The price of good taste
Most foreign critics probably thought the Italian pavilion at this year’s Biennale in Venice was a rather embarrassing display. They spoke of kitsch, “a great minestrone” and empty gestures. Most emphatic was Roberta Smith, a critic for The New York Times, who condemned the whole event as “unredeemable still-born schlock”. All these critics assumed that the Italian pavilion was actually designed to showcase art. There are reasons to question this.
Not because of the exhibits’ nature (some of them are undoubtedly art, like Michelangelo Pistoletti’s work), but because this pavilion primarily served as a revelation of rawness, of lust for intrigue and cultural machinations. You cannot talk about this year’s Venice Biennale without mentioning this attack on contemporary art, or without saying that the attack more or less succeeded.
The man behind this extraordinary feat is the art historian and philosopher Vittorio Sgarbi, who became known as a reactionary culture politician and, above all, as a loud and aggressive TV personality. He was appointed by Berlusconi’s government as curator of the Italian pavilion, and invented the theme “L’arte non è cosa nostra” (“art is not for us”). He ensured that the exhibition at the Biennale became only one part of a much larger display of several dozen events, which could at the same time be seen in as many Italian cities.
Contemporary art would be something for all Italians. The very Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale held works by 260 artists, in a varied collection where famous artists became neighbours with pure amateurs. As a consequence of everything being hung (or stood or laid) so close together, one work took all the power from the next. The paintings were placed in up to five rows, so there was no longer any room left for individual works’ requirements for attention.
The exhibition’s title has a double meaning: “L’arte non è cosa nostra” means not only that art is not for us. Cosa nostra also means the Mafia. The title’s second meaning is: “Art is not a mafia.” The message is openly populist: the art was a mafia (and perhaps still is), but now this is about to change. The Mafia, it should be stressed, is no metaphor in Italy, but a reality and a major problem for the state authority. If the exhibition bears the word mafia in the title, and if Vittorio Sgarbi in his opening speech accuses two of the most famous Italian art critics – Germano Celant (one of the central figures in Arte Povera) and Achille Bonito Oliva (one of the most important curators) – to be traitors to the people, thus are criminalised both the entire contemporary art world and its main representatives. ‘The Mafia’ is all the experts, all the critics, all the curators; it is the intellectuals and, above all, the whole of the educated public.
Vittorio Sgarbi’s show draws its strength from this same anti-intellectualism and militant impulse. To make his point, Sargbi opened the Italian pavilion with a friend: porn actress Vittoria Risi. Completely naked, she wormed her way with her artificial breasts onto a throne made of multi-coloured, translucent plastic snakes, while Vittorio Sgarbi sat at her feet and declared that Italy has traditionally had more major artists than any other nation.
Perhaps he did not even intend to dismiss the entirety of contemporary art as a pretentious, vain and empty achievement. Perhaps it was enough for him to turn it into a spectacle of power, sex and money; a show like so many others on Italian television. The message was: “look at her big breasts! That’s all we want to see.” To crush the ‘mafia’ of art, the most important agent in the art world must be eliminated: the curator.
Within the exhibition sector it is the curator (as opposed to the manager or ‘the boss’) who chooses or excludes. It is he (or she) who decides what should be included or not, who gets his own room, or even a solo exhibition. As for the modern, more or less non-figurative art, the curator is essential not only for a work’s rank, but above all for its very existence as a work of art – the more abstract the art, the more it is in need of explanation. And it is the curator who decides whether there is space and publicity for the explanation. The more strict the curator is, the less work he (or she) accepts, and the more important selected works seem to be. It is just that: to exclude creates meaning. And money.
For there is an infinite amount of art in the world, and everywhere, in every town, in every village there are artists who want to be recognised. But whether or not this happens, and at what price, depends on whether they can get respectable exhibitions. The interaction between curators and gallery owners is therefore among the most sensitive in the art world. It is in light of this relationship that the word mafia gets its actual impact. And when it comes to the Venice Biennale, everyone knows that in a more or less professional way it has to do with the exhibition, how this relationship works in practice. Although no work of art is sold, the cost of shipment and insurance of the most exhibited works would not be met without support from the galleries. It is no coincidence that the Biennale, after just a few days, was followed by Art Basel, the world’s largest commercial art fair.
Vittorio Sgarbi, therefore, did not exclude. Instead he asked 1,000 Italian celebrities from sport, including designers and intellectuals, to name their favourite artists – regardless of what the art world and critics thought. In this way, the distant relative, the work colleague’s cousin or grandmother’s childhood friend became ‘significant’ Italian artists. They will now all have the satisfaction in seeing this authority eliminated, which is probably what most have so far blamed for their lack of success: the ‘art mafia’, where everyone knows each other and no outsiders are admitted.
As some sort of compensation for all the setbacks, now everyone got international attention. But it was under the condition that the large number of selected artists and the cramped positioning would have devastating effects. For, when no one was excluded, neither was anyone significant. No business was done either. For who wants to spend money on an artist whose formal recognition (“Biennale”) depends on a radical, democratic, and thus non-commercial principle?
And it was not just the artists who were injured, but also those who had selected them. Because even if among them there were a number of celebrities (such as the authors Umberto Eco and Claudio Magris, conductor Riccardo Muti and the architect Mario Botta, who decided on a naked black woman with cello), no one escaped the suspicion of nepotism. No matter how you cut it, they all came to be seen as corrupt. The damage was limited by Italy’s declining reputation as an art nation. True, Venice is still remarkably like itself, and certainly the Biennale can defend its position in the art world – but not even the most naive visitor can have missed what the 17 years of Silvio Berlusconi in politics, with open corruption and unbridled commercialism, has meant to the country’s reputation in the art world.
The exhibition in the Italian pavilion resembled, to a large extent, an exhibition of a provincial collection. While the Biennale’s chief curator Bice Curiger had allowed the main hall’s rough floor to be polished, the Italian pavilion was actually withdrawn from an oriental art tour, and moved to Venice: a bit of landscape with cubist farms, more or less tasteless pornography, some urban shots with shiny lighting effects, a few puzzles in small and large formats, mixed with some harmless blasphemy and large amounts of Expressionism without any content or deeper purpose. In the middle of this mess, high up and next to each other, hung a portrait of Vittorio Sgarbi and another of Silvio Berlusconi.
In addition, there was, in the same hall, a documentary exhibition about the Mafia’s evil deeds – a dark torture chamber as a symbol of organised crime, with all kinds of photographs of young and old men bathed in blood. Tucked into an art exhibition was this viewpoint: we live under these conditions, and it is the mafia that prevents the people’s artists from being what they really are – and from getting the recognition and revenue they really deserve.
A more efficient (and simultaneously more deceptive) way to destroy all respect for contemporary art and its institutions can hardly be imagined. It is not clear whether Vittorio Sgarbi really knew what he was doing. But, even if he acted with malice, his work reveals an intriguing insight into the art world’s unwritten rules: without authority, however empty it may be, there is no experience of contemporary art, to say nothing of the economic value of a work selected for one of the major events. How often have we not heard, not least from the most successful curators, that a work of art should stand for something ‘ambiguous’ or ‘multifaceted’, without any reference to what this ‘ambiguity’ or ‘complexity’ actually means. The words are left as an empty pretence of meaning, or an infinite number of meanings.
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It is for this irrationalism’s sake that contemporary art requires a consensus among artists, art agents and art critics, which goes far beyond the consensus that traditional art could ever claim. And it is because of this irrationalism that art criticism (when did it happen, ten, twenty years ago?) ended up having a major influence on art and the art world. As the art itself was transformed into concepts, into a show that uses material objects only as an intermediate step or reason, so the criticism lost all its power. It may be that art criticism sometimes still has a strengthening or weakening effect on a work’s value. But it is the price, as expressed in money, that literally determines what a work is worth, and the critics’ influence on the price is small compared to what an efficient collaboration between curator, gallery owner and collector can achieve.
When Vittorio Sgarbi focuses his criticism on the unity between the curator, gallery owner and the initiated public, when he refuses to accept either the pretence of significance or authority, he also lays bare the modern art world’s weakest point, which is met with a totally limp defence. In the Italian media, there was not a single prominent voice that wanted to defend the art against Vittorio Sgarbi’s attack. You can understand why. For who wants to try to say something about corruption if it is obvious that everyone is corrupt?
And when the foreign critics wrinkled their noses and shook their heads, this reaction was not a counter-attack but a sign that they could not continue to deal with one of the greatest defeats that contemporary art has seen for decades. And to be perfectly clear on this point: there is no reason to sympathise with Vittoria Sgarbi. He is a right-wing populist and troublemaker, and his deeds bear close resemblance to a fascist coup; but his malicious intuition found contemporary art’s weakest point.
One question remains: why did all these artists get involved? And above all: why did all these intellectuals get involved when Vittorio Sgarbi called? The answer is simple: because they, and especially the leftist intellectuals, always take part in the resistance against any kind of elite; this resistance is also the secret of Silvio Berlusconi’s immense and not yet concluded success. He has incorporated egalitarianism into his political program: there should be no social or cultural differences, except those created by money. Everyone, and even Italian art, therefore, should be like him: an upstart who is constantly cheated (by all sorts of established powers, traditions, and class divisions) out of the income they deserve.
The most beautiful (and fun) work of an Italian artist in this Biennale was, by the way, in Padiglione Centrale, the fair’s central building. It was made by Maurizio Cattelan and consisted of two thousand stuffed pigeons, with fake bird excrement on each transom, riser or mursprång. But the work was old. Maurizio Cattelan had shown it already once before, in 1997, and at the same place – the Venice Biennale. Such a repetition contradicted everything the Biennale wants to be: the avant-garde’s avant-garde, the most creative arts’ primary event. Maurizio Cattelan now renounces all claims to originality. He drew the consequence of Vittorio Sgarbi’s attack on contemporary art even before it had its effects. He did not want to be an artist anymore.
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