Sgarbi and Farinetti's terrible artistic potpourri for Expo 2015. Which no one is talking about

What do Lorenzo Lotto, Francesco Cairo, Bartolomeo della Gatta and Virgilio Guidi have to do with each other? Absolutely nothing, if only because they are all painters. As of these days, however, they can boast that all four have a new common trait: they have in fact been chosen by Vittorio Sgarbi for his exhibition The Treasures of Italy, which will be held at the Eataly pavilion as part of the Milan Expo. Yes, you read that right: masterpieces of ancient and contemporary art, chosen to represent the twenty Italian regions according to who knows what logic, will be shipped to Milan to indulge Oscar Farinetti’s never dormant (and never accomplished) cultural ambitions. The rampant Renzi-friendly scion who has opened his supermarkets in half of Italy often taking advantage of sheds and spaces granted by municipalities on free loan. The one with the tremendous illustrative panels on the Renaissance in the Florence store. The one who said it was okay for young people to work for 8 euros an hour, or that the south should be turned into a huge vacation village. But above all, the one who, with Eataly, closed the contract for the presence at Expo without a tender.

Sgarbi’s intent, stated the day before yesterday at the presentation of the project, is to “show beauty to those who come from outside Italy.” An objective that is entirely in line with the space hosting the exhibition: claiming to know Italian art by visiting jumbles of works arrived by fishing here and there is a bit like believing that at Eataly one can really taste the excellence of Italian gastronomy. It is the concept of large-scale organized distribution applied to art: since visitors are considered too listless to go and see works of art in their context, and gourmets too lazy to look for restaurants, trattorias and osterias where true traditional flavors can be tasted, they confenct structures without personality, as good in Turin as in New York, and stuff a potpourri of works of art and typical dishes into them. The visitor to the Eataly pavilion, therefore, will not even have to make the effort to look for a restaurant after his visit is over: after seeing Lorenzo Lotto and Bartolomeo della Gatta, he will be able to tastefully solace himself in front of a pizza with broccoli and sausages, thinking not already about the exhibition he has just visited, but about which pavilions he is missing to complete the tour he had in mind.

Vittorio Sgarbi (photo by Giovanni Dell’Orto) and Oscar Farinetti (photo by Fanpage.it)

Embarrassing is the Eataly statement in which the exhibition is presented: it reads that from the exhibition of works at I Tesori d’Italia “the biodiversity of art will emerge.” Need we add more? Even more embarrassing are many comments from mayors and local administrators, all eager to send their jewels to the Eataly pavilion. There is not a local newspaper that has not dedicated an article to the work of its territory leaving for Milan: just do a Google search. “The presence at the Eataly pavilion for us is a source of great pride,” he said. “The work will be an ambassador of our territory.” “The Expo will be an important showcase for us to enhance our culture and art.” And so on: the tenor of lenders’ enthusiasm is more or less always this. Several questions arise: how can a municipal administration think that its territory can benefit from the presence of a work in such a dispersed context? Are we really so clueless as to think that a visitor arriving from Hong Kong or Bolivia will be seized with the urge to visit a small village in the Umbrian Apennines just because he or she will have seen a work at Sgarbi’s exhibition in passing? Is it normal to think that a work of art by a great master of the past can be enhanced in an exhibition made without scientific and philological criteria, without a serious project, and the terms of which are not well known little more than a week before the opening?

We have become so addicted to the rhetoric of beauty that we have lost our taste for beautiful things, we are so accustomed to thinking in terms of publicity rather than true valorization, moreover losing sight of how to do marketing in a serious and reasoned way, and above all we are so accustomed to initiatives in which art becomes an accessory to be exhibited, that initiatives of this kind, which impoverish local museums (such as the Pinacoteca Comunale di Castiglion Fiorentino, which sent the two most valuable pieces of its collection to Milan) and do anything but convey knowledge and disseminate theaesthetics of beauty, which is also reduced to supermarket merchandise, no longer cause us any amazement.

Finally, there is one last fact to take into account: if for the exhibition Da Cimabue a Morandi, set up by Sgarbi in Bologna, we have witnessed numerous risings of shields by art historians, with appeals, headlines in the newspapers, accusations and counter-accusations, no one has uttered a syllable to speak of the Sgarbi-Farinetti operation underway in Milan. The Bologna exhibition yes has a somewhat questionable project, it is a blockbuster exhibition, it hardly entices the public to delve into Bolognese art (all of which we had discussed), but one can still find in it an albeit tenuous cultural purpose. Of the Eataly project, the same cannot be said: the works, here, are treated simply as merchandise to be displayed to the public, as luxurious trappings through which to lend a chic patina to a supermarket, as accessories to be shown to people to whom Eataly will be passed off as the summa of traditional Italian food and wine, and to whom the exhibition will be passed off as a cultural operation. But art, it should be specified, has nothing to do with any of this. And it is a pity that, on this occasion, no one has remembered this.

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