Angelo Crespi

Contemporary churches often resemble industrial buildings, swimming pools, bars or garages. They rarely have a façade and bell towers are just a fleeting memory. Their interiors are disorienting and aseptic like waiting rooms and the dome has been replaced by a ceiling that doesn’t make one think of God, but of the tenant upstairs. The rose windows have been replaced by skylights and the sacred images by anodyne abstract artworks that evoke a vague spirituality lacking in transcendency. In homage to minimalism, the altars look like they’ve come out of an Ikea catalogue. The horror of the new holy buildings is the price the Church pays contemporary society. Following the Second Vatican Council, it did away with traditional forms in favour of more daring architectural eccentricity or, worse still, joyfully adhering to the bureaucracy of town planning committees. And yet new, magniloquent cathedrals are springing up everywhere: they are the museums designed by famous architects, driving forces behind tourism and multi-million euro investments, places destined not to conserve memories any more but to act as luxury packaging for contemporary art, themselves works of art, icons, places where the culture that is becoming a religion can be experienced. Throngs of the faithful set off in pilgrimage: just as they once headed to Chartres, now they visit the Guggenheim in Bilbao or the Tate Modern in London to worship the idols and relics of the contemporary age. Angelo Crespi takes a fun, light-hearted look at ugly churches, comparing them to the rules set for architects by the Italian Episcopal Conference in a comic little manual that is not the result of faith, but a sort of post-Council ‘pauperistic’ moralism. He compares them to the designs for Deconstructionist museums, huge alien spaceships made from glass, iron and concrete, which increasingly often determine the city landscape, fun houses and factories of meaning and consensus.

Dirty socks, inflatable balloons, sharks in formaldehyde, stuffed donkeys, stones scattered on the ground and a great deal of pornography and coprophilia. Desecration, nonsense and pointless amusement seem to be the new categories of contemporary art, where the market alone decides the value of a work and all aesthetic judgment is banished. Nothing today means anything other than the brand names of artists who make art as apple trees make apples, regardless of the results, in blind obedience to the gospel of production and profit, while museums of contemporary art, empty exoskeletons devoid of contents, set the prices of these new “junk bonds”. There would be no problem if this new art did not aspire to comparison with the art of tradition, to measure itself against the great works of the past. We need to come up with a new name for it, a new category for a new taxonomy in which to include all the ugly, foolish and often misshapen things that insist, however, on calling themselves art. Angelo Crespi has invented the term sgunz, sinking the blade of a disillusioned and competent observer into the rottenness of the present-day system of critics, curators, gallery owners and famous artists young and old, all simultaneously victims and champions of a mechanism that does nothing other than perpetuate itself. In line with a consolidated school of thought that runs from Robert Hughes to Jean Clair, this pamphlet presents itself as a manual for survival in an increasingly entangled jungle, a lifeboat for those who have lost their bearings, who sail against the tide and still believe in art. In real art.