A leading contemporary art curator, Massimiliano Gioni first served as US Editor of Flash Art International. He co-curated the Berlin Biennial in 2006, alongside with Maurizio Cattelan and Ali Subotnick. He currently serves as Associate Director and
A leading contemporary art curator, Massimiliano Gioni first served as US Editor of Flash Art International. He co-curated the Berlin Biennial in 2006, alongside with Maurizio Cattelan and Ali Subotnick. He currently serves as Associate Director and Director of Exhibitions at the New Museum in New York, and Artistic Director of the Nicola Trussardi Foundation in Milan.
1. How would you connect fashion to elegance?
Elegance is the ability to push the rules of fashion in a respectable way, in an athletic way – which, ultimately, is the opposite of art. Art is about violating the rule in a way that is destructive and requests of you to reconfigure your vision of the world and of art itself. Elegance is within the norm of fashion the ability to push that norm almost to the point of breaking, but not yet. Ultimately, to me fashion and elegance are both slightly conservative concepts.
2. What is the role of history and art history in your conception of fashion?
I work in fashion, being the director of the Fondazione Trussardi, which is a contemporary art institution supported by a fashion brand. And what’s funny is that I was raised to believe that fashion and art work according to two completely different systems, the one of radical renovation, and the other one of radical innovation within a set of rules. Now I realise that you can say the same about art, particularly today. But art was supposed to be the opposite of fashion. Then something happened in the 90s, that was extremely fascinating, and extremely proactive for art: the capital of fashion came to art. First art learned from fashion, and ultimately fashion learnt that it could use art to gain its recognition and a stamp of approval. In the course of my life, I’ve seen art and fashion come together to build a very powerful proposition. The speed has become the same. But now that they are together, it has become even more necessary to distinguish the two languages. Maybe romantically, I am in favour of fashion supporting art but with the understanding that art is a different form of creation. Ultimately, art is about frustration, perhaps about the pleasure you get from frustration, whereas fashion is about pleasure, satisfying a need.
3. Would you describe fashion as a language and a discourse, as Barthes did it?
The beauty of Roland Barthes was that he described everything as a discourse… And yes, of course both art and fashion are languages, you could say, but I think today we are at a point at which it’s probably more important to remind ourselves that fashion is a business.
4. The word "intellectual" was coined in a time of great political distress. Does fashion have a political role? And in which way?
It depends on how you define "fashion". If you mean "the fashion industry", the system of designers, producers, and so on, it has an incredible political power. It’s one of the strongest industries in some parts of the world. If you think of fashion as a form of clothing, it has a different meaning. I think that now the word fashion has more to do with the designers, than with a mode of expression of class. Maybe we forget the power of fashion to express dissent. In the 60s, fashion could also be connected with a sense of counterculture. Now it feels that it’s no longer the case because it’s such a big industry.
5. How would you relate the concept of fashion to the one of style?
You can say that a person has style, without following fashion. Someone said that taste was better left to ice cream makers than to artists. Maybe it’s the same with style.
6. What does fashion have to do with intellectuality ?
It’s a field on which great intellectuals have exercised themselves: during the 20th century you can’t think of any great writer who hasn’t thought about fashion. I think that what needs to be addressed now – and I’m not saying it in a marxist manner – is fashion as an economic and financial system, and its impact on our contemporary culture. It is probably the strongest financial engine of our visual culture today. As much as I appreciate the resources and the freedom it offers, I can see it is also as a huge dilemma that also affects the arts. If you think that, in the Western world, the vast majority of our semiosphere is connected to images produced for fashion, it means that the role of the artist as a producer of our visual culture has been totally pushed away and marginalized. That’s a field on which intellectuals should exercise their thoughts. It means that our visual culture – and as a consequence our everyday life – is dependent on the fashion industry.
7. You are director of the Trussardi Foundation and associate director of the New Museum. How do the fashion world and the artworld interact today?
Fashion has probably been the biggest revolution in the art world in the last 20 years. The greatest patrons in the arts are from the fashion world. And fashion has made art much more popular, more visible in public culture, maybe too visible. Perhaps it has taken away a bit of the friction I still believe contemporary art is about. Art still has to bite the hand that feeds it. The Fondazione Trussardi has accepted to work on projects that could have reflected very negatively on the fashion business, such as Maurizio Cattelan’s piece with the hanging children... The problem is when art becomes the propaganda of fashion.
8. The New Museum is known for its edgy insight on artists' work. What is the impact of "fashionable" and "edgy" on contemporary art?
The fashion industry and the fashion world support edginess. But they do so with the understanding they shouldn’t bother the public too much. Artists work on creating the non-understandable. They shouldn’t be assimilated. As much as we identify today’s artists with money and the market, one of the few fields in which contemplating an object doesn’t come with a price inscribed on it, is art. In the system of fashion, as elaborate as it may be now, we are ultimately required to buy in a lifestyle.
Organised around a regular pattern: in this column each interviewee picks the picture that illustrates their interview, answers six questions that are the same for all contributors and then two more that are designed specifically for them. In two weeks Donatien will be interviewing the editor, photographer and art director Fabien Baron.
