One can rejoice in reading the article that Gian Maria Tosatti wrote about ten days ago for the Domenicale of Il Sole 24 Ore, and to draw a happy hope in noting that even Tosatti, though firm in his twentieth-century idea of hegemonic debate, seems to have matured a certain awareness of the substantial infertility of critical discussion on contemporary art in Italy, where by “infertility” is meant the condition of a confrontation that, far from being participatory, broad, continuous and constructive, is not capable of “producing consequences in practices and works or of building a recognizable conceptual horizon.” Not that in recent years there has been a lack of proposals for systematization, reconnaissance, and a more or less orderly classification of what has happened in Italy and outside Italy, and in this sense the Quaderni della Quadriennale di Roma directed by Tosatti, who also seems to want to claim for his publishing activity a role as anunavoidable testimony of the present, have been but one of many initiatives (and probably not even the most organic or the most interesting) in the context of a critical panorama that, albeit quietly and most of the time far from clamor, has offered more than a few attempts, and not to recognize that there has been movement is to be either uninformed or intellectually dishonest. One could cite, in no particular order, without thinking too much about it and offering the reader a necessarily incomplete list, books such as Strata by De Bellis and Rabottini or Terrazza by Barreca, Lissoni, Lo Pinto and Paissan, or Roberto Ago’s critical lectures on Artribune, or even the brief history ofItalian art from 2000 to the present by Davide Landoni in Finestre sull’Arte and, again on these pages, the debate on art in the 2000s (in which Balbi, Bonacossa, Bourriaud, Obrist, Szymczyk, among others, took part), and then Luca Rossi’s battling Michelin-o guide with votes for artists, the Parola d’artist by Gabriele Landi with its myriad interviews with Italian artists, up to and including in the list of proposals even exhibitions such as the much bistrattatissima Pittura italiana oggi, and without counting those who have delved into individual strands of research (I am thinking, for example, of the last two issues of Titolo magazine dedicated to verbal codes in contemporary art, Italian and international, or the investigation of the sacred in contemporary art by the aforementioned Landi, but there would be many experiences to mention). Proposals that, even with all their limitations, have at least tried (or still try, for those still active) to offer some key to interpretation, some interpretation, some suggestions. However, they are all experiences that have met with a certain indifference: we are not talking, of course, about the feedback from a public that often, as opposed to the parterre of insiders, proves to be very interested in attempts to organize the present, but about that scope that is measured by responses, counter-proposals, polemics, discussions that have followed an input over a reasonably long period of time (discussions about poetics, in short, that last more than two or three months and that produce observable and in some way measurable results).
In welcoming Tosatti to the third millennium, it is necessary, in the meantime, to clear the air of the misconception that the absence of debate is due to the absence of a proposal: I am afraid that those who think in this way are far from the truth, and we can also consider ourselves serene, since in fifty, sixty or seventy years our grandchildren will not run the risk of losing the critical memory of the state of ’Italian art in the first twenty-five years of the century (and this without going into the merits of the recognizability and relevance in the international sphere of contemporary Italian art, which would also be an interesting element to address in this discussion, but let us gloss over it for now). The few examples mentioned above show that there is, indeed, the will to read the present. Nor is it a problem of lack of space: it is true that the publishing landscape has profoundly changed, it is true that not even the university comes to the rescue (those who aspire to an academic career often prefer to write about completely irrelevant topics that nevertheless find acceptance in scientific journals of the fourth(Those who aspire to a career in academia often prefer to write about completely irrelevant topics that are read by ten people, but which are accepted in scientific journals of the fourth order, read by ten people but which make a resume, rather than take a position by writing in a journal or a generalist journal that does not allow the accumulation of useful scores), it is true that we are witnessing a progressive parcelling out of experience, an erosion of stable critical spaces and the fragmentation of a critical apparatus that is increasingly dispersive and more and more conducive to the logic of the lacerto than to continuous discussion, not to mention that perhaps, for the first time since Mycenaean civilization to the present, criticism seems to prefer orality to the written word, but it is equally true that there are recognized platforms that maintain a solidity of their own (these same pages, which by virtue of their independence have always been open to all with supreme willingness, I think are a demonstration that we are not discounting a problem of lack of space for criticism) and consequently offer a landing place and a refuge to anyone who wants to contribute a proposal, an idea, a thought. No: it is not a problem of space. The absence of a debate that we could call “long” is explained by other assumptions.
It must be said that, in the meantime, the critical debate in Italy suffers, on the one hand, the precarization of the work of those who intend to make art their profession (no matter on which side of the fence), and on the other hand, the existence of a system that is based on the continuous interrelationships between those who produce and those who should read, interpret, classify. Now, in such a situation, to expect that deep and continuous debate can arise from a system in which, according to an apparent paradox, sterility is often functional to survival, would be a bit like scolding a dog for not meowing. The crumbling of spaces for critique (despite the healthy and sustainable survival of independent projects) is also due to the fact that even many publishing platforms struggle to find immunity from these logics, and as a result, even in journals, press release rinses, uncritical celebrations, and short-range polemics abound. And those who would have the tools to try to critically interpret the present, particularly if “critically interpreting” sometimes means taking uncomfortable positions, and especially if in order to embark on this operation of investigating the present it is necessary to go and stir up troubled waters and pronounce on issues on which it would be better not to open one’s mouth, are often inclined to adopt an attitude of conscious and serene prudence, given also the fact that we are forced to operate in a fundamentally small sector, where the actors multiply almost year by year, a sector dominated by conservatism and mercantilism, and where, for those who want to make a living from ’art, it is often more rewarding to be able to make a living from theart, it often turns out to be more rewarding to be superficial, pleasing or consensus-seeking than to have an aptitude for research or simply to take positions that might not be liked (to crush Jago and Giannelli, for example, everyone is good, while to attempt a critique of’an Italian Pavilion or, more trivially, of the museum in which one would like to go to exhibit one’s works or in which one would like to curate an exhibition, one struggles a little more). And in a system deeply permeated by market logics, and where therefore competition prevails over collaboration, heaven forbid that the writer should quote the work of a colleague of the same generation, thus of a potential adversary: better to hole up in the security offered by a Deleuze or a Guattari taking care not to move too far ahead the chronological horizon of one’s aesthetic or philosophical vision: at most one will pretend to have read two or three books and will also make a good impression without running great risks. It is well known that for a debate it is necessary to question oneself, but it is also true that in a contemporary art system where everyone, artists and curators alike, are basically entrepreneurs of themselves, where one often works by co-optation, where the bulk of gallery owners have not the slightest interest in supporting serious, quality writing, the time one devotes to discussion is basically time taken away from promoting oneself. We are no longer in the Sixties-Seventies-Eighties or so, when the reputation of gallery owners was built primarily on the ability to discover and support a line of research or even simply a supremely talented artist, when the reputation of the writer came from the strength of his or her thinking and not from the quantity of texts written to present gallery shows, when magazines were not showcases, they were arenas. It follows that, today, those who aspire to be recognized in the critical or curatorial sphere in most cases have already condemned themselves to a fate as art writing bureaucrats.
All this, of course, only thinking of those who would have the tools to understand the present (and I don’t even think they are the majority), and therefore without including in the reasoning all that vast plethora of curators, young and old, who do not inform themselves, do not study (let the reader delight in an easy exercise: at the next Artissima or Miart preview try stopping about fifty people at random, asking them who they were and what they did, say, Luca Signorelli or Gastone Novelli, and listen to the answers: I’m sure you’d be surprised), they don’t read books and journals, they don’t compare themselves with colleagues, they don’t ask, they don’t phone, they don’t venture, they don’t go to see exhibitions (except for those four or five fixed appointments and little else, where they tend to agree more out of signature duty than out of real interest or real curiosity), those curators to whom it is often difficult even to simply place the historical place of a phenomenon or even an artist they decide to follow, with all the risk of’impoverishment that comes with it (I am thinking of that genre that someone has called a studio visit and that most of the time results in a skimpy text, moreover often composed under the dictation of the artist, without any attempt to critically and historically frame his or her production, with the risk of missing openings, insights, flashes of novelty that are often unknown even to the artists themselves), to whom it is often difficult even to write a text in correct Italian.
Of course, there is no denying that it would be ungenerous to place all the blame on those who try to scrape by as best they can: we have all grown up in the society of hyper-specialization that has broken down the forms of knowledge we were used to, we have all attended schools filled with professors ready to teach us that at the Venice Biennale it is more interesting to look at two batiks and two Andean fabrics than to try to turn our eyes to Galileo Chini’s frescoes, and if we look around we will notice that even our masters do not shine much for willingness to dialogue and are distinguished, if anything, by their bolshy, musty, grotesque self-referentiality, which for some has become an almost proverbial trait. Gian Maria Tosatti himself, on his Instagram profile, before publishing the Domenicale page with his article, offered his followers a review of his exhibition at Lia Rumma, news of his participation in the Guatemala Biennial, the reel of one of his installations, and even a ChatGPT screenshot that he claims was sent to him by a “friend” and which shows a conversation in which AI is asked who the most interesting Italian artists of the 21st century are, and she responds by putting Cattelan in first place and Tosatti in second. It will be objected that he cannot be blamed for this either, if it is true that we live in the age of self-promotion and the world out there is overflowing with artists and curators who act as representatives of themselves (and, of course, there is nothing wrong with that: they did it even before the internet, the only difference being that before they avoided making us, the public, a participant in this constant infomercial), and as a result, one cannot even syndicate too much on the conduct of those who use Instagram, i.e., the platform that today much of the public almost identifies with the internet in general (aswas Facebook a few years ago), not to activate discussions or debates but simply as a catalog of one’s sample collection, as an interactive brochure with the possibility of collecting hearts and thus with an attached CRM function. Natural, then, that storytelling should prevail over discussion.
It would be reductive, however, not to consider another crucial aspect of the issue, which a certain historical squint sometimes prevents one from grasping: today’s conceptual horizon no longer follows centralized dynamics, but seems to have taken on, on the contrary, the appearance of a karst dialogue, of an underground stream that slips well hidden and then resurfaces with unexpected and distant gushes. The debate no longer flows like a river in flood, but resembles more like a water table, a submerged network in which concepts may find an initial formalization, let us say, in a small provincial exhibition and then re-emerge as a critical theme somewhere else and completely independently, or condition with greater or lesser awareness an artist or a critic who of that first, initial formalization perhaps knew nothing at all. The fact is that thought would seem to be no longer inclined to develop vertically, by hierarchies, but horizontally, by mutual connection and contagion, by fragmentary and rapid exchanges. Artists, curators, and critics then become nodes capable of intercepting, filtering, and reworking information. We are far from the epoch and modalities of groups that identify themselves under a single manifesto: the individualism that characterizes our contemporaneity is, if anything, producing constellations of singularities, distinct and autonomous, that take on a more or less defined form only when viewed from afar. The problem is that if everything is fragmented, it becomes more difficult to distinguish value from background noise.
And in a fundamentally post-ideological age, in an age devoid of any teleological horizon, discussions tend to focus and fragment on specific issues, technical or thematic, and struggle to coagulate into an overall poetic vision that can even be confrontational (I wish it were!): I think this is where the perception comes from that there seems to be a fierce debate on certain themes, especially if they respond to a global agenda that we have adopted even at our latitudes (I am thinking, for example, of post-colonial studies, which have also justified an entire Venice Biennale), although more by using them as labels than by probing them in depth in order to draw poetic nourishment from them: the result, of course, is a further flattening of practices and a further failure to develop new languages. I do not think we can say that in Italy (as elsewhere, for that matter) there is no debate on poetics because there is a will, especially an individual one, pushing in this direction. It would be to mistake the cause for the symptom: individualism seems more like a defensive reaction, it seems more like a response to the atomization of labor and the transformation of the critical landscape than the origin of a particular condition. The point is another: there is no debate of poetics because the structural conditions for a broad and participatory debate to arise, take root, settle, germinate, and bear lasting fruit are lacking. To see it rise again would require long and profound changes, exactly like those that have produced the current latitude of a long debate. Or it would require some unpredictable external event that would radically and structurally change the ground in which the debate should sink strong roots: at the moment, however, there is still no glimpse of the shadow of a black swan.
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