics were about building ideas, drawing them in the air, or sculpting them in the wind? Writing them down, making them dance, or sound them, or showing what color they are made of? Wouldn't this be a set of metaphors from which we might expect more promising results, from which we might anticipate dialogues that lead to encounters, debates to agreements? A new politics urgently needs a new political language , a new tongue: if we want to do other things with words, we need new and better words.

One should not be naive; politics will always have an agonistic dimension , and its main narrative will be made up of protagonists and antagonists who fiercely oppose each other, actors and actresses who struggle against each other in the public sphere, some main characters and others supporting roles. But even in that case, the self-understanding of that agonistic scenario as permeated by the creative and benevolent disposition towards the world and others so characteristic of art would be of great help when wanting to "get out of the labyrinth from above," as Leopoldo Marechal brilliantly stated.

The intellectual and playwright Vaclav HaveliThe first president of the newly formed Czech Republic, stated something of remarkable clarity and foresight, quite contrary to the cultural current, in the speech with which he inaugurated his term: “Politics is the art of the impossible”, almost unthinkable, unimaginable at least with the mental, emotional and spiritual categories from which we inhabit the world and unrepentantly carry out old and outdated politics about it.
However, politics remains decisive, and politicians should be the expert navigators of the future, the adventurers of tomorrow, those who imagine what no one has been able to imagine until now, those who propose and plan, those who create and build, dialogue and agree, the new artists, the architects and protagonists of what can be for everyone the noble, impossible art of politics when it is also conceived as one of the fine arts.