Edoardo Di Mauro
VOCAZIONE E PROGETTO

Description

With “Vocazione e progetto. Storia e attualità della critica d’arte” the art critic, teacher and cultural promoter Edoardo Di Mauro, in a phase where the role and function of this ancient discipline have clearly entered into crisis, especially in terms of a real incidence in the choices of the art system, claims the need for an active presence again. To testify to this intellectual urgency, Di Mauro makes an extensive excursus on the genesis and evolution of art criticism, from antiquity to the second half of the twentieth century, to then address the debate of the most recent current affairs, reconciling taste and preferences personal with the objectivity of historical reconstruction.
azione e progetto” wants to be, first of all, an educational and informative contribution that, starting from my personal path, leads to a broader and more general reflection on the role and function of art criticism in contemporary society. While on the one hand these considerations cannot be separated from subjective experience since otherwise they would be insincere, on the other hand, any model of writing cannot go beyond the reference to memory. However, it is equally true, in my opinion, that the experience of each one, in addition to depending on the conditions at the basis of our existence, and not chosen by us, such as the family inheritance with the consequent network of relationships, so important in Italy, the place and, above all, the historical time, do not evade being exemplary “part for the whole”, they do not diminish the importance of the individual “speech acts”, which move and enliven the overall edifice of the “language”, adapting it to the changing times, and making it a construction in which past and present overlap, contributing to the emergence of future hypotheses, in turn destined to turn into moments of new present in restless and constant movement.

Image cover: Gec, “Bomba di merda (d’artista), Omaggio a Piero Manzoni”, 2012