Opinions

The idea of hosting the Mona Lisa in Lombardy makes no sense: no appeal from the Louvre to find a place for it

Let's be serious: there is no appeal for the search of a different location for the Mona Lisa, as the Lombardy Region's councillor for culture, Francesca Caruso, implied in a note this morning. No one at the Louvre has yet dreamed of asking for help,...
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The other side of the futurism exhibition: GNAM emptied, library and archives closed

The current exhibition at Gnam, or Gnam/c, in Rome, Il Tempo del Futurismo, is probably the most talked about temporary exhibition in Italy in recent decades, and it is unlikely to be surpassed soon. It was talked about at the time of the announceme...
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Curators are now the real artists, and artists are weak. But this needs to be reversed

As has been the case for many years for the "elected" curator on duty, the newly appointed curator of the Venice Biennale 2026 International Art Exhibition, Koyo Kouoh, is presented as if she were a super-director, a super-author, but in reality the ...
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Decolonization and museums: a political and economic as well as a cultural problem

Decolonization is a product of the contradictions of a postcolonial society struggling to find points of contact between conquerors and conquered, in a contemporary context that demands a critical analysis of the history of European imperialist power...
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Cultural decolonization: it is not just returning museum works, it is a change of political perspective

Cultural decolonization is a process that is not only about objects and artifacts and, therefore, specific choices of museums and cultural institutes, but refers to a change of political perspective that questions the hierarchies between cultures, th...
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Ancient art exhibitions in Italy are of the highest level. But on contemporary art...

What indications can be gleaned from Finestre Sull'Arte's ranking of the best exhibitions of 2024? This year, for the first time, our magazine has decided to embark on a novel operation: entrusting a jury of more than a hundred insiders with the task...
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The best and worst of contemporary art 2024 according to Luca Rossi

For several years there has been little point in doing the classic "best of" referring to contemporary art. This is because we have been going through, for at least fifteen to twenty years, a neo-mannerist and transitional phase. Lists, with the best...
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Should Rai do more to broadcast art on the three main channels?

It is not comforting that the Christmas appointment with Alberto Angela is in danger of becoming a tradition, assuming that the popular popularizer has not already entered by popular acclaim among the characters of the holiday pantheon, along with Sa...
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What is happening to the art market? A phenomenon that can be called "polarization"

There is a paradox running through the contemporary art market, a dichotomy that pulses like a raw nerve between international fairs and small ateliers, between million-dollar auctions and neighborhood exhibitions. It is growing polarization-a phenom...
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If a robot makes a work (sold for a million dollars): is it really art?

The moment Ai-Da Robot accomplished the feat of making a work of art, a work(Portrait of Alan Turing) that managed to sell for more than $1 million, we were immediately confronted with one of the most daring manifestations of our time. But to what ex...
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Cultural decolonization: even Italy rediscovers removed fragments of its past

Awareness is growing throughout the world of the violence inherent in the colonial policies that for centuries Europe imposed on a very large part of the non-European world, invading, impoverishing and irreparably disrupting societies endowed with an...
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Tourism in Tuscany: there is a whole part of the region that is little known and needs to be told

How are we, as the Tuscany region, dealing with the Unesco issue? We are dealing with a real reservoir, largely completely unexplored from the tourism point of view: it is true that Unesco does not want to hear about a tourism function, so the proble...
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Has the Carrara Academy in Bergamo become unmanageable?

Even the most attentive observers of the museum and art world are struggling to follow the events surrounding Bergamo's Accademia Carrara, an institution founded in 1781 at the behest of Giacomo Carrara, which became a civic museum in 1958 and a publ...
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How we tell the story of rock art: the case of Camonica Valley museums

The Regional Directorate of National Museums of Lombardy manages several sites that are part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site: among the thirteen sites that the directorate manages, in addition to Valle Camonica, was the Last Supper (later passed un...
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Did the Jubilee need a mascot? And was it needed in manga style?

But of all the artists in its millennial history, did the Catholic Church really need a Japanese cartoon-style design to make the Jubilee 'mascot'? The unsettling choice (there are even those who wonder if there was a need to have a 'mascot,' like fo...
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What was the really dark part of Giuli's speech.

No: the least clear part of the speech that Minister Alexander Giuli gave in the House last Oct. 8 to outline his policies was not the "somewhat more theoretical" introduction, it wasn't that preamble about "defensive apocalypticism" and the "global ...
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