In front of David Datuna eating Cattelan\u2019s Banana to the cry of \u2018hungry artist\u2019, we all asked ourselves (some more, some less): what is considered art in today\u2019s complex and varied world? How far can provocation go and when does it become nonsense?<\/p>\n
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, \u2018there must be something going on\u2019! This was demonstrated by Fountain, Marcel Duchamps\u2019 urinal. It is said that in 1966 John Lennon took an apple at Yoko Ono\u2019s first installation and ate it, apparently this is how they met\u2026The celebrated Fontana built a conceptual highway that led straight to the cut. And Cattelan too, in the words of critic Jason Farago, \u201cmakes the obvious ridiculous, deflates and defeats the pretensions of previous art\u201d.<\/p>\n
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.
\nAnd 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.<\/p>\n