Opinions

Antonello da Messina's Ecce Homo: was it a good buy?

There is some lateral significance to be found in the fact that the Italian state has decided to invest nearly $15 million, or 12.5 million euros at today's exchange rate, to purchase Antonello da Messina'sEcce Homo that everyone, even those who have...
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Heritage at risk: ministry deploys ICRI but Sicily sinks in emergencies

In a measure signed by Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli, the Central Institute for Cultural Heritage Risk Management (ICRI), incardinated into the Department of Protection (DIT), was created. The garrison serves to give an ordinary structure to the ...
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Arte Fiera Bologna 2026: domestic market as a possible horizon, sales under 10k

I have been attending Arte Fiera Bologna since 2006. At the time I was a gallery assistant, beardless and without any experience, one of those who learn by snooping around, standing on the sidelines. I remember that first edition well: there was snow...
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When art provokes: expressive freedom or irresponsibility? How far can one go?

Contemporary art, since its beginnings, has often made provocation one of its favorite tools. To provoke means to stir, to shake, to destabilize. To trigger a friction between the work and the viewer. To break aesthetic, moral, political customs. But...
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An out-of-place Rotella? The House of Memory in Catanzaro

We are in Calabria, a land of millennia-old history and traditions, and in the footsteps of Mimmo Rotella, an artist of international prominence born in Catanzaro in 1918. His creative "genius," recognized among the most extraordinary minds on the co...
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In what case can an exhibition space be defined as public? What happens at the Ex Slaughterhouse in Rome.

The former Slaughterhouse in Rome is an extraordinarily interesting space. First of all, for its history, which has its roots in the ancient (and lost) bet of a capital also industrial, of which today almost only vestiges remain: the Gazometro, the C...
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What remains of Futurism today?

It was Feb. 20, 1909, when Filippo Tommaso Marinetti leapt onto the front page of Le Figaro, after first publishing in a number of Italian newspapers (starting with the Gazzetta dell'Emilia on Feb. 5) a text that still vibrates like a battering ram, ...
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Why Italy matters less and less in contemporary art (and what could still save it)

The current difficulties of Italian art are of three kinds: in part they are inscribed in the general difficulties of contemporary art, marked by a reduction of interest at the global level; in part they are connected to problems that the Italian sys...
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Art and porn: why are some works accepted in museums and others censored?

Entering a museum and being confronted with a nude no longer scandalizes anyone. On the contrary: the nude body, celebrated for centuries, is at the very heart of art history. Yet, just move a detail, make the image more explicit, more direct, closer...
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Let's not get any fancy ideas about the Basilica of Vitruvius.

We implore readers to do an exercise this weekend: take your favorite mode of transportation, take a trip to the countryside, look for a chicken coop, and look at it. For those who don't know where to find a chicken coop, there is the alternative: go...
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Who really owns the destroyed or stolen works? For a hypothesis of "cultural hospitality"

To enter a major European museum is often to experience a contradiction. On the one hand, wonder: Greek statues that do not seem to have lost an iota of their power, intact Egyptian sarcophagi, gleaming African bronzes. On the other the doubt that cr...
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Pietrasanta lags behind in math: city council's creativity on culture data

A few years ago, we were in the midst of Covid, Angela Merkel said during a speech to the Bundestag that as a young woman she had chosen to study physics at university because scientific evidence cannot be abolished. A seemingly unassailable assertio...
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Art and fast fashion: seduction, exploitation or contamination?

To walk through any major city today is to move through an open-air museum, but not always of paintings or sculptures. The windows of fast fashion brands display images, shapes, and colors that seem stolen from anart history catalog: Van Gogh prints ...
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The gipsoteca that isn't and won't be there: the plaster casts of the Carrara Academy still without a museum

For decades in Carrara, there has been an ongoing attempt to find an exhibition venue that can permanently house one of Italy's most important plaster cast collections: the plaster cast collection of the Academy of Fine Arts. Retracing, albeit briefl...
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Are museums still independent spaces or are they becoming private showcases?

There was a time when the museum was considered a temple of knowledge, a place where society confronted its own history, where art was kept not only to be contemplated, but also to be studied, understood, passed on. Today, in many cases, those temple...
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The private collector: savior or jailer of art?

There are figures who, more than others, traverse art history as ambivalent presences, somewhere between the generosity ofthe patron and the rigor of the banker. Figures who do not create, do not paint, do not sculpt, but without whom much art woul...
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