ARCHIVISSIMA 2023 | La mostra delle mostre d’arte nel mondo

The Foundation has joined the Notte degli Archivi of Archivissima 2023 making the text La mostra delle mostre d’arte nel mondo available online, in the “Racconti” section of the Archivissima website.

This text, published without indication of author in the avant-garde magazine «Che fare» (n. 6/7, spring 1970, pp. 269-272), is due to the collaboration between Francesco Leonetti and Arnaldo Pomodoro – founders and editors of «Che fare» – in dialogue with Kynaston McShine, the young art critic indicated as “K” in the text. The story was “rediscovered” and attributed to the two authors during the preparation of the exhibition La negazione della forma. Arnaldo Pomodoro tra minimalismo e controcultura.

The inspiration for the story is the research actually conducted by McShine in order to draw up «a international report on recent activity of young artists», of whom would have given account, in a few months, with the exhibition Information (MoMA, New York, 2 July – 20 September 1970), one of the first and most important exhibition opportunities to bring the phenomenon into focus , then emerging, of conceptual art. Staging an account of travel ironic and playful, Leonetti and Pomodoro offer the reader their position, at times strongly critical, on the recent evolutions of the international artistic panorama. Lamenting the speed with which the "geometric immensity" of the minimalist phenomenon seemed to have been archived, the two authors contest the "productivist spiral" that increasingly afflicts the art world, linking it to the emptiness of experiences that reduce the art of avant-garde – once “language of opposition to society, with a subversive or utopian intent” – to a form of “advertising of the society that uses it”.

At the end of the 2023 edition, the story La mostra delle mostre d’arte nel mondo was included in the collection La polvere del mondo. Il carnet de voyage di Archivissima 2023 .