Art critic, journalist, tv presenter, director of magazine ART e Dossier, professor and former art dealer. Philippe Daverio has even held public administration positions giving him a 360 degree vision of art. For us interviewing him he mostly represents a divulger of knowledge intended as a tool to observe and comprehend the current times. But also a master of style, weary of all trends – so much so he politely protested about the name of this site.
At Galleria Campari in Sesto San Giovanni, following a discussion on exhibition "Camparisoda 80 years without feeling them: from Fortunato Depero to Franz Marangolo, from Guido Crepax to Franco Scepi", we interview Daverio to cast a critical and historical gaze on subjects like advertising, design and obviously, the world of art.
Fortunato Depero
Recently, after 50 years of communication being controlled by agencies with conformed standards, advertising is once again looking for an artist’s touch. What does this exhibition at Caparisoda testify to?
The exhibit narrates a story from another age, in which the decision was being taken by a company internally, between owner and communicator. The direct relationship between entrepreneur and creative was natural. Then this big filter of the agency was born, and like all dogmatic mechanisms it hides behind its rituals. Sitting around a table convincing clients and other external and mechanic professional figures, mostly with the objective of creating a kind of misunderstanding: on one side to obtain an objective result and on the other to convince the client. It’s a mechanism imported from the U.S, where the client tends to be more naïve than in Europe.
I think if old Davide Campari had gone to one of those table meetings he would have sent everyone to hell, as do many businesses today who have a direct relationship with communicators. The greatly successful communication story of Benetton for example, was based on a direct relationship with its creative.
But today mediation is almost compulsory and it’s a liturgy that is hard to avoid. More or less: if you don’t do it, it’s bad luck. Everybody has a copywriter at their table, even when advertising has collapsed from a creative perspective. In the last 25 years the contribution of businesses to advertising has declined steadily and agencies have made less profits. As a consequence they stopped collaborating with many great creatives – I’m thinking of Armando Testa and Emanuele Pirella – substituting them with interns. In addition the Italian market sees even less investment and the spirit is more domestic and conservative. Just look at any International advertising award to realize we’re the last in line.
All of this has consequences. First: only the extremely expensive campaigns work in terms of objective results, while the invention of Depero’s Campari bottle cost 200 times less than a TV ad. Second: to guarantee all those sitting at the table, while upholding an image and making sure the client doesn’t rebel, the only possible path is absolute conformism, the opposite of invention. Third: what’s being totally ignored are the articulations of the contemporary time, that is yes trans-national, but also moving towards niches. Very few companies have taken advantage of this world. Estée Lauder does, with 100 different versions of its lipstick to satisfy individual niches. The field of market research, where the intuition of market research agencies played a fundamental role until halfway through the 80s, has been completely abandoned.
Bruno Bordoli
Your books Il museo immaginato (The imagined museum) and L'arte di guardare l'arte (The art of looking at art) were recently published. Today we’re in an exposition space: what general advice would you give visitors to enjoy the museum?
With regards to contemporary art I’m more dubious because it all has the same content. The best place to visit is the cafeteria, at least you know where you are: in France you can smell croquet monsieur, in Germany würstel, in the States hamburgers. The rest is a celebration of conformism.
Giovanni Ragusa
Does the same hold true for the Biennales?
Those are even worse. Biennales are places that tend to celebrate artistic mechanisms identified by people who have no cognition for them. They do so on behalf of a few speculators and a group of clients that are basically suckers.
Giovanni Ragusa
Who decides what’s contemporary art and what’s modern art?
The people deciding this are very few by now. The mutation occurred due to a group of friends of mine at the beginning of the 80s. They are Nicolas Serrotta, who then directed a small museum in London, Norman Rosenthal, secretary of the Royal Academy from ’77 to 2008, Christopher Joachimides who was in charge of Zeitgeist in Berlin, and Tom Frenz. They invented this extraordinary exhibition "A New Spirit in Painting", which gave way to Neo-expressionism and transavantgardism. They found a client by the name of Charles Saatchi, who bought many of their pieces, which were then convenient. When they rose in value he realized the potential deal and has since been establishing what will be successful. He was the communication boss and he invented whatever artist he wanted. Then Charles Saatchi became what we all know and was copied by others. By the pushers, those who wanted to sell lithographs. Among them was a genius, Larry Gagosian. The world today is composed of pushers and opportunists. Art is elsewhere, as it always has been.
Giovanni Ragusa
But if you have the support of strong systems you can reach the Biennale.
You can reach the sucker.
Giovanni Ragusa
Is this the art we should show the public?
Here the question is very complicated. The most beautiful statement comes from the book Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship by Goethe, when he becomes the manager of this theatre in the province, the dream of his life. He’s a middle-class man born in Treviso – let’s say – who finally becomes the director of the theatre of Legnano. So the inhabitants of Legnano want to see local authors represented. But he’s been dreaming his whole life to put on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. And so at one point he declares: we won’t give them what they want, but what they should have. From this concept you get the Enlightenment movement, where élites are delegated as tastemakers for others. Is it right or wrong? I don’t know, because that gave way to both Enlightenment and totalitarianism, with Hitler. I can only say art is not for everybody. Especially with the current conformation of society. But also in the past. Why? Because it helps form the identity of an élite that is in turn directing society. In any case some artistic styles can be immediately transversal. Such as Baroque, opera, that everyone can relate to. But not Goldberg’s Variations. Art is élitist.
Giovanni Ragusa
And in this historic moment who are the artists that interest you the most?
In Italy they are unknown. Raffaele Bueno to me is the greatest artist outside Italy today, Giovanni Ragusa, Orazio Gateano and Bruno Bordoli. They are like monks of the 7° century d.C, sitting on their towers while beneath them hordes of Visigoths (types à la Damien Hirst) are passing.
Giovanni Ragusa
You’ve stated that design exists when there’s a dream to be transformed into something that will be its ectoplasm. What are the new dreams forming on the horizon?
I was speaking of post-war design, of the gentlemen from Milan’s good society that educated post-Fascist Italy towards having some style. It was also the revolutionary dream of Ettore Sottsass who converted the younger Memphis generation from California to India turning them on to what he was doing in Florence with Superstudio. In the 90s that dream ended. Today a new dream will certainly surface. But we will have to understand where and how. I consider the new dream to be involved in the battle against the idea of GDP. The GDP is killing the world and so everything has to be renegotiated. As Kennedy would say, even automobile accidents contribute to the GDP.
Orazio Gaetano
Apart from the battle with GDP, what are the most interesting directions design is taking?
There are two. The first is tied to a need for more durable materials. The subprime crisis left us with the desire to leave somewhat of an inheritance. No longer disposable chairs. This is a radical mutation because it entails a different production method, different costs and an increasing frugality with regards to consuming.
The second is the invention of a different project, a different application of materials, which will no longer be simple plastics, but materials that require more study.
Then there’s design for those trying to live in conditions of poverty. What kind of home, visual culture and materials will they use? But at this point people will have to imagine a greater dream than the one of quotidian banality.
Raffaele Bueno
Raffaele Bueno
At Galleria Campari in Sesto San Giovanni, following a discussion on exhibition "Camparisoda 80 years without feeling them: from Fortunato Depero to Franz Marangolo, from Guido Crepax to Franco Scepi", we interview Daverio to cast a critical and historical gaze on subjects like advertising, design and obviously, the world of art.
Fortunato Depero
Recently, after 50 years of communication being controlled by agencies with conformed standards, advertising is once again looking for an artist’s touch. What does this exhibition at Caparisoda testify to?
The exhibit narrates a story from another age, in which the decision was being taken by a company internally, between owner and communicator. The direct relationship between entrepreneur and creative was natural. Then this big filter of the agency was born, and like all dogmatic mechanisms it hides behind its rituals. Sitting around a table convincing clients and other external and mechanic professional figures, mostly with the objective of creating a kind of misunderstanding: on one side to obtain an objective result and on the other to convince the client. It’s a mechanism imported from the U.S, where the client tends to be more naïve than in Europe.
I think if old Davide Campari had gone to one of those table meetings he would have sent everyone to hell, as do many businesses today who have a direct relationship with communicators. The greatly successful communication story of Benetton for example, was based on a direct relationship with its creative.
But today mediation is almost compulsory and it’s a liturgy that is hard to avoid. More or less: if you don’t do it, it’s bad luck. Everybody has a copywriter at their table, even when advertising has collapsed from a creative perspective. In the last 25 years the contribution of businesses to advertising has declined steadily and agencies have made less profits. As a consequence they stopped collaborating with many great creatives – I’m thinking of Armando Testa and Emanuele Pirella – substituting them with interns. In addition the Italian market sees even less investment and the spirit is more domestic and conservative. Just look at any International advertising award to realize we’re the last in line.
All of this has consequences. First: only the extremely expensive campaigns work in terms of objective results, while the invention of Depero’s Campari bottle cost 200 times less than a TV ad. Second: to guarantee all those sitting at the table, while upholding an image and making sure the client doesn’t rebel, the only possible path is absolute conformism, the opposite of invention. Third: what’s being totally ignored are the articulations of the contemporary time, that is yes trans-national, but also moving towards niches. Very few companies have taken advantage of this world. Estée Lauder does, with 100 different versions of its lipstick to satisfy individual niches. The field of market research, where the intuition of market research agencies played a fundamental role until halfway through the 80s, has been completely abandoned.
Bruno Bordoli
Your books Il museo immaginato (The imagined museum) and L'arte di guardare l'arte (The art of looking at art) were recently published. Today we’re in an exposition space: what general advice would you give visitors to enjoy the museum?
With regards to contemporary art I’m more dubious because it all has the same content. The best place to visit is the cafeteria, at least you know where you are: in France you can smell croquet monsieur, in Germany würstel, in the States hamburgers. The rest is a celebration of conformism.
Giovanni Ragusa
Does the same hold true for the Biennales?
Those are even worse. Biennales are places that tend to celebrate artistic mechanisms identified by people who have no cognition for them. They do so on behalf of a few speculators and a group of clients that are basically suckers.
Giovanni Ragusa
Who decides what’s contemporary art and what’s modern art?
The people deciding this are very few by now. The mutation occurred due to a group of friends of mine at the beginning of the 80s. They are Nicolas Serrotta, who then directed a small museum in London, Norman Rosenthal, secretary of the Royal Academy from ’77 to 2008, Christopher Joachimides who was in charge of Zeitgeist in Berlin, and Tom Frenz. They invented this extraordinary exhibition "A New Spirit in Painting", which gave way to Neo-expressionism and transavantgardism. They found a client by the name of Charles Saatchi, who bought many of their pieces, which were then convenient. When they rose in value he realized the potential deal and has since been establishing what will be successful. He was the communication boss and he invented whatever artist he wanted. Then Charles Saatchi became what we all know and was copied by others. By the pushers, those who wanted to sell lithographs. Among them was a genius, Larry Gagosian. The world today is composed of pushers and opportunists. Art is elsewhere, as it always has been.
Giovanni Ragusa
But if you have the support of strong systems you can reach the Biennale.
You can reach the sucker.
Giovanni Ragusa
Is this the art we should show the public?
Here the question is very complicated. The most beautiful statement comes from the book Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship by Goethe, when he becomes the manager of this theatre in the province, the dream of his life. He’s a middle-class man born in Treviso – let’s say – who finally becomes the director of the theatre of Legnano. So the inhabitants of Legnano want to see local authors represented. But he’s been dreaming his whole life to put on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. And so at one point he declares: we won’t give them what they want, but what they should have. From this concept you get the Enlightenment movement, where élites are delegated as tastemakers for others. Is it right or wrong? I don’t know, because that gave way to both Enlightenment and totalitarianism, with Hitler. I can only say art is not for everybody. Especially with the current conformation of society. But also in the past. Why? Because it helps form the identity of an élite that is in turn directing society. In any case some artistic styles can be immediately transversal. Such as Baroque, opera, that everyone can relate to. But not Goldberg’s Variations. Art is élitist.
Giovanni Ragusa
And in this historic moment who are the artists that interest you the most?
In Italy they are unknown. Raffaele Bueno to me is the greatest artist outside Italy today, Giovanni Ragusa, Orazio Gateano and Bruno Bordoli. They are like monks of the 7° century d.C, sitting on their towers while beneath them hordes of Visigoths (types à la Damien Hirst) are passing.
Giovanni Ragusa
You’ve stated that design exists when there’s a dream to be transformed into something that will be its ectoplasm. What are the new dreams forming on the horizon?
I was speaking of post-war design, of the gentlemen from Milan’s good society that educated post-Fascist Italy towards having some style. It was also the revolutionary dream of Ettore Sottsass who converted the younger Memphis generation from California to India turning them on to what he was doing in Florence with Superstudio. In the 90s that dream ended. Today a new dream will certainly surface. But we will have to understand where and how. I consider the new dream to be involved in the battle against the idea of GDP. The GDP is killing the world and so everything has to be renegotiated. As Kennedy would say, even automobile accidents contribute to the GDP.
Orazio Gaetano
Apart from the battle with GDP, what are the most interesting directions design is taking?
There are two. The first is tied to a need for more durable materials. The subprime crisis left us with the desire to leave somewhat of an inheritance. No longer disposable chairs. This is a radical mutation because it entails a different production method, different costs and an increasing frugality with regards to consuming.
The second is the invention of a different project, a different application of materials, which will no longer be simple plastics, but materials that require more study.
Then there’s design for those trying to live in conditions of poverty. What kind of home, visual culture and materials will they use? But at this point people will have to imagine a greater dream than the one of quotidian banality.
Raffaele Bueno
Raffaele Bueno
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