Johan & Levi: non solo Saggi

A sense of euphoria and invigorating plenty pervade the world of Jeff Koons and his body of work addressing the allure of mass-consumer goods, banal objects whose almost erotic enticement is further heightened by his use of mirror-like materials that turn the pieces into voluptuous temptresses who seek to seduce viewers by getting them to heed the same siren song which they themselves purvey.As brilliant and intense as his sculptures, Koons talks about himself and his work during these conversations with Massimiliano Gioni, held between 2018 and 2021. The interviewer’s critical insight prompts the artist to review key chapters of his past, from his childhood in Pennsylvania to his encounter with Duchamp, from his travels in Italy in search of the most skilled ceramics craftsmen to his recent commissions in Paris and Qatar. The underlying philosophy to art, which combines avant-garde tradition with an outlook of openness and acceptance of the world at large, is laid bare. Embracing a typically American form of eccentricity, Koons accepts his own history, taste and desires, even. His freedom from any distinction between high and low culture allows him to draw with equal ease from both home appliance stores and Italian renaissance art, with which he has always dealt on an equal footing. In total freedom.

A virus has been spreading through the art world for some time now: the politically correct. Shaped like a tyrannical and moralistic power, it takes root at biennials, festivals and cultural events increasingly devoted to anti-globalist, environmentalist and feminist themes. Such militant art is shadowed by new forms of censorship of artistic output deemed to be offensive to public morality. The petition to remove Balthus’ painting Thérèse rêvant from a museum’s walls and the addition of cover-up banners on Egon Schiele’s nudes in the subway are but the most sensational cases. Having abandoned all provocative and subversive ambition, art today has become the banner of social struggles, while artists allow themselves to be cotton-woolled in do-gooder critique. Often lacking specific skills, artists willingly don the garments of the archivist, historian or activist to make projects that leave ample space for documents, testimonies and densely didactic and sententious scaffolding. But if the intrinsic value of the work takes second place to the content and cause it promotes, what about the strength and autonomy that Modernity assigned to it? The thing that is endangered, in truth, is not only the notion of art: the very idea of ethics is paradoxically fragmented into myriad categories – as many as there are claims to identity – potentially in conflict with one another. In this short and highly polemical non-fiction work, Talon-Hugon retraces the stages of the delicate relationship between art and ethics, comparing them with what is happening today: censorship is being exercised not for the good of humanity as a whole but for the benefit of individual categories or communities, to the detriment of artists and their modus vivendi.

Lack of culture, financial resources and globalization are rapidly driving the languages of art into a cul-de-sac. The definitive decline of the avant-garde movements and the erosion of the intellectual power that had supported them, along with the image of art as a status symbol, have fostered the rise of a type of art collecting, which devoid of sufficient knowledge of the object of its desire, has nonetheless imposed new rules of the game and provoked a radical standardization of taste. At one time, collecting – that tangible fruit of developed taste, its material visualization – was the prerogative of a cultured, charismatic aristocracy, capable of bringing legitimacy and authority to the battle of ideas; today, on the contrary, it is mostly seeking consensus while treating art objects like mass-produced souvenirs that should be as recognizable as an image of the Eiffel Tower, familiar even to those who have never been to Paris. Guided by conformity and armed with massive sums of capital, collectors choose trophy-works with the sole aim of confirming their membership not in an elite of knowledgeable art lovers but in the club of the wealthy. For their part, artists offer no resistance to this standardizing arrangement, having lost the antagonistic role that once sheltered them from the whims of fashion. They are now forced to chase after economic success and produce “obedient” art, respectful of the dictates of marketing and globalized taste, at the expense of the autonomy that had been their most prized and powerful quality until only a few decades ago. This lively essay, scathingly controversial even in its title, analyzes changes in the spirit of the times, in taste in collecting, in the system by which art is disseminated and ultimately in art itself, reflecting the changes over the last thirty-five years in society, geo-politics and the economy.  

Since 2005, the proceeds from sales in the art market have almost doubled, surpassing 60 billion dollars yearly. Art fairs and events have proliferated like mushrooms; auctions reach dizzying figures and the overall demand for artwork has increased exponentially. And yet, this peculiar gold rush is only part of the story. Looking more closely, behind the slick vernissages in museums and galleries, behind Christie’s and Sotheby’s glorious records and ever-changing leadership, lies a much darker side. In fact, the legacy of this boom has been a rapid increase in the concentration of power in the hands of a few mega-players who can singlehandedly determine the price – and thus the value – of a work of art. This concentration has had many repercussions: artists are branded like merchandise; art is increasingly treated as an nothing more than an investment; fraud and the circulation of forgeries are on the rise; the temptation to avoid or falsify tax records has intensified and methods of art production and sales have changed. In recent years, Georgina Adam, astute contributor to the most influential art magazines, has been gathering interviews, statements and testimonies from leading figures in the art system, confronting shady intrigues and scandalous backstories of the often opaque and always poorly regulated art market. With discrete irony, Adam explains the notorious auctions of works by Picasso, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, as well as the financial dealings of luxury tycoons and nouveaux riches Asians. With a genuine outsider’s view, she follows the most incredible intrigues and legal proceedings of the art market, where – as one might expect – all that glitters is not gold.

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.

The future of the public museum has never seemed more at risk: rather than representing the diverse interests of society as a whole, in most cases it has been reduced to a vehicle for promoting block-buster events and protecting the privileges of private concerns, giving rise to temples of amusement and entertainment that are unable to grasp the actual historic moment in its entirety. Apart, that is, from the odd happy but rare exception. In this short essay, Claire Bishop talks about the experience of three European institutions of contemporary art – the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Museo Nacional Reina Sofía in Madrid and the MSUM in Ljubljana – which have dealt with the challenge of cuts to public funding dictated by austerity measures by making a virtue of necessity and developing brilliant alternatives to the dominant mantra of “bigger and better, and, if possible, also more profitable”. Through enlightened policies regarding the acquisition of new work and the display of their own permanent collection, these museums have turned themselves into places dedicated to experimentation, capable of using their own resources to put together a critical discourse and cast a political eye on the current period in history. In re-opening discussion of a heated international debate, Museologia Radicale outlines a manifesto for a new concept of contemporary, which should be seen as a practice and not merely as periodization, favouring a reinterpretation of the museum’s role as an institution charged with preserving cultural heritage, at the same time providing a critical voice that can interrogate the present and contribute to creating a different future.

From image makers to playlists, from gourmet menus to singing festivals and even VIP weddings, nowadays everything is “curated by”, and “curate”, “curator” and related terms are on the lips and on the curriculum of everyone who wants to make an impression and stand out from the crowd. Whereas even the most disparate companies have adopted this strategy of extreme evaluation of content, it is in the field of art where curators rule the roost. Architects of high-profile group shows and biennials to which they lend their name and their face, the various Obrists, Christov-Bakargievs and Gionis overshadow the work of the individual artists to become the protagonists of the events they have been asked to curate, divided between the need to tap into public taste and the mission to shape a new avant-garde. The phenomenon began in the nineties and soon became widespread, to the extent that even the museums, once havens separate from the frenetic world of marketing, jumped on the curatorial bandwagon, ready to serve up a pre-digested helping of their treasures. What set off the unstoppable rise of these “guarantors of value” so skilled at promoting mainly themselves, so that they appear to be the “must-have” arbiters of taste? How has this role infiltrated mass culture bringing about a hyper-professionalization of roles in the art world and a proliferation of new areas of specialization?

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.