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 of voting on the exhibitions of the past year. For 2024, therefore, no list by editorial staff sentiment: we have entrusted the task to the experts. Journalists, museum directors, art historians, critics, curators, press offices, gallery owners, antiquarians, artists.

This is not, of course, a vote that has any claim to absolute objectivity, nor was the sample, however large and varied, selected on the basis of statistical criteria that could be called scientific, and we started from a shortlist of forty exhibitions chosen by the editorial staff of the magazine: we tried, however, in the first place, to offer the “jurors” a broad base, including all the most talked about exhibitions, the most interesting ones, the largest and most visited, and then each expert called upon to vote was still entitled to indicate two additional exhibitions of his or her choice. We then tried to gather as diverse and distributed an audience of jurors as possible (those who want to know the individual names can see the list in the article in which we published the results). As for voting, we came up with a method that was as balanced as possible: jurors were asked to give a grade from 1 to 10 to the exhibitions they visited, after which, to provide a minimum of shelter from any instinctive votes, the highest and lowest votes were discarded for each exhibition, and at the end of the two weeks given to the jurors to express themselves, an an arithmetic average was calculated, multiplied by a coefficient assigned on the basis of the number of votes received, to grant a small advantage to the exhibitions that were most visited by the experts, and thus attracted the most attention, but calibrated so as not to penalize too much the equally interesting but less visited exhibitions. And given the results we believe that an analysis is still possible.

The most obvious fact that emerges from the ranking of ancient and modern art exhibitions is that insiders reward solid and unpublished projects. It applies to all the exhibitions that placed in the top ten of the ranking. One could object to the fact that the victory went to an exhibition, the one on Federico Barocci in Urbino, with which an artist who had already been extensively investigated fifteen years ago (in a memorable exhibition held in 2009 at the Santa Maria della Scala complex in Siena) was examined in depth, but this is not the point: we are in any case talking about a complete review, strong in important loans, able to offer a profound view of Barocci’s art, an exhibition of correct dimensions, founded on a solid scientific project. The distance that separates it from the exhibition on the Pre-Raphaelites in second place is little more than a tenth of a point, and short is also the distance with respect to the exhibition on Pino Pascali, which even had an average score equal to fourth (but earned the podium because it turned out to have a higher coefficient). To give an idea, all four had an average score above 8, and the top sixteen in the ranking (in 11th place the one on the Renaissance in Brescia, in 12th place The Sixteenth Century in Ferrara to which the editors of Finestre sull’Art wanted to give a special mention as the exhibition it thought was the best, and then to follow Berthe Morisot in Turin, Henri de Toulouse Lautrec in Rovigo, Niki de Saint Phalle in Milan, and the precious Alexandria review) all exceeded the average of 7. The fact, then, that an exhibition organized in Urbino won (which was also among those that received the most votes, a sign that it was well-visited), and that the top places in the ranking were taken by exhibitions set up even in peripheral centers (such as the one on Masolino in Empoli) confirms what has always been said on these pages: that our exhibition scene, at least as far as ancient and modern art is concerned, manages to keep a very high level even on the territory, far from the big centers.

So the idea that Italy does not know how to organize great exhibitions, of an international level, seems to us far from true: we challenge anyone to say that the one on Barocci in Urbino, the one on the Pre-Raphaelites in Forlì, the one on Pino Pascali at the Prada Foundation, the one on Guercino and the Ludovisi era at the Scuderie del Quirinale, the one on Jean Tinguely at the Hangar Bicocca, just to mention the top five in the ranking, are not exhibitions of international scope. Looking instead at the lower part of the ranking, and thus broadening our gaze to the exhibitions that failed to get a place in the top ten, other interesting data emerge: meanwhile, there is a discrepancy between the tastes of the public and the ideas of the insiders. The Munch exhibition in Milan, highly appreciated by visitors, after being criticized by Ilaria Baratta on these pages (with a review that raised, as was natural, some perplexity among readers), was also punished by our jury, narrowly exceeding the average of 6: a symptom of the fact that the paradigm of boxed exhibitions built with material from a single museum does not always work (indeed: the exact opposite is almost always true). The exhibition on nostalgia at the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa was also narrowly saved from inadequacy: despite the sophistication of the layout and design, it was probably weighed down by an exhibition itinerary that did not always live up to the theme addressed, and with an ending that was unclear and not very open to the contemporary that the exhibition was also intended to explore. On the other hand, the exhibition on Futurism in Rome was slaughtered: voted by about forty jurors out of the just over one hundred convened, a sign that it was therefore highly visited (the insiders could not comment on exhibitions not visited: they had to leave the box blank), it nevertheless scored a very meager average, just under 4 and a half, with only fourteen jurors giving it a sufficient grade (and of these, half limited themselves to a 6), compared to about thirty insiders who rejected it. We do not believe that this is a ’political’ vote, so to speak: the fact is that The Time of Futurism is an exhibition that has too many limitations, as well as too many weaknesses with respect to how it was presented. And experts in the field have pointed this out.

In general, the vote on ancient and modern art shows an all in all enthusiastic assessment of the Italian exhibition scene: many 10s awarded by the jurors, general appreciation, few insufficiencies. The same cannot be said, however, for contemporary art, where only two exhibitions reach the average of 7, that of Pierre Huyghe at the Punta della Dogana, which won by almost a point of average difference over the second, and that of Mark Manders at the Fondazione Sandretto, relegated, however, by one place due to the numerical coefficient (the gap from the exhibition on Anselm Kiefer at Palazzo Strozzi was, in any case, risky). An important, visionary, uncomfortable exhibition, capable of offering a glimpse of the future (which probably will not be liked by many, but Huyghe is nonetheless, in addition to being an original artist, an artist who is capable of showing a direction, capable of looking beyond), wins, agreeing with almost all the jurors who have spoken on contemporary art (Huyghe was voted for by about half of those summoned). The wide detachment on Kiefer thus highlights, in all likelihood, the perception of a weakness that all the rest of the contemporary proposal in Italy has manifested towards the Punta della Dogana exhibition. Venice Biennale included.

There were many, in fact, insufficiencies, a sign that in Italy the contemporary scene suffers, first of all, a delay with respect to the exhibition offerings of antiquity, and then, one might think, it also has difficulties with respect, this time yes, to what is organized abroad. One fact then jumps out at you: in the first ten positions there is only one exhibition by an Italian artist, Bertozzi&Casoni’s solo show at the Labirinto della Masone. And this in spite of the fact that there were other Italian art proposals among the nominees (Ludovica Carbotta at MAMbo, Dario Ghibaudo in Modena, Fabrizio Plessi in Como, Valerio Adami in Milan, and Marina Apollonio at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection: we considered “contemporary” all living and active artists). Bertozzi&Casoni’s high position may be due to the fact that the jurors perceive the ceramic duo as one of the most advanced contemporary peaks we have in Italy today, and I think we cannot disagree on this point: Bertozzi&Casoni’s research speaks of universal themes with a contemporary language that is refined, unique, non-derivative and marked by an Italian-ness that is instead unknown to so many younger artists. We have no problem attracting great international artists, from Kiefer to Marina Abramovic, from Mark Manders to Wael Shawky, and even a young man like Louis Fratino. The jurors, however, seem to dislike the sense of déjà-vu that major international artists seem to arouse when they arrive in Italy (Ai Weiwei, for example, was widely clubbed by the jurors: his exhibition at Palazzo Fava in Bologna did not reach an average of 6).

Another symptom of this backwardness on the contemporary lies in the fact that few of the jurors made alternative proposals to the shortlist presented to the editors: the most recurrent one was Christoph Büchel’s operation in Venice (thus a non-Italian artist), to which must be added the exhibition on Francesco Clemente in Rome (the second “off the shortlist” most voted), Elisabetta Benassi’s solo show at MACRO in Rome, Maria Morganti’s at GAM in Turin, Giulia Piscitelli’s at the Museum of the Treasure of San Gennaro in Naples, and Chiara Camoni at Hangarbicocca. So many boxes were left blank by the contemporary jurors. Decidedly more wild about alternative proposals were the jurors on the ancient and modern, who hardly left their boxes blank, another sign of a more varied panorama: ranging from Carla Accardi in Rome to the exhibition on Dürer in Trento, from the exhibition on Piero della Francesca’s Augustinian polyptych at the Poldi Pezzoli to the anthological exhibition on Salvo in Turin, from the exhibition on the Master of San Francesco in Perugia to the one on Guercino in Turin, and then two more Roman ones such as “Roma pittrice” and the small monograph on Michael Sweerts at the Accademia di San Luca.

In conclusion: we have an exhibition offer on ancient and modern art of the highest level, capable of meeting with critical acclaim and holding its own internationally, we have many relevant exhibitions spread throughout the territory, we have an excellent class of art historians’art historians and every year Italy is able to produce new, solid and important projects, while we are much scarcer on the contemporary, although we manage to attract great international artists and put on exhibitions that probably also meet with public approval: we fail, however, to give our leading artists the audiences and projects they deserve, there is a dearth of truly original and wide-ranging projects, and we are unable to bring out our young people. But on the contemporary, other reflections could be opened: if contemporary art is suffering from a loss of relevance for a public that, in order to understand the world and to look to the future, prefers, as is well known, other means (cinema, music), if therefore the problem does not only concern Italy but is more wide, if the colder attitude of critics towards contemporary offerings is an indication of greater severity, if the weakness of the contemporary is a symptom of the lack of a strong criticism, if the problem lies in the visions of the curators. With our rankings we certainly do not want to offer a full picture, but perhaps we have managed to collect a little material on which to open some reasoning.

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.