Andrea Bellini has curated major exhibitions around the world, directed international art fairs and museums, and collaborated with leading artists of recent decades, actively participating in the development of what we call contemporary art. After such a career, one might expect an authoritative volume on the History of Contemporary Art, focusing on the works and events he has contributed to. However, the History of Art is primarily the intertwining of the stories of the men and women who were inspired by, created, commissioned, curated, analyzed, and preserved these works. Bellini doesn’t narrate an epic heroism suffused with a mystical aura, but rather the process of art in its everyday making, with its humanity as common as it is exceptional. It’s a history composed of many stories, populated by kleptomaniac critics, uninspired curators, and financial speculators who give little thought to the art; demodé gallerists desperately searching for a new wave to ride, accidental and positional publishers, eerie museums, and ambitious wheeler-dealers. A gallery of brand-new monsters that could only be told by someone who has been intimately and closely connected to that world for a long time. Andrea Bellini, with the grace of a flâneur and a rare literary talent, manages to depict a corrupted and deceitful human landscape in which, somehow, poetry still resides.

Speakers: Andrea Bellini (author of the book, director of the Centre d’Art Contemporain and the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement in Geneva), Andrea Cortellessa (literary critic), Gianluigi Ricuperati (writer)

Language: Italian