Exhibitions are held because artists are there. This could easily be a response, albeit directly and somewhat bluntly.
There are producers of artefacts (belonging to a very particular species of artefacts) who need to identify a place (which may be suitable to host them, but not necessarily) where they can display them.
Why on earth do they want to show these particular artifacts?
At best, because they are thought to captivate the imagination of an observer; in the vast majority, to sell.
It is an
"exchange value", commonly a commodity, albeit of a particular type, which, as happens with every commodity, has a value if it allows its producer to obtain a compensation that satisfies him.
But this artifact also has, under certain conditions, historical and cultural value. And who defines this value, which cannot be measured simply in the hours of labor required to transform material components into an artistic artifact?
Where, that is, does the performer's creativity, his instinct or his "gift," that is, his talent combined with his skill, acquire that unique, ineradicable, and inimitable aura that transforms him into a work of art?
Here, we are quite close to the core problem underlying the initial question.
Marcel Duchamp , questioned by Pierre Cabanne about the duration of a work of art, responded in a curious way:
"A work of art lasts roughly as long as an artist's creative life—30, 40 years. Afterward, it either fades away, dies, disappears from view, or enters the history of art."
In the latter case, it undergoes a kind of transmutation; if
"the work of art is created by the one who looks at it," now that gaze is mediated by other historical subjects, critics, curators, who to some extent decree its centrality: a centrality that is attested by the texts and, in the case in which "technical reproducibility" is not a sufficient vehicle, by the display through exhibitions.
As early as the seventeenth century, the Bolognese nobles began to display the masterpieces of their collections under the city's porticoes on the occasion of the decennial anniversaries of the parishes, against the backdrop of richly draped panels; the Romans did the same (living artists came to organize exhibitions in the Pantheon), especially on the annual celebrations of San Salvatore in Lauro, and the Neapolitans did the same on the occasion of particular religious festivals.
The first Salon burst into Paris in 1667 , when for the first time a real exhibition of "modern" works opened its doors, accepted by a jury under the patronage of the King.
The people of spectators were born, bourgeois collectors, the feared family of critics, the hostility between official and "rejected", the interest of travellers.
England values these immense exhibitions even more highly for the part they play in educating the public and forming taste, not to mention their remarkable sales, as the enormous success of the London exhibitions of Reynolds, Hogarth, Gainsborough, Rembrandt, and Italian and Spanish artists testifies.
Exhibitions, from the very beginning, create problems, both because those singular historical ready-mades temporarily deprive a collection of the cultural hinges that attest to the quality of a historically established path, and because moving works of art can be very dangerous.
In 1930, a group of absolute masterpieces of Italian art, en route to London, nearly sank in the Bay of Biscay due to a storm.
In 1936, when
Alfred Barr was preparing to organize one of the first major exhibitions at the recently inaugurated MoMA, "Cubism and Abstract Art", customs seized a series of works from Europe (Arp, Boccioni, Picasso, Delaunay, Mondrian), which for some time remained unattended and without any protection in a warehouse.
We thus enter the twentieth century where , right from the start, the exhibition takes on a different character,
which paradoxically is still a legacy of the previous century.
One of the first scandals to accompany an art exhibition is Gustave Courbet's "Pavillon du Realisme" (1855): a silent protest against judges who rejected the two vast canvases of
The Painter's Studio and Burial at Ornans.
Inside an old shack the author sets up an exhibition, prints a small catalogue, adds forty paintings "for sale" and the dissident exhibition is open.
And it is from here that an art exhibition, as will be seen for decades, also acquires a political value.
In the immediate post-war period, the theme of art exhibitions was the order of the day.
If
Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti is convinced of the need to activate a relationship that allows for the comparison of the most relevant results of international artistic studies, and at the same time also bring this action abroad, influencing an active exchange, and also contributing to the knowledge of Italian culture and art there",
Roberto Longhi is annoyed to say the least:
"The exhibitions" , he wrote in 1949,
"had clearly reached their saturation point; the paintings that were requested (from museums, of course) were almost always the same ones".
But the foreign ministries and embassies put pressure on the education ministries, who immediately gave in, in homage to the motto 'politique d'abord.
Exhibitions and Museums, published in
"Paragone" , adds:
"Italy has become, willingly or unwillingly, the most 'showy' nation in Europe, and perhaps in the world [...]"
After the great upheaval of the war, with empty pockets and the material impossibility of quickly getting the museums back on their feet, it was only natural that the most unfortunate nations, the most deprived of means, would try to obtain some hard currency through some exhibition abroad".
Italy had immediately opened grandiose exhibitions, which had no other meaning than to reaffirm the intact supremacy, at least artistic, of the nation: the Tuscans in 1922, the Ferrarese in 1933, the Rimini people in 1935, and then Correggio, Titian, Giotto, the Romagna.
Catalogue introductions often clearly express the intent to bring attention back to the "old masters," as Francis Haskell says, just as the greatest initiatives of modern Italy, the Biennale and the Quadriennale, were beginning to flourish.
Of course, all this happens if you're dealing with works that "have entered the history of art"; but between the 1950s and 1960s, the so-called "art system" was defined in completely unpredictable terms, and became more complicated with impressive vehemence.
The subjects keep the same names, or almost: artist, critic, gallery owner, collector, museum.
But the functions change, they twist, they integrate.
How then to answer the initial question?
Why is art "displayed"? Why do we organize its exhibition? Let's say there are some rules that justify exhibitions, and they start from a seemingly very limiting assumption: they are held because they are inevitable, because they are necessary—that is, because they produce knowledge, are tools that enable the advancement of research, both historical and contemporary, and cannot be replaced by a magazine article or a book.
The exhibitions are therefore the result of prior research, not improvisation ; they reconstruct the complexity of a historical period or explore the intricacies of contemporary "feelings," highlighting its suggestions and critical issues.
An exhibition's authority is only as great as that of its curators, provided they are able to avoid the influence of the works' owners (be they artists, museums, or collectors) and the organizations that sponsor it.
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Palazzo dei Capitani Exhibition - Selling Paintings[/caption]
Once these conditions are met, then an exposition is welcome and can avoid the risk of falling back into the aphorism that hovers in the
Treatise of Human Knowledge , published by the philosopher and theologian George Berkeley in 1710: "Esse est percipi." This means that extended matter, objects (in our case, art), appear real to us because we perceive them through the senses; but perceptions do not certify the existence of anything; they are the worldly reflection of divine ideas.
The inevitable, necessary exhibitions, those that "shock the world," are those that challenge the radical nominalism of the Irish theologian.
