The controversy against Giannelli and Lodola in Florence? Crocodile tears of insiders.

There is a lot of talk about some artworks deemed “not appropriate” and installed in the historic center of Florence, in the specific case of Emanuele Giannelli and Marco Lodola. It is rightly criticized that these works have plummeted from the sky without the artists having an internationally established artistic value (but what does this mean today?) and without the operation being guided by an art curator of clear international reputation (but how to measure this too?). In this operation, as in many others in Italy related to contemporary art, there is certainly a high degree of improvisation and poor knowledge of the subject on the part of public administrations. However, at the same time these operations are placed in a cultural context incapable of deciphering, reading and recognizing them. This happens because the whole art world, even its most “sophisticated” and “up-to-date” part, has completely abandoned the critical and popularizing capacity, which would be precisely capable of arguing lights and shadows and thus forming a public taste.

If tomorrow the Football Federation put Prince Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy to coach the national soccer team there would be a popular uprising. If Giannelli and Lodola put their (also to me cloying) art out there, no one says anything, except with a few indignant articles by some insiders. However, the problem with these operations must be sought much earlier, that is, in the months and years leading up to them. Otherwise we will always arrive too late with our criticisms, even if justified, and with the result of making only a few insiders get excited and exulted, who, if anything, only hope that next time the same Region of Tuscany can finally call them to the curatorial committee so that they can put “valuable” works in the public square. But what does “value” mean in modern and contemporary art today?

In recent years, Florence has also hosted a dried-up tree by Giuseppe Penone (an artist the most up-to-date system would never criticize) and a work of a lion with a head of an ancient Roman in its mouth (a work by Francesco Vezzoli conveyed by Cristiana Perrella, then director of the Pecci Museum, and Sergio Risaliti, director of the Museo del Novecento in Florence). How can the public understand that the dry tree or the lion is fine while Giannelli’s men and Lodola’s figures are not? If critical literacy work is not done, which would then also serve to train new eyes far beyond the subject of art, we cannot be more indignant against any art operation in the piazza in Florence, as in any piazza in Italy.

The hypothesis of objective references to prove the quality of artists and curators involved is then raised. There is then talk of artists who should have had exhibitions abroad. But where? Today making an exhibition abroad is not difficult. And there are strings of “curator-gallerists-museum directors” who can allow these exhibitions beyond any quality benchmarks. We could then rely on curators with obvious international resumes: again, though, things are manipulable, and we may find a curator from Giannelli and Lodola who can actually demonstrate an international cursus honorum. So how to do it? The only antidotes to this “anything-can-go relativism” are critical confrontation and dissemination skills to be kept alive every day. On the contrary, the art system that is most informed and up-to-date on the latest trends, in order to maintain good relations and good business relations with everyone, eludes and disincentivizes precisely that critical confrontation that would be the only salvation and the only solution with respect to criticizable operations such as those of the Tuscany Region. We never find, except perhaps this magazine on which I am writing, articles, podcasts, videos that we know how to argue lights and shadows of an exhibition or a work of art. We never find a critique, obviously argued, capable of fueling confrontation and debate. The “good” art system takes everything for granted, and then goes so far as to get indignant about these extreme and actually criticizable operations. But these critiques still represent “crocodile tears”: as proof of this, I have not mail read any stance, for example, on the Nutella exhibition and the Autostrade per l’Italia exhibition that are going on at the MAXXI Museum in Rome and that represent two private commercial brands that have organized an exhibition inside an Italian public museum.

But other than fueling a daily critical confrontation and widespread taste, what could be an immediate solution? In the immediate term, the solution can only be to involve leading Italian museum directors in these selections. A kind of “grand council” that can, however, only act unanimously as is the case with popular juries in the American judicial system. If everyone does not agree, the project cannot be done. Gilles Deleuze said that the creative act is also an act of resistance: it is not necessarily the case that “doing,” especially in a loaded city like Florence, is always the best thing. A committee of experts, who will then be able to ferry these commissions to a time when these public calls will be just a pro forma, as a new critical awareness capable of recognizing artists and works of “clear fame” will have matured in the viewers.

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