Opinions

Venice, if St. Mark's Square becomes Las Vegas

It may be the stark contrast with the blizzard of daylight hours, but it is with twilight that Venice takes on a charm that is unparalleled. Perhaps the true, unique work of art of every Biennale. Wandering around calle and campi in the evening is li...
Read more...

Does the Venice Biennale exist only when controversy erupts?

One can challenge anything to this Venice Biennale, except the success of Pietrangelo Buttafuoco's masterpiece of unintentional strategy, repaid by the most fragrant numbers the president could hope for: 10 thousand visitors during the first opening ...
Read more...

Is the Venice Biennale still a space for freedom or is it a machine of the system?

Every two years, Venice transforms into the gravitational center ofglobal contemporary art. The Biennale, with its kaleidoscope of national pavilions, collateral events and special projects, is an expected and celebrated ritual, but also a massive, a...
Read more...

In my unassuming opinion. On the visibility of Italian art outside Italy.

Visibility-invisibility of Italian art outside Italy is the theme that most recurs in the discourses that have been made, at least since the last two decades, within the Italian art world. However, in my unassuming opinion, the real problem is not so...
Read more...

But is it the Biennale or a circus? How can the contemporary art world be taken seriously?

But is it the Venice Biennale or a circus? We had not yet finished reading the latest news about the arrival of the inspectors from the Ministry of Culture at Ca' Giustinian, when today comes the communiqué announcing the en bloc resignation of the j...
Read more...

Italian art in the 1980s was not only Transavantgarde!

In this same journal, I had occasion to read in a recent critical reflection that art in Italy in the 1980s would be reduced to five artists and a single movement (I quote verbatim: "theItaly of the 1980s, the Italy of the Transavanguardia"). One may...
Read more...

Milan, double week: design as global industry, art as domestic eco

There is a precise moment, in April each year, when Milan stops behaving like a city and starts functioning as a high-intensity economic device. It is not a gradual change, more of a sharp jerk. It happens when the design system turns on: the Salone ...
Read more...

From the Transavanguardia to today, what has changed in Italian contemporary art?

I constantly ask myself, dealing a lot with artists and works from the 1980s in Italy, what happened in that decade in the contemporary art world of our country and in the international context, when the Transavanguardia artists were transiting to Am...
Read more...

Why is RAI reviving an untenable attribution to Michelangelo without hearing from experts?

It seems that the only ones still willing to believe in the clumsy, flimsy, improbable attribution to Michelangelo of the poor Christ of Sant'Agnese fuori le Mura are the journalists of Rai's Tg3: nine days ago, the news program of the third public n...
Read more...

AlUla, Saudi Arabia: is the new global art center in the middle of the desert?

Anancient oasis, sculpted by red sand canyons and centuries-old palm groves, is being transformed into one of the boldest cultural geographies of the 21st century. Al-'Ula (or AlUla), a remote region in northwesternSaudi Arabia, is no longer just a U...
Read more...

Aldo Grasso criticizes Jacopo Veneziani for being an influencer on Rai 3. But Grasso is also an influencer for old people

For the past few hours I've been noticing in my bubble a certain overexcitement over Aldo Grasso's critique in the Corriere newspaper of Jacopo Veneziani's program ("Vita da artista"), this time more fierce than six months ago, when Veneziani got awa...
Read more...

Art Italy is like the national soccer team: off the world stage. Problems and solutions

In the catalog of Exit, an exhibition on "young Italian art" curated by Francesco Bonami in 2002 at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Massimiliano Gioni, now curator at the New Museum in New York, defines young Italian artists this way: "Italy ...
Read more...

On the future of Italian art (and its relevance): how is the system doing?

The question about the marginality and relevance of Italian art today in relation to the international context is part of a long-standing debate whose parameters are partly outdated. In the globalized context in which Italy participates, one should a...
Read more...

Neurodivergent art rewrites visual language. Here's how

Something profound is happening in the contemporary art world: the increasingly visible entry of neurodivergent experiences, not only as the subject of works, but as a force that transforms display, perception, and visual language itself. Museum inst...
Read more...

Why did the National Gallery of Umbria pay 100,000 euros to GNAM for the Klimt loan?

For what reasons, in May 2024, did the National Gallery of Umbria pay a sum of 100 thousand euros to the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art for the loan of Gustav Klimt's The Three Ages ? Was an exception made to the guidelines governing...
Read more...

Carrà beats Botticelli's Venus: why we like the Ministry of Culture's campaign

What to say. I, for one, liked the latest promotional video made by the Ministry of Culture, and very much so. The new communication campaign is called Felicità (Happiness ) and I assume it takes its name from the 1974 song Felicità, t&...
Read more...