Page 45 - Studio International - April 1972

Italian Installation shot at Salone Annunciata, February
I Rudolfo Aricò
commentary: 1972 showing First House 1970-72, acrylic on shaped
canvas in four pieces
36o x 27o cm
art and its market Photo: Mario Carrieri, Milan
2 Germano Olivotto
Toni del Renzio Research 10 17 1971
Substitution of a tree in Plexiglas and neon

Milan, so they say, is the capital of Italy's
industrial Triangle, a region not indicated on
any map, unrecognized by government
department or administrative unit. Yet it is a
state within the state, a power scarcely
subordinate to the government in Rome which is
farther away than New York or São Paulo. It is
as old as the Italian State itself, born of the only
contributions the wretched House of Savoy ever
made to Italian life and society: a paternalistic-
exploitative care for the rest of the peninsula;
narrow self-interest, at times self-defeating in its
myopia and intensity; the consideration that
money, and its acquisition by any means
whatsoever, constitutes a virtue. In Milan they
make money if they make nothing else. For
centuries the city has traded in goods that never
passed through its gates or along its canals, that
weren't even produced in the Triangle—the
flatlands bounded by the Alps to the north, the
Apennines and the Maritime Alps to the south-
west—but reaching Genoa, and cutting up north-
eastwards to Venice's mainland industrial
appendage, Mestre. It is one of the richest zones
in Europe, and includes the wealthiest cities of
Italy: Turin, Alessandria, Novara, Varese,
Como, Bergamo, Brescia, Verona, Vicenza,
Modena, Piacenza, Voghera, besides those
already mentioned, with Milan unfairly and
unsquarely in the moneyed middle.
This is where Italy's middle class has
emerged, late and parvenu, well-heeled and
pettily powerful, expansive and narrow-
minded, eating imported second-rate French
cheeses rather than the native product, too close
for their peace of mind to their peasant origins—
some are not even second-generation urbanites—
cosmopolitan provincials, often the results of
internal immigration and of the limited
arriviste social mobility growth demands,
extravagant and pinch-penny, knowing but not
knowledgeable, fanatics for the modern and
fearful of the new, philistine and culture-
fearing.
This is the exemplary market for art as
conspicuous consumption and as investment,
prestige-hungry and status-jealous. Of Italy's
five hundred odd galleries, over a third are
crowded into Milan, while close on another third
lie in clusters in the cities and towns of the
Triangle.
Art is not only sold but seen to be bought,
and what is sold in Milan today is bought,
say, in Rome tomorrow. In Milan they
know how to sell, and as art has become