Art, and especially contemporary art, is told, read, interpreted and unpacked in many different ways. The exhibitions have thematic, narrative, historical, documentary and exploratory dimensions, as do the books that talk about art. A remarkable novelty is certainly the essay by Saverio Verini, a book that selects a specific topic that is difficult to tell and portray because it is distant and almost forgotten in adulthood. But fortunately some artists have a different sensibility, such as works by Diego Marcon and Thomas Braida, Luca Bertolo, Valerio Nicolai and Maurizio Cattelan. Artists who, each with their own poetics, have touched the theme of childhooduncover the aspects that go beyond the canons of pedagogy or psychoanalysis and are perhaps even more interesting for that reason.
Saverio Verini – The fairy time. Childhood in Italian Contemporary Art
Castelvecchi, Rome 2023, leak series
Pages 128, €16.00
ISBN 9788832909562
http://www.castelvecchieditore.com/
Relational art, codified by the French art critic in the 1990s Nicolas BourriaudIn addition to being an innovative practice, over time it has had the advantage of bringing contemporary art closer to the general public, thanks to the absence of that aura that made works of art inviolable objects for viewing only. But now this kind of artistic format is becoming a product category. This phenomenon is described in Serena Carbone’s essay. In the book, the author rereads the path of relational art to date and concludes: “where these practices, which are inherently dialectical and move fluidly across boundaries and definitions, in organic metamorphosis in terms of content and issues that impact them, are often instead enclosed within market categories“.
Serena Carbone – Art in the changing realm of possibility. Community Building Practices
Publisher Gli Ori, Pistoia 2023
Pages 112, €16
ISBN 9788873369202
https://www.gliori.it/
Luca Beatrice, the “heterodox fortune teller” of the Italian art world, appears in bookstores with a new book from Marsilio Publishing. A journey through Italian art from the economic boom to the present, told from his perspective and with an approach of anecdotes, curiosities and nonsense, digressions. This is how the lives of great artists, protagonists of Italian art, but also people who contributed to changing the way of telling art, such as Umberto Allemandi, intersectGiancarlo Politi, Francesco Bonami And Roberto D’Agostino.
Luca Beatrice – The life. A provincial history of Italian art
Marsilio, Venice 2023
Page 320, €19.00
ISBN 9788829719525
https://www.marsilioeditori.it/
A photo for every day of the year: That’s it TO Book of Days, the new photography book by Patti Smith, published for Bompiani. The volume brings together old Polaroids and photos taken with a smartphone on a journey that leads through the artist’s everyday life, but also shows unpublished moments: from photos of his children to cups of coffee, his cat and the story of a life on the way consisting of small clubs and train stations. An experience told as a collection of frames and episodes that reveal more intimate and unpublished aspects of an artist who made music history. Page by page, a personal aesthetic emerges that can be traced in every recording: an authorship that refines and makes the recordings as a whole A Book of Days a true art book.
Patti Smith – A Book of Days
Bompiani, Milan 2023
Pages 400, €25.00
ISBN 9788830109995
https://www.bompiani.it/
Over four million: That is the number of mass layoffs from the world of work that have been recorded since 2019. A phenomenon that emerged during and after the pandemic and was a time of deep reflection for many workers: many began to question whether this is the narrative that has been instilled in us for years, according to which work is the very definition of oneself, of oneself one’s own horizon, one’s own existence, was actually true and correct. Apparently many concluded that this was not the case and Francesca Coin, in the essay published by Einaudi, He explains it excellently: “The great resignations can be seen as an anthropological laboratory that arises in a kind of existential crisis: the escape attempts are often based on the urgency to change the world of work, its organizational methods and its goals.”“.
Francesca Coin – The big resignation
Einaudi, Turin 2023
Pages 288, €17.50
ISBN 9788806257446
https://www.einaudi.it/
