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Watch out for small-mindedness in art, this deplorable phenomenon of contemporary art created by a "stupid father": contemporary art at all costs. A mystery and intentionally misleading place for so many artworks in these last twenty-thirty years, which inflicts on us everything and its opposite: from the brilliant to the false brilliant, from the genuinely high quality to the genuinely mediocre, from the mediocre to the aggressively illiterate. All of it in luxury stands and window displays. Find and avoid small-minded artists, small-minded gallerists, small-minded curators, small-minded consumers, etc…


Time has passed for good and not-so-good artists. When art business lobbies (international exhibitions, auction houses, etc.) take them over, they are passed off as geniuses. Manipulative super-efficiency. Shall we mention the secrecy and the nearly sacred privacy of Bonnard or Brancusi or Giacometti (see the wonderful pictures of those years caught by Cartier Bresson or Doisneau). Or the persistent studio discipline divided between meditation and feverish activity of so many American artists from the 60s and the 70s? (Jasper Johns, Jim Dine, Rauschenberg photographed by Ugo Mulas in 1964). Fewer geniuses therefore, more humility perhaps.

Contemporary art is the inspiration for an abundant body of writing, which is an offshoot of this conceptual, minimalist, meagre universe, which probably would not need it, but would create one of its own. Even absolutely authoritative critics (i.e. Didi-Huberman) describe us, with writings which are a mix of theoretical and critical analysis, as artists with a very thin, indefinite, borderline language, developing a complexity in meanings, texts and subtexts which are probably absent in the work of those artists: a literature essentially consistent with aesthetics, sociology and anthropology which is absolutely self-referential, as an independently meaningful body. In other words… the artwork is elsewhere!

The work of Cattelan is not simply the work of a genius of contemporary art, but also makes a mockery of the entire Art System (gallerists, critics, curators, regular art goers, etc.); a genial interpreter for a filthy rich, super exhibitionist, super informed middle class, which is hypnotized by business, by a stratospheric financial turnover, by an absolutely narcissistic monetary eroticism.
From an interview with Cattelan in La Repubblica (2011): "however, in my case, the market is doped with artists not being responsible for price increases. Fifteen years ago, contemporary art was not like that: nowadays, if you are not the object of economic speculation, you are not considered a high quality artist…".
Approximately one year ago Cattelan went a step further: he RETIRED PUBLICLY FROM ART…a more than brilliant move!