Treccani presents the first Encyclopedia of Contemporary Art: 3,600 headwords in 4 volumes

TheTreccani Institute presented, at the Venice Biennale Historical Archives Library, the first Treccani Encyclopedia of Contemporary Art, an undertaking of more than 3,600 headwords with 4,000 images directed by Vincenzo Trione and Valeria Della Valle with co-editing by Jean-Loup Amselle and Boris Groys, which took several years to complete. It is a work in 4 illustrated volumes of 800 pages each, measuring 23.5 x 31 cm, with leather covers and gold lettering and friezes. The work involved 435 authors, including scholars of international art history and criticism, aesthetics experts, historians, and Italian and foreign writers. Authors include Jean-Loup Amselle, Luca Massimo Barbero, Renato Barilli, Stefano Bartezzaghi, Fabio Benzi, Marco Biraghi, Francesco Casetti, Lorenzo Casini, Maria Luisa Catoni, Antonio Costa, Danilo Eccher, Michele Emmer, Maurizio Ferraris, Massimo Fusillo, Paolo Giordano, Sofia Gnoli, Elio Grazioli, Franco La Cecla, Melania Mazzucco, William J.T. Mitchell, Tomaso Montanari, Pietro Montani, Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, Franco Purini, Barbara Rose, Pierluigi Sacco, Vittorio Sgarbi, Emanuele Trevi, and Stefano Zecchi.

Moving from a phenomenological reconnaissance of the art of our time, the work aims to document, in the broadest and most inclusive perspective possible, the different components that enter the art system. Featuring a graphic design by Polystudio and accompanied by a rich selection of images, the Encyclopedia aims to catalogue not only artists, but also art historians, art theorists, critics and curators, gallery owners and art dealers. Finally, architects, designers, filmmakers, cartoonists, designers, poets, and writers who have had a significant dialogue with art. Alongside the individuals (arranged in alphabetical order) are thematic entries, devoted to the places where art is formed and promoted (museums, galleries, foundations), the geopolitical context (old and new capitals of art), but also movements, techniques, some “borderline” themes and recurring critical categories. Among the main criteria that guided the selection was the decision to narrow the field of inquiry to figures active in the time span from 1900 to 2021.

The lemmary is divided into monographic entries, thematic entries, and interdisciplinary and transnational entries. By monographic entries, we mean artists, groups (understood as teams that sign their work with a single acronym), architects, designers, filmmakers, cartoonists, designers, poets, writers, theorists, critics, historians, gallery owners, museum directors, dealers, collectors, curators, as well as museums, exhibitions, and magazines. By thematic headings, we mean movements and trends (e.g., Blaue Reiter, Dada, Futurism, Transavantgarde), themes (e.g., Installation, Interactivity, Google, Kitsch, Medium, Heritage), liminal headings (about ’situations’ on the borderline between art and other disciplinary fields: e.g., Art and the Arts, Anthropology and art, Architecture and art, Ecology and art, Pandemic and art, Religion and art, Social and art, Sports and art, TV and art) and a limited number of cities relevant to the art debate. By container entries, we mean entries that bring together, in a single headword, experiences, techniques, exhibition types, and groups related to a single geographic or thematic area (e.g., Avant-garde groups in China; Architecture capitals; Contemporary art magazines). Interdisciplinary or transnational entries mean entries divided into geographical or thematic sections assigned to specialists from different areas (e.g., Women’s Art: Europe, Women’s Art: North America, etc.; Primitivism: Europe, Primitivism: Africa, etc.).

Each volume is accompanied by an unpublished work of art, inspired by the very idea of the encyclopedia. The authors are some of the major figures in contemporary art: Anish Kapoor, William Kentridge, Anselm Kiefer, and Joseph Kosuth. Each artist has been asked to represent a specific continent: Kiefer, Europe; Kosuth, America; Kentridge, Africa; Kapoor, Asia. Four masters of contemporary art whose names always begin with the same letter, K, to compose a sort of “K factor” of art. The Encyclopedia is then introduced, in the first volume, by a portfolio by Shirin Neshat, an artist who has always moved between different worlds and languages (East and West, Iran and the United States, painting and writing, photography and film, black and white, engagement and abstraction). Scientific advice was carried out by Giorgio Amitrano (Japan), Jean-Loup Amselle (Africa), Luca Massimo Barbero (galleries and market), Andrea Branzi (design), Silvia Burini (Russia and USSR), Lorenzo Casini (law), Mario Codognato (North America), Simone Ferrari (art techniques), Sasha Grishin (Oceania), Rossella Menegazzo (Japan), Sara Mondini (India and Islamic countries), Tomaso Montanari (art criticismart in Italy), Enrica Morini (fashion), Paola Nicolin (exhibitions), Alberto Pezzotta (cinema and comics), Maria Antonietta Picone Petrusa (history of art in Europe 1900- 1945), Andrea Pinotti (aesthetics, theory and criticism of ’art), Francesco Poli (museography), Vipash Purichanont (Southeast Asia), Sabrina Rastelli (China and Korea), Livio Sacchi (architecture), Pierluigi Sacco (economics of art and culture), Mario Sartor (Central and South America), Roberta Valtorta (photography, graphic design, advertising).

The statements

“La Biennale,” said Roberto Cicutto, President of the Venice Biennale, “cannot but welcome with enthusiasm a new instrument of knowledge such as this work, which has the ambition of recounting the artistic production of an entire century (the 20th) and the first 20 years of the 21st. A period that largely coincides with the history of the Venice Biennale (1895 the First International Art Exhibition of the city of Venice), which in these very days launches a new International Center for Contemporary Arts Research. Two closely related initiatives to seal a new relationship between the Biennale and Treccani, excellences of the cultural world of our country and beyond.”

“Contemporary art of the twentieth century and of the year two thousand,” explained Massimo Bray, Director General of the Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani, “has substantially changed its means of production and its meanings, adapting to the times and to our way of life, in order to interpret the instances of the present, identifying spaces and moments of reflection and confrontation on the great questions of our time. Its ’liquidity’ and the dense network of relationships it weaves with our social, economic and cultural life make it difficult to investigate in an orderly and exhaustive way. The work Contemporary Art aims, therefore, to return a possible architecture of the subject, a reasoned collection and choral narrative of the major artistic experiences of our time.”

“A vision without boundaries,” Valeria Della Valle explains, “a new idea of art, as total art that mixes all the arts (visual arts, music, theater, literature, design, minor arts), according to Alberto Savinio’s vaticinium (”There will be no more poets, nor painters or composers. There will be only men, whose genius will be able to grasp in the same time all the possibilities of realizations’“).”

“This work,” Vincenzo Trione emphasizes, “wants to make itself a testimony, a figure, a metaphor. It does not conclude, nor does it resolve. The work refers to the attempt to try to juggle within that parallelogram of forces that are the heterogeneous visual landscapes of late modernity. It is delivered, therefore, as a partial map, to orient oneself in the infinite variety of artistic creations of the 20th and 21st centuries. A regesto that does not impose obligatory roads, masuggerisce tracks, labyrinths, often interrupted paths. A possible catalog, ready to welcome also ’other’ presences, ’other’ discourses. A problematic cartography, which proposes thematic areas and is also marked by centrifugal lines, unexpected digressions, partial truths.”

In the photo, a moment of the presentation

Treccani presents the first Encyclopedia of Contemporary Art: 3,600 headwords in 4 volumes

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