Italy Art

ROME

Skip to next paragraph Multimedia Slide Show Italy's Contemporary Art Scene

YOU wouldn’t know it from wandering around the crowded art fair in Bologna a few weeks ago, or from seeing Larry Gagosian’s new gallery in Rome, where some of the moneyed, antiseptic air of the Chelsea of New York reaches the neighborhood around the Spanish Steps. But Italy has become the basket case of Western Europe.

So everybody says. It is still tourist heaven, of course, if you’re not paying in dollars. In political terms, though, it’s forever chasing its own tail. This winter the government, chronically geriatric, fell for the umpteenth time. Decades of festering indecision caused rotting garbage to pile up in the streets of Naples.

But then there’s the contemporary art scene.

A new museum is under construction in Rome, nicknamed Maxxi, designed by Zaha Hadid. A museum opened not long ago in Bologna called Mambo. (Italians love their acronyms.) The Prada Foundation has just bought an exhibition space in the south of Milan; Rem Koolhaas will be that architect. And in the north of Milan there’s Hangar Bicocca, a vast former Pirelli factory devoted to gigantic installations; Anselm Kiefer’s, an awesome series of towers built of tottering concrete blocks, has justly become a pilgrimage site.

In Naples, Madre, a contemporary museum, does first-rate shows. Now it has a new place. So does the Maramotti family, which owns Max Mara, a clothing company. This winter the Maramotti children opened a foundation in a converted factory on an improbable stretch of loveless industrial and office buildings in Reggio Emilia to house the collection of their late father.

More is happening in Turin, where the Castello di Rivoli has long reigned as the premier museum of contemporary art in Italy. And after years of dawdling, Venice has recently turned its customs house over to François Pinault, the French billionaire who already has the Palazzo Grassi and says he will use them both to show off his collection. That’s hardly the best way for any city to take up new art, but it says something about Italy that Pinault chose Venice over Paris, which wanted him.

To get perspective, I dropped in on Lorcan O’Neill, a dealer who moved from London to Rome several years ago and now runs one of the best high-end galleries in town. He’s a lanky Irishman with a roster of big-name artists and a modest space on a side street in Trastevere. We sat in the back room, surrounded by stacks of the many art magazines published here.

“Foreigners feel free to make fun of Italy and complain that it’s creaky and corrupt,” he said. “For whatever reason, they think it’s charming to insult Italians, never mind that then they go off and buy Prada, eat Italian food and covet Ferraris.” In terms of new art, he added, Italy is in some ways livelier than England, where outside London it’s pretty much a wasteland.

So the art scene here is booming, I said.

He laughed at my ignorance: “It’s complicated. It would be bizarre if Italy didn’t benefit like everyone else.” He was talking about the global art boom being a tide lifting all boats.

Many public art institutions here are like the Italian government, he went on. They’re dysfunctional. The state still thinks of culture almost exclusively in terms of antiquities, so that’s basically where all the money goes, what there is of it, “on top of which,” he said, “there’s historically a very complex and often antagonistic relationship between the public and private spheres,” which is why a city like Milan has no public museum of modern art, but it has all sorts of private initiatives by people who think they can get things done more efficiently. ...

I confessed to being, suddenly, a little confused.

“See for yourself,” he said, giving me what you might call an Italian shrug and sending me off into the drizzly night.

“IT’S medieval,” the veteran curator Germano Celant said. He’s the Richelieu of contemporary art in this country. Now he sounded more like an avenging angel. “All these different villages, city against city, museum against museum — every institution is a one-person project; otherwise nothing happens. There’s no structure, no official culture of expertise.”

A recent whirlwind tour of various contemporary art museums and collections, girded by the obligatory pit stops for bucatini, turned up plenty that’s going on, much of it excellent. But Mr. Celant is right. Responsibility for contemporary art here clearly falls, as it long has, on regions and cities and, above all, on private entrepreneurs, who at least since the war have recognized that Italy’s future prestige rests on its artisanal past.

But whereas the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate and the Pompidou have emerged in the United States, Britain and France during that time as the big institutions around which smaller museums and private foundations have arisen as complements and alternatives, there’s no MoMA here. No cohesion. All dispersed energy. Talk over the years about accumulating a modern art collection out of the Venice Biennale — a ready-made source that over decades, wisely culled, could have produced a first-class museum — typically came to nothing.

1 2 3 Next Page »

More Topics:
Food and Wine Gift Baskets for Christmas, New Year and other Holidays.
Holiday gift baskets! Perfect Gift Basket, of fine Candy Gifts or the ... offers a variety of all occasion baskets to meet all of your gift giving needs. ...

Gourmet Gift Baskets for Any Occasion
Order a gourmet gift basket for corporate, new baby, wedding, thank you, holidays, and more. GourmetGiftBaskets.com has a basket for every occasion.

Delightful Deliveries
Offers gift baskets and gourmet gifts including chocolate, cookie, cakes, ... Gift Baskets , Food Gift Baskets, Gourmet Gift Basket, Wine Gift Baskets, and ...

Gift Baskets: Fruit Gift Baskets, Food Gift Baskets, Spa Gift Baskets ...
We specialize in gift baskets for birthdays, get well, sympathy, thank you, and just because. ... Why use Cherry Moon Farms for gift basket delivery? ...

Gift Baskets
Sugarfree & No Sugar Added Pancake Mixes & Syrup Fruit Butters A Jam-boree! ... Gift Baskets | Food Gifts | Cheese Gifts | Gift Ideas ...