Is Art Being Erased in Italy?
Where is Italy in international art? Almost absent, if we believe the pages of the art directories published by Phaidon almost every year. The formula lists ten curators and a hundred emerging artists. The number of Italians included has never exceeded four in recent years. The recent Maurizio Cattelan exhibit at the Guggenheim has not attracted critical praise (Roberta Smith was lukewarm and other comments have been unflattering). The same kind of welcome was reserved to other personal exhibits of major Italian artists through the years: Lucio Fontana (posthumous, 1977), Enzo Cucchi (1982), Mario Merz (1989) all attracted either criticism or outright indifference.
As China and Brazil are making strides in the international art scene, Americans seem reluctant to acknowledge the role of European and Italian art: they seem afraid to be undermining the cultural supremacy they attained in the postwar period.
But there are signs that something is changing. In 2009, the Gagosian Gallery staged a major tribute to the work of Piero Manzoni, who has now definitely entered the Olympus of conceptual art. In 2010, the Philadelphia Museum of Art made a philological reconnaissance of Michelangelo Pistoletto's oeuvre. And New York's MOMA is now hosting a major retrospective of Alighiero Boetti, who had been expunged by exhibits on Arte Povera for his overproduction, but who is now being rehabilitated almost twenty years after his death. The new exhibit which the Gagosian is now devoting to Lucio Fontana and his sense of space goes as far as to say that the Italian-Argentinian artist was the first in the world concern himself with environmental art.
These rediscoveries notwithstanding, the Italian art system has made no advancement, and seems unable to reach the critical mass needed to promote its emerging talents. A whole new generation of artists who had shown promise in the 1990s has been left hung out to dry. Galleries do not have enough financial clout to defend younger artists. Organizations like ACACIA (collectors) and AMACI (museums) have only shown the inability of private and public actors to come together in promoting Italian artists. Contemporary art is not a priority and there is little fiscal advantage in buying Italian art, so that collectors buy abroad.
Our young artists thus suffer from old sins and cannot hope in future corrections. Let's hold on tight to the Venice Biennale, which has never stopped fulfilling its role of place for cultural diplomacy. The Biennale is not about Italian art, but about Italy as a cultural pole that still attracts prestigious art made elsewhere. We can only hope for further acknowledgment abroad of our modern artists who have become classics and for more international showcases in Italy, such as the Venice Biennale.