"Florence prostituted": Tomaso Montanari tough on Gucci fashion show at Palazzo Pitti

“Florence prostituted” is the title oftoday’s editorial by Tomaso Montanari in his blog Articolo 9 in Repubblica. The reference is to the affair of the two million euros that the Gucci fashion house donated to the Uffizi Galleries for the restoration and enhancement of the Boboli Gardens. The announcement was made yesterday by Marco Bizzarri, Gucci’s CEO, Eike Schmidt, director of the Uffizi Galleries, and Dario Nardella, mayor of Florence. In exchange for the donation, Gucci was granted the concession of the Palatine Gallery in Palazzo Pitti for a fashion show to be held on May 29 (on a Monday, the day the museum is closed to the public). The project, which is titled Primavera di Boboli, plans to return the entire park (33 hectares as opposed to the current 20) to public use.

Tomaso Montanari, art historian and professor of History of Modern Art at the University of Naples Federico II, compared the Gucci-Palazzo Pitti affair to the Gucci-Partenone affair, when the Central Archaeological Council of Greece had refused the concession of the Acropolis of Athens to the same fashion house, which intended to organize a fashion show inside the archaeological site. “Greece,” Montanari wrote, “has a budget worse off than ours. But we have lost dignity, thanks to an abysmal political class and a class of intellectuals servile to the grotesque. And now also thanks to the most fucked-up cultural heritage in the world.” And “fucked up” is also the adjective the art historian uses for Palazzo Pitti, called the “most fucked-up museum in Italy, between millionaires’ bachelor parties, loans imposed by politics, and designer exhibitions.” For Montanari, “this is not a cultural project, but prostitution,” also because in vain in the professor’s eyes appear the cultural assumptions of the collaboration: “here we are faced with large multinationals that use common goods as locations to better sell their products.”

Link to read Tomaso Montanari’s full article

Image: Pitti Palace. Photo credit.

"Florence prostituted": Tomaso Montanari tough on Gucci fashion show at Palazzo Pitti

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