SIMONE MENEGOI

Generazione Critica: Curator, critic, teacher … how would you define your professional career and what, among the different experiences, led you to deal with contemporary art? 

Simone Menegoi: I try to approach current art (which is not necessarily the one produced today) from several different angles, doing my best to complement each other. Teaching allows me to broaden my knowledge; to write it, to place it in critical hypotheses; organize exhibitions, to test those hypotheses in practice.
I arrived to the contemporary aesthetic not directly from the visual art. My first passion was music. I listened to American minimalist composers long before I knew who Donald Judd and Carl Andre were.
The choice to make art a profession came at the end of university. At the beginning I just wanted to be a journalist and a critic; the opportunity to curate an exhibition in 2005 made me change my mind.

 GC: What was the first exhibition you curated and where? Thinking back now, today, what should – if you should – change and why?

 SM: My real debut as a curator is precisely the 2005 exhibition that I have mentioned. It was called “Scultura leggera” and was made in a private space, in Vicenza, thanks to the generosity of a patron. It was an ambitious exhibition with important artists (Wolfgang Laib, Christiane Löhr, Hans Schabus, Gabriel Orozco, Rachel Whiterhead, to name but a few). It was already addressing to an area on which I’m still working: the dialogue between contemporary sculpture and other media (photography, video, performance, drawing, sound). Its limits were those of my knowledge; and the fact, perhaps, of not having sufficiently valued the social and political dimension of the works.

GC: Critic vs curator: what is the role of the art critic today and what space does it occupy in relation to an exhibition, a festival or a biennial?

SM: It seems to me that the criticism is in an “Indian reservation” situation. It is squeezed between the minute daily news of exhibitions and events, on the one hand, and philosophical theory on the other, which continues to guide the choices of artists to curators even when it does not reflect specifically on art. (See the sources quoted by Cecilia Alemani for “Il latte dei sogni”). With some rare exceptions (especially Anglo-Saxon) it is no longer the arbiter of taste and value what is on focus; gallery owners, curators and collectors take care of that. It is a serious loss, because it leaves the field free to market arbitrariness, to ephemeral fashions, to celebrities built on the number of likes and views.

GC: Maurizio Cattelan said something like ‘my notoriety will never equal that of a Sampdoria full-back’, besides provocation, is it still so true that contemporary art occupies a niche?

SM: It is less and less true, numbers in hand. Of course, if the term of comparison is football, then I fear it is a difficult challenge, even for the very famous Maurizio …

GC: Private foundations, corporate patronage, festivals, awards and residencies … the contemporary art system in Italy is experiencing, despite or despite the pandemic situation, a moment of great vitality. The question of the sustainability of artistic design (and production) is at the same time increasingly central: we observe a public museum system in difficulty compared to private companies competing for research and selection of exhibitions and initiatives. Do you think this is a trend destined to last over time, starting a structured patronage, or one that will potentially run out?

SM: After twenty-five years of working in contemporary art in Italy, I have learned not to particularly rejoice at the announcement of the opening of a new space for contemporary art, whether public or private: what is difficult is not opening one, but maintaining it with funding and relevant programming. And this is where many fall: for lack of motivation, of sufficient economic availability, of forward-looking planning. I repeat, it applies to both the public and the private sector. As for the proliferation of private spaces, on the one hand it enriches and diversifies the panorama of Italian institutions for contemporary art, which is asphyxiated compared to other European countries; on the other hand, however, it subtracts precious funds from the meager finances of not many public museums in our country. Sometimes it’s worth it, sometimes it’s not. In some cases, the patron sincerely eager to promote contemporary art in our country would do better to support the museum of his city or region, rather than create a new one.

GC: You have been director of ArteFiera in Bologna since 2018: yours is a privileged observation point on the Italian and international art market. How would you define today, in 2022, the role and objectives of an art gallery with respect to artists, collectors and institutions? What are, in your opinion, the sustainability mechanisms and the characteristics that determine their success?

SM: Fatigued by the pandemic, undermined by the overwhelming power of auction houses, the galleries nevertheless remain a fundamental hub of what we call the art system. When dealing with contemporary art, they scout, support artists with the production of works and exhibitions (also intended for public spaces), weave contacts between artists and other actors in the system. When they work on historicized art, they create and manage the archives of the artists, they promote their knowledge, they are indispensable references for scientific exhibitions on them. (All of this, of course, in the best of cases).

I think the basic objectives are the same for each gallery, regardless of the area. A gallery must give itself a coherent and recognizable profile in terms of proposals, find its audience and bind it to itself, dialogue with the actors of the system who can become allies or “street companions” (public and private institutions, critics and curators , exhibitions).

GC: ‘Fairs must be held in person. Collectors want to see the works from life and have the opportunity to confront the artists. Digital fairs are a response to the limitations imposed but in the future they will not be an option … ‘ the digital and digitized market for digital and non-digital works of art, however, seems to be a reality that must be confronted. How, in your opinion, does this relatively new and expanding area of the art market, the NFT, relate to the traditional one (fairs, auctions) beyond the speculative aspects?

SM: At the moment it is not easy to see beyond the speculative aspects related to NFTs; after all, speculation constitutes the very raison d’être of the system on which they are based (which, I recall, was born to guarantee digital currencies). There are exceptions, of course, but for me they are a minority.

The presence of NFT works in fairs at the moment is marginal; it will probably expand, but I find it hard to imagine that it will play a central role, if only because we are always talking about digital works, and digital art has always been a niche up to now. Things have changed since the blockchain has existed; but it is still difficult to fascinate the average collector in a work that he can only see on a screen, stored on a super-server whose location he does not know, and which ultimately consists of a sequence of bits.

GC: Bologna and ArteFiera, a virtuous partnership that has historically welcomed, supported and systematized the vitality and articulated experiences of a city that has always been an important production center in the arts and open to research and the most experimental. The extensive and articulated program of ArtCity still demonstrates this today. But what are Bologna’s strengths today and in relation to an European system of cities of art and culture?

SM: Bologna is a provincial city that in the last eight to ten years has become impetuously internationalized: it was “discovered” as a tourist destination worldwide (an unprecedented phenomenon, unthinkable when I frequented the city as a university student between the end of 1980s and early 1990s) and it has a student population that has opened up to the whole world. it perceives much more than before the need to have its own specific identity to play on the European scenario, and it found it in historical architecture (the famous arcades, which have become Unesco heritage), in the kitchen, in the art of the past and, luckily , even in that of the present. There is in Bologna a “tradition of the contemporary” (from the architecture and design of the sixties and seventies to the performance, at the fair itself, one of the first in Europe) that must be remembered and cultivated. I hope that the city will want to focus more and more on this characteristic of its cultural DNA.

GC: Theater, cinema, music… are contexts in which the production and use system operate on international networks that contribute to the sustainability and circulation of shows, concerts and audiovisuals at the same time. The art system seems to be refractory to this system: there are few experiences of ‘sharing’, limited to large exhibition events or, more recently, projects to support young artists supported by European funds or a ‘system’ of galleries born in a pandemic era, however, more similar to a protectionist trend than to real planning. What makes collaboration between individuals who, on paper, should have common goals so difficult?

SM: Of course, more could be done in terms of sharing and circulating initiatives between institutions, galleries and other spaces for art. Networks should be more widespread and more efficient; collaboration should become a regular practice. But we must also consider the nature of the cultural products we are talking about. It is one thing to distribute a film; another a theatrical performance, which in fact usually has a much more limited circulation; and yet another to run an exhibition, perhaps in spaces that are very different from each other in terms of capacity, budget, programming cut-off. Some years ago I collaborated with my American colleague Chris Sharp on the early stages of an exhibition project that connected some European institutions, both public and private. It was not a traveling exhibition; it was a unitary project, with a single idea and title, but made up of a series of exhibitions that were very different from each other, as were the participating institutions. It seemed more effective and sensible to work like this, rather than trying to run the same show and having to change it every time, perhaps drastically, to adapt it to the context.

GC: Is there a project in the drawer of Simone Menegoi curator that was not possible to carry out? Because?

SM: There are so many, and I haven’t lost hope of making at least one or two. Precisely for this reason, I will not reveal them.

12/06/2022