To Benedetto Croce’s famous aphorism — Art is what everyone knows it to be — the philosopher William Kennick added, a few decades later, a provocative postscript: art is what everyone knows it to be, until the moment they are asked to explain it.
And he is right. To put it in Leibniz’s terms, art is a clear and confused concept, like many of those that straddle perception and reflection, sensibility and intellect. And it is interesting that it is a concept entirely immanent to the human being. No eternity, no transcendent beings: pure humanity, which evidently contains more within itself than all your science, Horatio.
Now, with the indeterminacy surrounding the definition of what art is, all those to whom art simply does not matter can comfortably coexist. And so can those — and there are many — who treat it as the “Sunday of life,” who go to exhibitions and concerts to relax, to be distracted, to appear cultured. But those who take a serious interest in art and its mechanisms, and all the more so those who, by profession, look at, evaluate, curate, select, or assess artworks or presumed artworks, must have formed some idea of what art means to them. And they should also be able to articulate a communicable version of it.
I am obviously not saying that in order to be a critic or a connoisseur one must necessarily arrive at a universal definition of art; the question is too complex and probably impossible to resolve definitively. I am talking about a personal idea of art — the one that allows us to decide whether, for us, a given object is a work of art or a piece of rubbish. Personal taste, of course, is not a valid answer, since it flings open the gate to an aesthetic relativism that is the antechamber of solitude. Anyone who sets out to have their say on art and artists should, in my view, first declare what their criterion is, so as to allow the listener to verify whether the critical judgement holds up against the sieve the critic has set for themselves.
In the podcast ArteFatti, written and presented by the great-great-great-grandson of Count Ugolino and by Francesco Bonami (for those unfamiliar with him, one of the most influential critics and curators in Italy), no such declaration is ever heard. And only rarely does a judgement reveal a rationale structured around a stable, if individual, criterion. I do not rule out that such a criterion exists; but it is not perceptible. At that point, the back-and-forth between the two hosts gets lost in the swamps of idiosyncrasy — the great artist and the charlatan, the epiphanic work and the crowd-pleaser are pointed out without any clarity as to what grounds these verdicts.
That said, I listened to the twenty episodes of the series’ two seasons with diminishing amusement and interest. Having fairly quickly abandoned any hope of a formative guided tour of the world of contemporary art, I made do with the stories and references to movements and works — in short, yet another history — or more precisely, chronicle — of contemporary art that recounts the facts without explaining their causes. I found the right balance of seriousness and banter appreciable, though over the course of the second season it tilted toward the latter, with concessions to poor taste that struck me on the whole as gratuitous. For anyone wishing to listen to a few episodes, I would note that the podcast is accompanied by an Instagram page where reproductions of the works can be viewed and the descriptive texts — stripped of the banter — can be read.
English translation based on ChatGPT translation services.