The conclusion of the Amerigo Vespucci’s world tour offers a cue to recall that the Italian Navy’s training ship, these days docked in Genoa, has also taken a number of works of art around the world over the past two years in order to “celebrate the excellence of Made in Italy through events, meetings and initiatives in some of the most iconic ports on the planet” (so the official presentation). More than three hundred thousand people visited the Villaggio Italia, a sort of exhibition where the Vespucci brought what should be the best of Italian culture, and in the eight stops they were able to see the works of the two artists chosen, evidently, as testimonials, so to speak, of Italian art: Jago and Lorenzo Quinn. Even in Genoa’s Villaggio Italia the public can see a work by Jago.
On the works of Jago and Lorenzo Quinn that Vespucci has taken around the world, there is no need to dwell much: they are the usual banal and didactic works to which the two have accustomed us over the years (moreover, very curiously, Jago presented a work depicting a hand, i.e., the trademark that made Quinn famous). Jago, in particular, brought, among others, La David, an atrocious and winking female version of Michelangelo’s David; Family, a sculpture depicting three intertwined forearms, a symbol of “human union”, and Future, a hand folded to make the sign of three, a gesture that in the United Arab Emirates, one of the tour stops, was “made famous by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum,” official introductions inform us, and which represents “Victory, Success and Love.” It is fast food art with pre-packaged and pre-administered meaning, and moreover blatantly obsequious to one of the subjects that welcomed the Vespucci tour. Quinn, on the other hand, brought Posidonia, a scholastic transformation of the sea plant of the same name into a woman’s face: because, the artist says, the sculpture’s flowing hair waves like the posidonia plant. I think there is no need to add more, except that Lorenzo Quinn is not Leonardo da Vinci. Besides, if any poet these days ventured to propose such a comparison between hair and waves, he or she would probably be demoted to a village festival versifier. If a contemporary artist does it, he is taken on a world tour with Vespucci.
There is no need, it was said, to dwell much on the works, except for the sake of reporting (and criticism). It is, if anything, necessary to ask whether, since Vespucci should hopefully also take on a world tour the best of what Italy is capable of expressing in the cultural field, there was really nothing better than Jago and Lorenzo Quinn. Rhetorical question, of course: it sounds really hard to think of Jago and Quinn as the advanced peaks of national contemporary art. Indeed, I dare say that it is impossible to consider them “excellences” of our contemporary art, borrowing the phrasing of the person who wrote the texts of the Vespucci tour. Evidently, however, this must not have seemed so to those who determined that Vespucci should be accompanied by the works of Jago and Quinn. So, at the end of the day, it is not even really necessary to wonder whether there was not better.
Perhaps, one needs, if anything, to reason about the reasons that led the tour organization to choose Jago and Quinn as representatives of Italian art. We are not talking about a temporary exhibition, even an impactful one, presented in a venue where the public has more and better to see: I am thinking, for example, of the canea that was raised for Emanuele Giannelli’s exhibition in Florence, with its giants placed near the entrance to Palazzo Strozzi Sacrati, arrived in a city that has a significantly vast offer and that quietly allowed one to turn one’s back on Giannelli’s exhibition if one did not think it was up to par, and choose among the many contemporary art offerings that Florence makes available to citizens and tourists. Not to mention, then, that Giannelli had not been selected as an “excellence” of Tuscany, although, of course, an artist who exhibits in an exhibition promoted by the Region may be perceived by some as an “ambassador,” if I may say so, of the institution that decides to host his works. The case of the Vespucci is different: the three hundred thousand who entered the Italy Village, often set up abroad, were not given the choice of seeing Jago and Quinn’s works or anything else, and above all their works were packaged with the rhetoric of excellence, Made in Italy and so on. To all those in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Abu Dhabi who entered the Italy Village, Jago and Quinn were basically presented as the best of contemporary Italian art. As “great Italian artists”: I quote the exact expression that can be found by walking around the Vespucci tour site. Why?
First, the total disconnect between the contemporary art system and everything outside of it. It is an effect of the frustrating, obtuse, nauseating self-referentiality of the Italian contemporary art world, of its unwillingness to open up to the outside world; it is an effect of the agony of criticism, of the renunciation of popularization, and, by extension, of the total disinterest that the outside world has in Italian contemporary art. Normal, then, that if there is incommunicability between two parties, if a terrain is not cultivated by those who should do it, then that terrain becomes everyone’s land, a land where it does not become too difficult for a Jago or a Quinn to pitch their tents and be presented as “great Italian artists.” And the fact that, in almost two years of touring, no critic, no curator, no insider has bothered to point out that, perhaps, Italy has better with which to present itself in the world, is further indication of the sidereal distance that separates the contemporary art world from everything else.
Second, the idea that public success corresponds to actual quality. And it is difficult for an artistic product rewarded by a very wide audience to also be a product of quality, especially today, in the age of rapid consumption of any content, in a historical moment that tends to reward easy cultural products because they can be grasped without too much effort. That is, in a historical moment that tends to reward the antithesis of art. Jago and Quinn obtain public acclaim because they have applied to their works the mechanisms that decree the success of influencers (so much so that both exceed one million followers on Instagram, numbers probably precluded to almost all contemporary artists, and perhaps impossible to reach for any Italian artist who refuses to apply the same schemes): works of extreme ease, subjects known to all, reassuring content and so on. It is as if we were to assume that Gigi D’Alessio and Il Volo are the spearheads of Italian music: here, Jago and Quinn are the Gigi D’Alessio of contemporary art. The problem is that the “excellences” of Italian art should not be chosen by popular acclaim, even more so if they have to represent us around the world by choice of an institution.
Third: if we want, the lack of a committee that has made a minimum of selection or, at least, of someone who has bestowed some suggestions to the Ministry of Defense and the Navy, for example, on who not to bring, and that would already have been a very good result. Someone will be able to say that in order to be understood outside national borders, better a product like Il Volo that reaches everyone, with its commercial version of those three-four airs that abroad are known even to the ignorant who associate Italy with pizza, mandolins, lemons from the Amalfi Coast and Libiamo ne’ lieti calici. So for art it is better to bring the artist who cosplays Michelangelo, or the one who has become famous because, by dint of sneaking into Venice every time there is a Biennale, eventually everyone knows him. However, what was said on these pages about the choice of Volo as artists to promote the image of Agrigento Italian Capital of Culture 2025: even if the presence of Jago and Lorenzo Quinn responds to legitimate marketing reasons, we need to ask ourselves if we really think that they are the two artists best suited to represent the image of Italian art, Italian creativity and Italian artistic thought in the world.
Some curator may raise the objection that Vespucci’s world tour, after all, is a negligible event, because it is one of those pot pourri where anything goes in, and generally mixing never does anyone any good: in Los Angeles, for example, there was Jago, the music band of the Carabinieri’s student legion playing Morricone’s songs, Serena Autieri performing classic Italian songs, screenings of the film Comandante, and so on. However, I do not think the problem should be seen from this perspective: meanwhile, we are talking about an event that for each stage attracted an average of more than thirty thousand people, spread over five to six days. Not exactly negligible numbers: someone try to name an Italian contemporary art exhibition capable of eliciting the same fascination. Besides, if the quality is sustained, I don’t think we need to fear the proximity of different languages. However, it is necessary, precisely, that quality be sustained. It is not impossible to bring quality inside “national-popular” gathering occasions, so to speak. And there is no shortage of examples: last year, at the Paris Olympics, a good selection of art was brought to Casa Italia. Perhaps with some sags, of course, but at least an itinerary was set up that was the result of choices made by two professionals in the field who operated and chose the artists according to defined criteria. Could not the same have been done for the Vespucci tour? The hope is that, for the next world tour, the contemporary art that is to accompany our school ship will be chosen without improvisation, and if there will be no committee, that at least some curator will be chosen who can avoid having Italy’s image represented by artists to like on social media and circulate a more solid proposal to the world.
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