Gianluca Marziani lives in Rome and Ibiza, is Curator of contemporary exhibitions programme for MetaMorfosi and Artistic Director of Poetronicart. He is the official curator -with Stefano Antonelli- of many exhibitions, catalogues and new book (Giunti, Sept 2021) about Banksy.
He directed Palazzo Collicola Arti Visive (2010-2019) and curated the programme Festival dei Due Mondi, at Spoleto. Gianluca was Consultant Curator for Biennale di Venezia (2011), Critic and curator for many exhibitions in galleries, museums and foundations, author of many books and catalogues, chief curator for 6 editions of Premio Terna and Premio Celeste. He is former Columnist on La Stampa, Specchio, Panorama, Style, GQ, Numerò Beauté;
Art Critic on Radiodue, Rai1, Rai5, Sky Arte, and Teaching art programme for IED Rome.
He has an index book on Dagospia called “Un Marziani a Roma”.
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Photo courtesy: Danilo Bucchi
“Art, whatever it takes” – The RomeArtProgram has made a series of interviews with people involved in art, living in Italy, the USA and the UK, to know their feelings and orientation during these times of emergency.
-Interview with Gianluca Marziani:
RomeArtProgram: What is your definition of “art” today?
–Gianluca: Art is a sort of complex organism: it synthesizes the chaos to produce visions and to indicate the geography of the multiple. Today’s art amalgamates analogical and digital life in an integrative organism that proceeds by direct synthesis and prolonged release impact. Finally, visual art is behaving like a true biological organism: mutant, unstable, insinuating, interstitial, fragmentary, with no more centers and pyramidal chains.
RAP: Art is dynamic and regenerates itself… how does it change, and how did it change us?
–Gianluca: Art changes us at the moment in which we understand and metabolize the dispersive liquidity of its signs, and its resistant evanescence. It begins to act within us starting from the moment we don’t experience it as a necessity, but instead as a form of awareness about the world.
RAP: When (and how) did you understand that art was becoming very important in your life?
–Gianluca: It happened when I decided not to take the last Law exam, in that moment I decided and I threw the script of the thesis in the fire, in the middle of a big party. That night I understood that a passion can never be an alternative pastime, but it has to occupy all the time of your inner life, especially when you are not seemingly dealing with art, but you are feeding your pleasure.
RAP: What role does art play today? What are the “great figures” who have recently changed it? Do you feel close to any of these figures?
–Gianluca: The rapid progress of digital culture is bringing visual art back to the center of the financial and media debate. In a society based on the principles of liquid capitalism, art that produces profit in favour of a growing number of users returns to the stage of multiple interests. All this drags the entire artistic sector, supporting the necessary balance between the “old world” and the “new world”.
RAP: Are there still traditional figures such as collectors, muses, mecenate and patrons, in today’s art and society interaction model?
–Gianluca: Those figures still exist, even if they are transforming along the lines of the epochal movements, that sweep the world. On the one hand, we have the “old world” from which those who grasp the innovative root of the present are disengaged; on the other hand we have a “new world” of millennial collectors, people who are forming among the social media platforms. There is a connection between the two worlds, a cultural limbo on which they will converge, the one and the other, giving shape to a necessary evolution of the traditional figures that define the so-called “system”.
RAP: How have the new technologies and media culture changed art today, improving or worsening it…? What do you feel are your biggest challenges?
–Gianluca: New technologies are changing the world and our habits, and I don’t limit myself to art, which is one of the various languages with which humanity expresses itself. Technology is improving many things, creating new solutions and new jobs. In the face of radical revolutions, as always, it’s fundamental to use a selective quality control, to manage thrusts from below, to direct the new roots of sensibility, to make new users aware of the market.
RAP: Art as a mirror of man, in this moment of emergency seems to be shattered …what do these fragments reflect now?… Shadow or light of the moment?
–Gianluca: Art is not shattered, its shattering resembles a biological process instead, a process in which there is no longer a propulsive center, but a multiplicity of propulsions and forces.
RAP: Understanding, interpreting, and then possibly judging the work of art; which is the right path when we are in front of a piece of art?
–Gianluca: There is no manual to understand and assimilate a work of art. Each of us is the rule and the manual. Suggesting how you look at a painting resembles those courses for becoming poets. One is a poet, or one is not; you look at a work or look at it superficially; to each of us the code to assimilate it. Those who do my job can offer useful tools to move, give density to the context, feed awareness to get in front of the work in a certain way. At that point it will be a relationship between the user and the work, a private relationship that recreates an invisible but very strong connecting line.
RAP: Which is the real role of Academies and Art schools today? What can artists learn from these institutions today?
–Gianluca: Schools play an important role in targeting skills, in producing new branches of advanced professionalism. It’s essential that these institutions are interconnected with the art system, that they are neither isolated nor self-referential organisms; they don’t have to proceed by doctrines and dogmas, but rather by openings of meaning. Schools do not have to explain, but educate, acting on the passages of conscience, on the keys to open portals to go through.
RAP: Art too has undergone a complex process of globalization; can having an authentic and genuine style be an advantage or a drag for an artist?
–Gianluca: If there is a true style It’s clearly authentic, otherwise it is called copying someone else’s style. We know that a style is not enough to affirm a qualitative value, it’s necessary to recreate some wonder, a sparkle that draws a supernova in the creative hemisphere.
Art is like the infinite space of the universe:
there is a corner for anyone; the proportions -fame, value, importance- become a simple problem of scale, and not of meaning, role and identity.
RAP: How do Art Galleries and Museums position themselves today, and, in your opinion, how should they?
–Gianluca: They must reformulate and integrate into the technological system that is bringing the collective synapses to a liquid and inclusive status. “Tunnels” are the ones most damaged by the changes; those who believed that a logistical and commercial model was to be continued, are destined to fail.
The today winners are those who resisted and invested, sensing the new collecting, managing digital practices, changing business models, reviewing those methodologies that created conformity and homologation. By now, with the due exceptions, the gallery owners who who win are those who create anomalies, leaving the patterns behind.
RAP: “Figurative” or “Abstract” ? Which of the two is better descriptive of the period we live in? Which one will have a better future?
–Gianluca: A binary division that no longer makes any sense, just as all binary divisions, begins to disperse in a liquid dimension that favours archipelago structures, and no longer pyramid structures.
RAP: Today we often speak of “emerging artists”; what advice based on your experience do you feel you can give to young artists?
–Gianluca: “Emerging” and “emergency” are similar words that I often apply young artists’ path. An emerging artist must feel the urgent emergence of his message, look for the appropriate form to express it, find the best context to propose it. Artists need to make the theory more and more practical, and the practical exercise more and more analytical. Young talents are to be measured in their holistic quotient, not in the partiality of an innate gift.
RAP: Art as a lens for reading the present, can it modify the space and time we pass through? …will art save us?
–Gianluca: We’ll be all saved, the way we believe; everyone. I don’t believe that art can save us, in a didactic sense; there are airbags, money and seat belts that can actually save us. But art helps to look at the same money, or death, in a different way, expanding the reason the same way Yoga connects the body to our breath.
We don’t have to forget that art is the main cause of creativity on our planet.
@gianlucamarziani
RomeArtProgram is ready to bounce back!
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