Italian art? We are at an all-time low. Gian Enzo Sperone speaks.

A life between the two sides of the Atlantic Ocean, a gallery that has been a landmark in world art for decades, a collector who has collected art from every era, from archaeological finds to gold backgrounds, from great seventeenth-century painting to contemporary: it is difficult to sum up in a few words the experience of Gian Enzo Sperone, one of the most important gallerists of the last fifty years internationally, owner of Sperone Westwater Gallery in New York. With him, we talked about the similarities and divergences between the art world of his early days and that of today. Here’s what he told us. The interview is edited by Federico Giannini.

Gian Enzo Sperone

FG. You opened your first gallery in New York in 1972, so next year will be 50 years in business, which is an important milestone.

GES. Yes but actually the numbers don’t add up! I have been fighting on the shores of the avant-garde for more years. I opened the first gallery in Turin in 1963 with a Roy Lichtenstein exhibition: I remember that among the rather hostile visitors were my former professor Umberto Eco, with whom I later always had very cordial relations but disagreeing on the visual arts front, and then Dario Fo, smiling and lashing, and again the great Milanese collector Giuseppe Panza di Biumo (who was a source of inspiration for me). This is to say that my path starts from there, after which I tried other paths, such as opening a gallery in Milan in 1965, one in Rome in 1971 and then, in 1972, in New York where I still operate. Although for the past five years, since they elected Trump, I refused to go back to that country where the number one of the nation began speeches with that obscene phrase “America First,” as if the problems they have are different from those of the rest of the world, and anyway putting their vanity first. Today, however, I am more active as a collector, which is a word that does not really suit me, because I am actually a serial collector convinced that art history proceeds by rivulets, streams, torrents, rivers. Incidentally, this was also a cordial polemic of mine precisely with Giuseppe Panza, who in noting, in the mid-1960s, the new reality of Arte Povera, which he did not find sufficiently representative of the problems of art at the time, invited me to reflect on the fact that art history is made by the great summits and not by the small depressions. That said, having even today a substantial divergence of opinion on the development of the avant-garde going in the digital direction, I am rather concerned with antiquity, and so for years I have been carrying on a collection that is also questionable on the academic level, but instead very agreeable on the level of variety of choices. I then did a book with Allemandi [ed: Gian Enzo Sperone. Dealer / Collector, Allemandi, 2019] that says a lot about who I am.

Speaking of avant-garde and digital development, how do you feel about today’s contemporary art market?

The art market today concerns me little and marginally because, having as a serial accumulator stockpiled hundreds if not thousands of works by perhaps now unfashionable artists, this allows me to continue to make a living by sending to Christie’s or Sotheby’s auctions of things that I consider to be non-core or at any rate more marginal, and sometimes I am successful and sometimes less so. Recently I also sold some very important works because I needed to make cash to continue this collection, but let’s say that the contemporary art market I don’t understand or want to understand. Leo Castelli, whom I recognize as one of my masters along with Arturo Schwarz, used to say that all prices are symbolic: that’s true, but money is not symbolic, money is real. And so if the current market spends 69 million for a virtual work, like the one Christie’s hammered out not long ago, and many lesser artists get attention and prices from greater artists, I have nothing to comment on: I just disagree.

You have undoubtedly been an avant-garde gallerist. But is it still possible for a gallerist today to be avant-garde?

No, it is not possible. In fact, the model of my American gallery is declining, because there are no more movements. The last great movement was Arte Povera, while in America there were the minimalists, the conceptualists. Today there are mavericks who, while talented, are masters of the art of marketing. So what is the function of an ambitious gallery today, a high ranking gallery? It serves no purpose, because artists are marketers of themselves: this is true for the big ones, for the small ones, for those who are hugely successful, for those who struggle. It is an unstoppable change, probably intended by history. My position is not one of criticism but one of dissent: when I opened the gallery in New York in 1972, I opened it, of course, in the SoHo neighborhood, the oldest neighborhood in New York (now we are in the Bowery, which is a historic street, where until the 1950s-1960s the most derelict of artists, literary men and musicians lived). At that time almost working on the street, in the sense that SoHo was called “Artist in residence,” so all the late nineteenth-century and mid-nineteenth-century to newer buildings were inhabited by artists or galleries: no one else was allowed to buy or live there. This was until the early 1970s, then it slowly began to change (indeed today there is no longer a single artist or gallery). I make this premise to say that there were a lot of galleries one after the other and artists met: there was a community of art addicts who took pleasure in polemicizing, arguing, loving or hating each other on the street. So no time was wasted, no middlemen. I’ll spare details about many mythical characters, but I for one met someone like Julian Schnabel (in my opinion the last great painter of the generation after Abstract Expressionism and after Pop Art): I met him in an elevator. I didn’t know who he was. He said, “Excuse me, are you Sperone?” I answered yes, and he replied, “I am Julian Schnabel, and I would like you to visit my studio, because I am sure you will like my work.” And in fact that’s exactly what happened: it’s proof that there was little intermediation and above all there were not these insidious figures who dominate the scene today and who are the so-called art consultants, unidentified experts. Who, moreover, are often women, and in this case, since the subject of gender is often mentioned, I would say that the intrusiveness of women was conspicuous and created some problems: it is always more seductive to have a pretty girl visiting a gentleman to give him advice, rather than yours truly standing in a now predictable gallery repeating the same things over and over again. And then there has been a proliferation of investment funds.

Who then dominates the scene today?

Today, the big galleries like David Zwirner and Gagosian (who, by the way, is someone I have known for forty years, serious and brilliant) are now simulacra, because what dominates the scene are the art experts, the art consultants and the artists themselves in a deadly embrace. Artists now spend most of their time doing marketing activities. The most talented and intelligent Italian artist of the last thirty years, Maurizio Cattelan, shifted the terms of the issue and said many years ago that he did not even want to be an artist (in the common meaning of the term) by promising to stop being an artist the next day, which he did not do, of course: is another indication that the best intelligences of our time are practicing to become the champions of this marketing that seems a decisive thing as well as a deformation of the concept of progress. What the economy tells us every day is that we must grow: never, however, one that says we must progress, or that we must evolve! But if we do not progress we will crash! Art has always been the telltale of man’s maladjustment, it has always been a quest for the impossible, but if it starts to adhere to these somewhat crass or somewhat modest marketing themes, then it looks bad.

And in such a situation, how much does it weigh that today there is no longer an art criticism like there was in the 1960s and 1970s?

The question already contains the answer, in the sense that criticism now has a marginal position: consultants dominate, billing figures that you and I cannot even imagine, just as in more ordinary fields (such as fashion) there are so-called influencers. We don’t really understand who they are and what numbers they have: we know the numbers of their followers but we don’t know the numbers of their personal quality, we don’t know their education. In art it is the same thing. However, it is impossible to stop this trend that is going in a direction of growth instead of evolution. It pains me on my part, since I am also of a certain age, to make speeches that contain a hint of pessimism, but one must first be a realist before becoming a visionary. As Bertozzi & Casoni have often said (even in some titles of their works), nothing is as it appears. However, what appears, and is evident to my eyes, is that this society is rather imperfect, so in an imperfect society the search for the impossible becomes a chimera, a pursuit on nothingness. On this issue I have nothing more to say.

How do you see the current Italian art scene instead?

I must be honest to the point of brutality: it seems to me that, contrary to what happens with the Italian national soccer team, in art we are at an all-time low. And as we mentioned before, since there are no movements, there are no theorists and critics, there are no scholars who share the same experiences as artists.

But there must be someone from whom to begin a path of rebirth or reconstruction.

Surely there are, but I don’t know them. I have lived in a fragmented and dispersed way all my life, so today I do not even have the tools to assess the situation of Italian art. I can say, however, that there is no Italian avant-garde because there is no movement of thought of people who share issues and love each other and are at each other’s throats to carry out an impossible project, but that is history.

And how was it possible in your opinion to get to this point?

We got there because this is an imperfect society. Can we put a number on imperfection? No: we are moving toward a suffocating presence of marketing. And even intellectuals and artists are taking on the ways and cadences of those in the advertising departments of large corporations. An example of these influential and very insightful figures is Oliviero Toscani, who is anything but an artist. I already have major misgivings about photography as an art in its own right: photography used by visual artists as a medium is fine, but I believe little in the artist photographer. Toscani, moreover, speaks as if we are dumb and he is a genius: and so if these people take power (as they used to say in ’68: imagination in power), and indeed have already taken it, all others can only become marginal. Artists have the antennae to pick up these things, however, the problem is that the war against this system is already lost in the beginning. So either you cooperate or you’re out. I don’t envy my young colleagues, nor today’s artists, because I think art today is a battlefield where you don’t even understand what the sides are, what the goals are. I leave it to today’s interpreters and analysts to draw the conclusions-I collect old art. But I see the silence of ideas, increasingly deafening. For my part, I also find it very consoling.

However, scrolling through the list of artists represented by Sperone Westwater, there are two living Italian artists: Fabio Viale and the duo Bertozzi&Casoni.

Let me first make a premise: I have brought a lot of Italian artists to America, because I have always had close relations with Americans since the beginning of my career. No one has ever tried to sink me; on the contrary, I have been helped. However, I am no longer informed about today’s rankings: there are artists who are certainly very skilled, but if you look deeper? Take Francesco Vezzoli: he is well introduced, but to me he is a derivative artist even though skilled in marketing...compared to him, Bertozzi & Casoni are artists of another depth. Misfits and children of an imperfect society, however, they have very precise and non-derivative linguistic tools, and this is quite important. As for Fabio Viale, we are currently no longer dealing with him. His production has grown out of all proportion, with repetitions that I find rather unjustified. I have always felt this about others, even Andy Warhol or Lucio Fontana, but they are “geniuses.” I was taught in school that quality goes hand in hand with rarity. So if you produce one painting a day and think that each one is a masterpiece, you are way off. One of the artists I loved the most was Alberto Giacometti, whom I met personally in 1961: he impressed me a lot. Giacometti tormented himself all his life, in every sense of the word, because every one of his works was a suffering, and then he was uncertain, he had doubts, he never posed as a master, despite the fact that he was already wildly successful internationally when I met him. His catalog raisonné, assuming it exists, will be a volume or two. Picasso’s, which is the example of genius (in every sense: even evil genius, because he invented marketing), is a catalog raisonné of thirty-four volumes, plus the seven of the graphic work. Another example of one who used to torment himself and who I like less than Giacometti, but is a curious and mysterious artist, is Balthus: his eldest son, who is about my age, used to tell me that his father spent a third of his life sitting on a chair, not even too comfortable, in an unadorned room, with an easel and a blank canvas, which remained so for days, weeks, months, sometimes years. So here is his catalog raisonné, a volume of eight hundred paintings. And here is my response to the fact that Fabio Viale, a real talent, is producing replicas disproportionately, so I no longer follow him. Bertozzi & Casoni, on the other hand, are another thing, not least because of the kind of work they do that cannot be done by machine (marble working, on the contrary, today is mostly done by machines: the artist submits a sketch to the workshop, sometimes even just a photograph, and from there then very good craftsmen bring out the sculpture, which can be replicated exactly as one does with photographs). In Bertozzi & Casoni’s art, every leaf, every animal feather that appears in their work is handmade. And this is moving. In addition, they work to achieve verisimilitude, a theme that has plagued the lives of generations of artists. By the way, I would like to quote Michele Bonuomo, who is a critic I respect and who in a presentation for Bertozzi & Casoni said something that brings us back to what Giacometti said, “the more a work is true, the more it has style.” And so it stands that they are among the few artists today who create true moral operettas, precise (of the Vanitas, the Memento mori, and much more), with a strong credibility: in front of one of their works, I, who also have been following them for twenty-five years and have accumulated so many sculptures, always feel a great strength, the one that these terracottas and majolica emanate. And this is because, beyond the fact that there is an invention that takes place slowly in the workmanship, there is manual skill, there is a composition that is always original. And then in their work there is very little mythology, everything means something in relation to the issues of our time. There is also a great cruelty, an atrocity, that post Pop art (a strand that, moreover, has definitely won) does not have. Because post Pop art gives spectacle, makes theater, uses tools to provoke strongly at the stomach level, but it never gets to be what they do. Every work by Bertozzi & Casoni is mysterious and contains suggestions that touch the mind.

In short, you said earlier that your thoughts are tinged with a hint of pessimism, but when you tell me about Bertozzi & Casoni I seem, on the contrary, to sense a flash of optimism. Is there then a glimmer of hope?

Of course, if I were another age I would continue to go in search of artists who seek the impossible, with non-derivative linguistic tools and who explain that they are following their dream and not the dream of others. In every age new ones are born.

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