Why nowadays ArtVerona is much better than Frieze in London

Let me explain why at this historical stage a contemporary art fair like ArtVerona is much better than Frieze in London. Despite the fact that this year the London fair seems to be seemingly relaunched.

We are coming from a historical period, the last ten to fifteen years, characterized by a profound crisis in contemporary art: derivative languages, neo-manierisms, evolved IKEA, young Indiana Jones syndrome, marginality of artists forced to become public relations workers and creativity bureaucrats in order to gain access to fairs, often forcing everyone to inflate prices at random. Collectors of contemporary are not buying not because they don’t have money or because the international instabilities are there, but because they can’t find quality. Others convince themselves to buy something in order to join a club and be able to become little champions of contemporary art, but even they, by the time they have finished buying those four or five artists of reference, of course stop buying. Internationally, this has meant great speculation, often on artists from the peripheries of the world and therefore second and third generation, and now living in the West. Absurd prices that have become unjustifiable and have crippled the contemporary market.

In this situation, a fair like Frieze, which has very high and often very pretentious prices, still retains the dross of the past ten to fifteen years. In fact, galleries cannot suddenly say “we were wrong”: therefore, in order to get out of this phase, they still have to put in place speculative dynamics in which there is no room for quality, and they are obviously forced to bring very expensive works to the fair in order to justify the cost of the fair and the blazon of the gallery. Not to mention the barriers to entry that obviously do not allow the freshest experimentation and quality to enter the fair. Which, on the other hand, ArtVerona allows and which I hope to encounter at the fair.

If the disease is serious, on contemporary art (I am not talking about modern or art from the 1990s) we have to start from scratch a curated, dynamic, intelligent and sustainable fair like Art Verona is the strategic trigger and gateway to attempt a restart. But beware: the quality of the fair is not done inside the fair. The fair is the place to harvest what has been made and sown outside. So ArtVerona provides an opportunity to experiment and improve quality but this work must be done in the year before the fair.

And this is where the problem arises: because after ten to fifteen years of desert, it is difficult to find quality artistic paths that have been able to resist, protect and defend themselves. From this very intuition, in 2016, the Luca Rossi Art Academy and coaching was born, which probably today, only after eight years, begins to show some fruits (which we will present right at ArtVerona). But we are a drop in the ocean and we pay for an exhausting and often politically incorrect critical path.

The menu of artists we find in Italy and internationally is linked to a new mannerism, to derivative, homologated languages, forced into rigid and nostalgic postures. Fifteen years we have brought “Luca Rossi” to life as a kind of benign tumor, capable of bypassing the problems of the system at the moment when Luca Rossi plays all the roles of the art world, and therefore the artist, the viewer, the critic, the collector, the gallerist, etc., as we will see at ArtVerona. But I was forced into this degeneration, I was forced to create this hybrid role in order to survive. In fact: I had to kill what I was in order to survive. The strongest warrior is the one who is already dead in himself.

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