Because the only Venus by Pistoletto that makes the news is the charred one

Michelangelo Pistoletto became a Mother Teresa ofcontemporary art, a Sandro Pertini from Arte Povera. Talking bad about it is not forbidden: it is impossible. Now, with the burning of his giant Venus of rags in the square, he has turned into a Savonarola or Giordano Bruno of art history. The beatification process is complete. The condemnation of the vandalism goes without saying. God forbid. But in reality the real arsonist, conceptual of course, is Pistoletto same. This Venus with his rags, since the idea came to him back in 1967, he has cooked it in all possible sauces. This time she went up in smoke. The fire of social networks does not forgive but also helps. In the sense that this work, boiled and reboiled, few had noticed or acclaimed, this time. Now thanks, paradoxically, the stake has come alive. Indeed, the burning of the Venus could become an annual event, a propitiatory rite, like the Burning Man that is incinerated every year in the Nevada desert. Even someone, as they did with Burning Man, could even turn it into a good business (Pistoletto, who is an intelligent person, could even think about it). Art that disappears sometimes generates more emotion than what remains. Think of the crowds of people who lined up in 1911 to see the space left empty by the Mona Lisa stolen. There will be no crowds in Town Hall Square a Naples to see the ashes of the sculpture. Not for lack of respect for art or culture but because his work and idea no longer aroused the wonder of the past, abused and recycled by the author himself beyond the limits allowed by the law of genius and creativity. Now it’s just a artist must have new ideas all his life, he can also have only one essential one, you see Lucio Fontana with his cuts. The important thing is that he is aware of it and that it is consistent with the formidable singularity of his idea. The problem of Father Michelangelo of Biella it is instead that every time it tries to make the same soup, successfully served sixty-five years ago and anchored in its time, look like a new and different dish. But works of art are not like tortellini which can be revisited or deconstructed at will. Art carries with it the time and history that have produced the conditions to create it. But for Pistoletto, lucky him, time does not pass: it updates itself. Thus the Venus of Naples signified the beauty that transforms waste. Monument to recycling, without double meanings.

There Venus of Thunberg could be titled. Now that the ad usum social criminal iconoclasm has struck, I wouldn’t be surprised if one emerges Charred Venus, a further but even more precise indictment of global warming. We are Venus and Pistoletto fights with her.