No one believes it, but contemporary art could be a way to train new eyes. The problem is that in exhibitions, fairs and biennials we always see the same works, homogenized, interchangeable winking, strange little things, surreal painting, unusual objects processed from the antiques market under the house. This happens because there are never times and places for sowing but only places for exaggerated harvesting, and because in the formative stage, in which they try to forcibly slip even sowing, there is no open critical discussion that should nurture artists’ education and popularization as a space of opportunity to become interested and passionate about the work.
Selling the latest generation at the fair (the artists who have emerged in the last 25 years), is not necessarily good news. It is as if in a supermarket the prices are multiplied by 15 or by 20, and there are people who buy them anyway. If art is just the decoration of the fireplace, today, with artificial intelligence and thousands of contents available to each of us, we can have fun independently and make the works ourselves. After all, we photograph, we film, we think about how to create yet another piece of content on social media, we have an authorial attitude, so let’s do it all the way for the fireplace as well.
We need to buy works that witness valuable ways and attitudes that we can take out of the museum and apply concretely in our lives. By now a “diffuse biennial” is created around the fair with thousands of works to be seen in a short time and in a small space. At Artissima I liked Galleria Zero’s booth with only two works and two artists in focus, Francesco Gennari and Michael E. Smith. Only two works, precisely because anything we throw into the chaos of the fair risks being overwhelmed and unseen, so it takes courage and intelligence to make such a choice. But if the gallerist is really convinced of the values the choice pays off because in this way it gives breath to the two works.
But we are always at the limit because the claim, even in the best of cases, is to sow and reap at the same time in a place, the fair, that would only be useful for the harvest. We cannot expect a good harvest if there is no sowing time first, but before the fair there is always another fair.
A few days ago the Quadriennale in Rome opened, and it seemed to be in an ill-concealed fair, where we find the same things we find in a fair. But this also happens internationally with biennials, manifests and documents. Not only is there no critical confrontation that can train mode aptitudes for artists, but there are never places where the artist can experiment without the pressures of the market. This necessary absence of quality is then paid for during fairs where gallerists, even to bear the costs of participation, must then inflate works in value arbitrarily-the fact that they sell them is not necessarily good news. All one has to do to understand how things are going is to take a tour of the fair with an honest and sincere eye. The situation for many years has been there for all to see, the “king is naked,” but no one has the courage to look him in the eye and tell him that something must be changed.
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