Art is wallpaper for the rich: Giulio Alvigini's provocation in Prato

From Sept. 20 to Nov. 22, 2024, BBS-pro in Prato presents L’arte è carta da par wallato per ricchi, an exhibition by artist Giulio Alvigini (Tortona, 1995), organized in collaboration with TerraMedia, curated by Davide Sarchioni. For Alvigini, whose practice is centered on the concept of “work-career,” making an exhibition in the exhibition space of a firm of Certified Public Accountants and Auditors becomes an opportunity to stage a narrative about the art system and its market, through the deconstruction of certain themes of intersection between contemporary art production and its commercialization.

Alvigini’s practice can be described as a quest for “making one’s career a work of art” since in all his work he attempts to sanction as artistic all those processes that are useful in building a career in the art world, such as path and strategy (or non-strategy). Art is Wallpaper for Rich is a site-specific installation designed for the studio spaces and is structured in a circular path simulating the self-referential and self-referential dimension typical of the art world. The path is punctuated by four interventions/works of a returning phenomenology that is indebted to certain philosophical perspectives: the Hegelian “circle of circles” with its dialectic and the Nietzschean eternal return in the infinite spiral that defines the course of the exhibition; the “cogito” Cartesian as the collector’s statute of existence; the socialist and Marxist struggle and its rhetoric in the reworking of Pellizza da Volpedo’s famous painting, Quarto Stato, made between 1868 and 1907.

The exhibition opens with the flag, a symbol of confrontation but also of the risk of falling into its rhetoric, “Art workers = artworks,” in which the Fourth Estate provides the backdrop for an unusual comparison: what if the art workers (thus the system) were the real work? The struggle is transformed into a sense of appearance, into exclusivity that excludes those who are not part of the tribe. A diaphragm composed of a construction site fence physically divides the exhibition space from the office work space metaphorically drawing an inside-out between outsiders and art initiates. A process that must confirm itself in the positivity of collecting as “I am insofar as I collect” but culminates in the large intervention that dominates the exhibition: a large wallpaper that states in its statement “art is wallpaper for the rich,” thus making the concept coincide with its form. It is the recognition of the privilege of art that compels a critical reconnaissance that hangs up the first work and restarts in this nihilistic and disillusioned spiral that is eternally condemned to return on itself.

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Art is wallpaper for the rich: Giulio Alvigini's provocation in Prato

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