to us Maurizio Cecchetti for more than thirty years, both as a journalist and art critic. An author of cultural themes who has always been able to emphasize stories and facts in a decidedly detailed way without ever missing the thousand, even more ironically subtle, nuances that characterize the complex world of art. This is a pamphlet which could only arrive in the bookshop on the opening days of the Venice Biennale. It will therefore be appropriate to read it as a story that goes beyond "the irony of fate".
The pamphlet that put the Baratta era of the Venice Biennale under the spotlight is back, revised and augmented, in the year, 2019, in which an era where art was in the hands of managers came to an end. Since Paolo Baratta became President of the institution for twenty years, the artistic world has changed radically, transforming the great aesthetic questions of our time into a media circus, where sociology, economics and politics have occupied the space that was once dedicated to the aesthetic and expressive issues of artistic languages. One of the most lucid and severe critics towards those who control the destinies of art through the media and its exhibition institutions, updates and develops this essay which, after Covid, the drifts of globalisation, the imposition of AI fictions and the threats that are growing with wars spreading across the planet, becomes a free and necessary tool to orient oneself within one of the most serious cultural crises that man has ever experienced in modern centuries. Why continue to believe in an art system that peddles the distorting logic of a market that thrives on the crisis of ideas, values and the presumed pre-packaged truths of political correctness?
Who is Maurizio Cecchetti
MAURIZIO CECCHETTI was born in Cesena in 1960. Art critic, writer and publisher, his books include: The City of the Angel (Marietti, 1992), Edgar Degas. Life and work (Mondadori, 1998), Ingres's suitcases (L'Obliquo, 2003), The circles of the birches (Medusa, 2007, finalist for the Viareggio prize for non-fiction), Glass skin. The book of anti-architecture (Medusa, 2010, Feronia prize for militant criticism), It caught my attention. Contemporary art and its schizophrenia (Medusa, 2015), Pedinamenti. Exercises in art criticism (Edizioni dell'Asino, 2018), Off duty. Notes for the maintenance of Marcel Duchamp (Medusa, 2018), Art is always contemporary (like history). Pedinamenti 2 (MC, 2020), Memory intuition freedom in architecture (MC, 2022), Gli anni di Fancello (Medusa, 2023).
Author MAURIZIO CECCHETTI – Title “How did the Venice Biennale become a circus”
Wunderkammer necklace
