There’s a point today where the art world seems to be spiraling in on itself: this idea of plurality, of crossing into canons beyond the single one we’re used to. Biennials and museums speak of new geographies, of languages that break the Western canon. Have they succeeded – have they broken it? Or is art, as we proudly claim to understand it, still a European invention?
Vincenzo de Bellis studies Cultural Heritage Conservation in Lecce, then lays the foundations for an international career. A period at the Prada Foundation, a few years and many studies later, the role of global artistic director at Art Basel, the largest (read also most prestigious) art fair in the world.
The question has been there for a thousand years, stuck: how much has the gaze really changed? Vincenzo de Bellis looks at me with the calm of a verdict: “This is a complex question.”
A hint of likely silence, I think – then he replies: “The canons of art are still, to this day, European canons. The vast majority of works we see in the world’s major museums and contemporary galleries still reflect those codes. You see Europe everywhere, in every piece.”
We return to the single, European canon. It’s more a historical observation, he makes me understand, than a firmly held opinion. “Because our eyes,” he explains, “those of us who work in the sector, even the youngest ones, remain steeped in a traditional canon.” It’s a form of cultural inertia that doesn’t overturn in a single season: “Things are changing, but it will take centuries.” Are there novelties to expect? Yes, small fires can already be glimpsed, he adds: Asia, South America, artists who haven’t internalized that colonizing culture. But it’s a slow process. Even the word “quality,” he says, no longer has the meaning it once had. “Because we continue to define quality by comparison with the past. And today this is an idea to reconsider” (I hear in the subtext: therefore absurd and wrong).
To understand what is meant by “European canon,” the story he tells me is enough. “Basel, 1967. Two Picasso paintings – The Two Brothers and Seated Harlequin – are exhibited at the Kunstmuseum Basel as loans from the Staechelin art collection. Following an air disaster, Staechelin, who is the majority shareholder of the airline company involved, wants those two and other important paintings from his family’s art collection to compensate for the damages caused by the disaster. To prevent all this, the young people of Basel organize an enormous protest, pushing the Basel population with voting rights to approve a state contribution of over six million francs for the purchase of the paintings. The initiative succeeds, the works remain at the Kunstmuseum. Picasso is so moved that he immediately donates four more of his works to the city, which are also in the same museum today. That love for art and for a public museum makes me think of the best that Europe can represent. I’m talking about geographical Europe, obviously, not political.”
Then there’s the present, which thank goodness becomes increasingly noisy. Art Basel today is a global machine, and generates value and is capable of orienting desires. But the question always remains the same: whether the commercial dimension hasn’t taken precedence over content. “Well there is, but there always has been, from my point of view. A small business in terms, compared to many other markets, but art remains a luxury market. Certainly, expansion has surely flattened it, but not believing that the art world hasn’t always been linked to the market would be a great mystification. Even in the years of great protest, art winked at the market. Even in those years the most politically exposed artists were still attentive to the market. But the reality was that they had to sell to live. Contemporary art – all art is contemporary – and let’s say art in general responds to logics and is born from reasons that aren’t necessarily mercantile. But without the market and its commerce it cannot exist, because it cannot exist in its independence.”
Are we in a moment, and perhaps you wanted to allude a bit to this, of critical apathy toward what happens around us, and has commerce taken precedence over the market? “Probably yes. From that point of view. But also consider a lack of distance that exists every time with contemporary production. Ease of judgment because historical distance is lacking.”
How do you recognize an avant-garde then, how do you know it’s her and not the usual suspects? At the last Art Basel I saw, Miami a couple of years ago, you could recognize the didactic thread: neon signs, assembled paintings that conveyed in highway fashion the single concept without variations: “look how the internet has reduced us in recent years.”
“There’s no method. You need knowledge of what has been and the ability to refuse it. The boundary between reference and derivation is razor-thin.” A name? Jordan Wolfson: “American, born 1980. He became famous in recent years for creating animatronics, sculptures that move mechanically. If you look at Jordan’s work you’re obliged to relate it to De Chirico’s mannequins, to all the avant-garde that mixed the human body with the humanoid one. And yet he makes them autonomous in their movement through artificial intelligence. So it’s a direct point of reference. But it’s also something no one else has done until today.”
What about us? On the Italian system De Bellis is precise and discontented: “Everything’s missing a bit. System, collectors, cultural support.” And about digital illusions, NFTs and surroundings? Should we believe in it? Did that method have the cards to resist? Will it have them later? Never? “What’s born only for speculation has a short life. I’m not one of those who deny a future to digital art. But to become relevant it needs the Duchamp of digital: someone who enters and dismantles certainty.”
The last question is about the new generations. They have more space, yet seem less willing to understand it from within: “What they do have is greater awareness. They have many more horizons – the art world is infinitely larger now – so they have sources of inspiration and, let’s say, points of reference that are far broader than those their predecessors had.
What are they missing? Well, a bit of – it’s always hard to say this without being misunderstood – they’re missing a bit of suffering. In general, art needs moments of rupture. We’re seeing more and more artists from Africa and Southeast Asia, and it’s not just a trend. The market wants them, and it would be foolish to deny that there are real urgencies in those places – urgencies that are expressed in their work. Unfortunately, contemporary art – no matter how much we pretend otherwise – can’t stay in a studio, in isolation. It’s tied to what’s happening around us, and therefore inside us. And if there’s nothing to change, to break, to remember, and to overcome, it’s hard for it to truly be disruptive.”
