We can be moved by it, irritated by it: ultimately, the market swallows everything, even what a priori escapes it. Demonstration with arte povera, this “poor” and revolutionary Art forged in Italy between 1969 and 1972, which the Bourse de Commerce of billionaire François Pinault celebrates in Paris until January 20, 2025. Conceptualized by the art critic Germano Celant (1940-2020), this movement envisaged far from the rules of money denounced American hegemony, opposing an economy of means to the drift commercial and flashy pop art. “The important thing was to corrode, engrave, break. Attempting to break down the imposed cultural regime”insisted Germano Celant in the Italian review Flash Art. In this way, this transalpine avant-garde was part of the aesthetic and ethical concerns of American minimal art, with a good dose of poetry and spirituality.
United under this label, thirteen artists have experimented with the field of installation, with simple forms and poor, rustic materials whose symbolic and spiritual force they reactivate: straw at Mario Merz, tree trunks and branches at Giuseppe Penone, raw wool at Jannis Kounellis, frost at Pier Paolo Calzolari… These political artists did not take a vow of poverty. Michele Casamonti, founder of the Paris branch of the Tornabuoni Art gallery, who also devotes an exhibition to this movement, would like to point out, “arte povera immediately had collectors, gallery owners and therefore a market”. A niche and elite market in its beginnings, which expanded slowly but surely at the start of the 2000s.
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Mariolina Bassetti, head of Christie’s in Italy, dates the first slump in prices to 2014. François Pinault’s team then put the collection of Nerio and Marina Fossati up for sale under the code name “Eyes Wide Open”. This established the first records for many arte povera artists. Other collectors have since joined the dance, like the Americans Cindy and Howard Rachofsky, major influencers based in Dallas, or the founder of the Barnes & Noble bookstore chain, Leonard Riggio, who recently died. Magazzino, a private museum dedicated to arte povera, was opened in 2017 in Cold Spring, New York.
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The intrinsic fragility of the pieces, however, has discouraged some buyers. “Collectors must accept that a work of arte povera will never be preserved like a Picasso paintingwarns Michele Casamonti. We must restore the engines of Calzolari’s works, change the tobacco leaves of Kounellis’s pieces. »
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