Cultural and Artistic Paths

Young Artists between Venice and New York

Next year In June, in concurrence with the opening of the Venice Biennale, opens a new exhibition centre François Pinault’s Punta della Dogana. So will be born - so it’s said - the world centre for contemporary art, which will see united in a type of ‘art city’ three prestigious Venetian museum institutions: Palazzo Grassi, the Guggenheim Collection and, precisely, the new ‘museum’ of the Punta della Dogana. Full Story

Current Affairs

The lights and sounds in the skies of New York

New York and its skyscrapers, its architecture which like swords search for height nearly cutting the sky above them. Lights, sounds, life which in this period of the year attract the party lights. Happenings, meetings, encounters. Not just events, but
Occasions that in which only New York of its visitors find themselves confronted with culture, ways of life, different awareness’s.
This is also the promise made by George Feritta, CEO, NYC & Company: “The holidays in New York offer a really unique experience. We invite visitors to enjoy the numerous activities on offer and to embrace and feel the energy that our city transmits in this joyful period”.
It begins on the 19th November with the evocative ceremony of lighting the UNICEF Snowflake. The huge snowflake in inbox steel, a crystal and light prism that will shine like a “beam of hope, peace and compassion for the most vulnerable children in the world” at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, in mid-Manhattan for the Christmas season.
As in preceding years, you can ski during “Under the Stars” at the Time Warner Center from the 11th November until the 2nd January or ice skate at the Rockefeller Center from the 3rd December until 9th January during the Christmas Tree, the event that brings thousands to slide on the ice rink under the gigantic trees illuminated for the holidays.
This year the Big City also offers the new “Wild Winter land”, the newest event at the Bronx Zoo. From the 6th December until the 4th January visitors can take part in, at 11.30 am and 3.30 p.m., activities that involve children in the children’s area of the Children’s Zoo, guided demonstrations the ice for adults, costume parades, music and songs.
From what the city proposes to what instead Italy proposes the Big Apple. Cipriani, the famed name for great Italian cuisine and hospitality present in New York, opens the doors of its Cipriani Club 55 on Wall Street to those who want to relax with a glass of Italian wine in its rooms, play billiards in one of the elegant halls or leisurely read a newspaper or book, both Italian and American. The style of Old Europe sweetly enters into the heart of America.
The New Year is welcomed by Cipriani with parties, dances and the finest cuisine in the elegant Rainbow Room.
Another year draws to a close; it melts like the snow falling from the New York sky. New York, the same city that opens its heart and arms to whoever wants to share with her the arrival of the new one. On an icy slope, with eyes lost in the sky for the lighting of an enormous snow crystal, or in the heat of a famed nightclub, it doesn’t matter on Fifth Avenue or Central Park, what’s really important is to let yourself be rocked by the energy of this timeless city.

Viewpoint

New York capital of fashion (No longer Venice)

When one talks about the capital of fashion thoughts run naturally to Paris, for ever the cradle of elegance but also a way of understanding the industrialization of fashion that has allowed France to monopolize – at least until the middle of the last century – the entire concept of fashion in the world. From the 1950’s to the 1990’s Italy however has begun to move with the ease of impact that the country of the ‘bel sole’ has always had with everything to do with artistic expression. Full Story

Cultural and Artistic Paths

Renaissance Marriages, between opulence and politics

As in all eras, even in the magnificent Italian Renaissance marriages sanctioned alliances, strengthened political agreements and had to show “erga omnes”( rights towards all) in the political power of a particular family. More than during any other historical period, however, the renaissance nobility invested in these occasions’ money and resources to commission precious works of art, which offer today an amazing insight and understanding of the times.
The exhibition “Art and Love in Renaissance Italy”(Arte e Amore nell’ Italia del Rinascimento), on show at the Metropolitan Museum of New York until 16th February, shows around 150 works of art , dated between 1400 and 1500, which were created by major Italian artists to celebrate love and marriage. The exhibition, developed by Andrea Bayer, a curator of the Department of European Pictures, is found in the gallery on the second floor of the museum and includes refined examples of majolica and jewellery, portraits and paintings praising love and fertility, rare and important pieces of renaissance crystal, decorated chests, changing tables, paintings and prints of amorous subjects. It concerns objects offered as gifts to the newlyweds by rich and influential guests, such as Lorenzo The Magnificent, a leading figure in the Florentine Renaissance. “To prepare this exhibition we have drawn principally from the resources of the Metropolitan involving nine different departments and choosing many objects – recounts Andrea Bayer – that were made to celebrate a wedding; we have understood that a large majority of these important marriages were used to strengthen alliances, for dynastic motives, in short they were decided by parents and the families”. A clear example is shown in the frescoes by Botticelli “Nastagio degli Onesti”, a wedding gift given by Lorenzo the Magnificent for the marriage celebrated in 1483, between Giannozzo Pucci and Lucrezia Bini. “Looking carefully at the work you can find – explains the curator of the exhibition – portraits of the families of the bride and groom, just like the coat of arms of the relative families”.
However, works representing pure love, sometimes ambiguously, are also present. The ceramics of the “Belle Donne”, which would be real and true tokens of love, or the “Ritratto di Laura” for which Giorgione was commissioned by “Messer Giacomo”, probably intended as a tribute to his lover. A strong Venetian influence is also evident: for instance two great works by Titian are present in the exhibition: from the Prado Museum in Madrid the work “La Venere e l’organista”, while the Borghese Gallery in Rome have loaned the marvelous painting “Venere che benda Cupido”.
One particular section, named “Profane Love”, and presented by Linda Wolk-Simon, curator of the Department of drawings and prints at the Metropolitan, is concerned in exploring the story of erotic art in the Renaissance, through a collection of rare works of art whose subject is sexuality.
“It is unbelievable how much is spent on these new weddings, habits have become so disgusting”, complained Leonardo Bruni nearly five centuries ago, in a letter sent to Poggio Bracciolini. An observation that remains relevant even now. “ If Leonardo Bruni was alive today he would confirm this criticism, especially in this climate of crisis , in view of ceremonies where too much is spent: but while today only flowers and expensive clothes that will never be worn again remain, at least in those days – concludes Andrea Bayer – it wasn’t all ephemeral”.

Cultural and Artistic Paths

Venice from the pen of Luther Blissett

Luther Blissett is the author of ‘Q’. Or rather, some members of the Bolognese column of  The Luther Blissett Project have been authors of ‘Q’, signing with this multiple name a novel published in 1999 by Einaudi (for the United States, Harvest Books, 2005, 768pag., paperback). A group of writers ’Wu Ming’ (Chinese for ‘without a name’) also answer to the same name and have recently published a travel diary ‘Grand River’, on the traces of Native Americans. Full Story

Current Affairs

A Memorial not to be repeated

A gate, a sign: “Arbeit macht frei”, work makes you free. 27th January 1945, there are 7 thousand survivors of Auschwitz. Now the 27th January is the Holocaust Remembrance day, when the menorah is blown out, eyes lowered in a darkness that seems to shout, the mind lost in memories of death.
“It’s not about a Jewish moment – says Elias Ricchetti, Rabbi for the Jewish community in Venice – but a day founded to remember the insanity of Nazi fascism, to not commit the same horrors”. You open a drawer of nightmares; voices, screams, those who were deprived of the goodness of life. “A message to our conscience – says Riccardo Calimani, Jewish historian – in a dedicated and delicate moment. All told but not all heard; the moment in which every man listens to himself”. Moni Ovadia, actor and musician, underlines: “It’s the occasion for more detailed reflections on an event. Not a celebration, but a reflection, so as not to reduce the Shoah, meant in the more general term and not just referring to the Jewish people, an empty shell”. There is no vendetta, only memories; of voices, hands, smoke. Man’s judgment has already been expressed. Nuremberg was the stage for the trial of the winners against the vanquished. After a task. Grave, difficult; remembering all that had happened so that the madness would not be repeated. “He who has no memory of the past, does not have a future”, quotes the Talmud. “Memory – affirms Ricchetti – is not valued. It is the work of parents and society to reverse the tendency”. “It’s the day – remembers Calimani – for all those who died for a non existent idea: race”. Years of orders in German, shouts, whippings and the fear of seeing gas and not water coming out of the showers. An electrified fence, the quick escape from suffering; but in the hearts energy, a strength that doesn’t feel beatings, humiliations or hunger. The desire to be witness, remember, not allow anyone to crush a will stronger than life. The dawn of 1945 lit up cathedrals of death where human beings walked around like skeletons. Novelli “Lazzaro” came back to life regaining conscience and looking for dignity. The world had discovered a black story, of lies, denials; the beginning of a hidden nightmare that became reality. In 2009 World Holocaust Remembrance Day will be celebrated in New York and will be attended by the Italian state institutions.
In the rooms of the Italian Academy at Columbia University the dead without graves will be remembered with the voices of the living. “Venice and New York – underlines the Rabbi – are opposite and congruent Jewish realities. Venice lives her history, symbolic in it’s isolation but glorious for the consequences in the cultural field. In New York 99% of the synagogues don’t survive twenty years. Jewish life jumps about, from the shops to the banks. There is nothing Jewish that can’t be found in New York the two cities have one aspect in common that represents the Jewish vitality: the continuous search for stimuli and services at a cult level and a cultural level”. Calimani affirms: New York and Venice are twinned in this memory; for the first time unite two cities, non typical in there own countries but at the same time, exactly for this reason, the most cosmopolitan”. “The USA always surprises – echoes Ovadia – even on Remembrance Day. They have recently reawakened their sensibilities, and to do so they used a communication system for which they are masters. It just needed a television series, Holocaust, to relive the tragedy of the Nazi fascist exterminations. But on the other hand American culture owes a lot to the Jewish culture, from Gershwin to Spielberg”. Italy saw the Holocaust pass through Trieste, Rome, and Venice. World capitals of culture and art, theaters of purges during Nazi fascism.
The Jewish people have left the world a lesson, finding the strength to carry with them an inauspicious memory. The vocation to remember: this is what needs to be learned.

Dossier: Cultural Capitals

When history brings you to the top of the world

That Venice is the World Capital of Culture is not an absolute mystery. As witness are centuries of history and a present made of great cultural occasions intrinsic to the Historic City and to the dynamism of public and private subjects. The real news, if ever, is that today we are beginning to move the light also to the territory.

Full Story

Dossier: Cultural Capitals

Venice in the network of artistic communication

Venice in the network of global communication. The value of a form that can transmit contents and works of art. Giandomenico Romanelli optimistically evaluates the idea of communication and interconnections between exhibition spaces, together with the presence and work of the most diverse cultural workers in the field of the culture of art.

With what tools do you interpret the accomplishments of art and the exhibition spaces in the era of globalization and in the face of the melting pot culture in which we live?
“When we work in the area of artistic production, and above all in the exhibition spaces, automatically we take a position that foresees collaborations that come about in quite natural ways.  Full Story

Dossier: Cultural Capitals

New York: dynamics of a creative community

Commissioner Levin, in the past statement you expressed significantly that: “it is as hard to imagine New York City without the arts, as it is to imagine any of the arts without New York City”. How comes that the city of business and of finance became at the same time the preferred place for many artists, and sub-cultures?
“I invoke the words of poet Bob Holman, who says that when people from outside New York think of the City, they think of two streets Full Story

Dossier: Cultural Capitals

Cultural Journeys

Thinking about a journey means also to think about the relationship between the places we travel through and the sensations of the traveler, the passions of the tourist, the cultural interests. This relationship, in its strong originality, can be rendered through three fundamental factors such as space, time, and subject. Space, that which we cross every day, drifting from the geography that we pass through drawing not only a ‘perceptive journey’ for the body, but also in the evocative images of the soul. Full Story