In front of David Datuna eating Cattelan’s Banana to the cry of ‘hungry artist’, we all asked ourselves (some more, some less): what is considered art in today’s complex and varied world? How far can provocation go and when does it become nonsense?
We steal the words of Cesare Catania, an artist interviewed in this issue, saying that art is everything that is supported by a concept, a path, a thought form that accompanies the gesture. Translated trivially, ‘there must be something going on’! This was demonstrated by Fountain, Marcel Duchamps’ urinal. It is said that in 1966 John Lennon took an apple at Yoko Ono’s first installation and ate it, apparently this is how they met…The celebrated Fontana built a conceptual highway that led straight to the cut. And Cattelan too, in the words of critic Jason Farago, “makes the obvious ridiculous, deflates and defeats the pretensions of previous art”.
The Dadaists at the beginning of the 20th century had even played with the common object, and Pop Art had already expanded it into the repetitive sequence of industrial production translated into art.
And on the debated and controversial banana, the work is the idea, not the object itself. So can photography. The Utah nude by Letizia Battaglia, chronicler of pain through images, exhibited at the Baths of Caracalla, portrays a woman lying in the snow, immersed in the reassuring silence so far from the overflowing violence of society.
