Everything Is Beautiful When You Look At It With Love
On Maurizio Cattelan’s SINGLE POST INSTAGRAM
Essay by Perry Shimon
Maurizio Cattelan’s Instagram consisted of one post at a time. It paired a bold, memetic image, seemingly gleaned from the authorless subconscious of the internet, with a witty and often unexpectedly insightful all-caps aphorism.
If I had to characterize the mood of these posts; it would be an irreverent, libertarian, stoned, punk rock ethos that’s as surprisingly philosophical as it is extremely funny. Cattelan seems well suited for the loose velocities of internet meme culture and, retrospectively, much of his conceptual work operates in a similar register. His gift as an artist appears to share similar qualities to that which determines success in both the metaverse and the aphoristic mode; a striking distillation of complexity.
It is not a provocative claim to say that art often mirrors the hegemonic ideas of its time. This can play out as an affirmation or contestation of power relations, and sometimes both simultaneously. To take an example from recent art history, there is a tendency to understand the Pictures Generation as contesting notions of authorship and ownership, intervening in or challenging conventions of visual circulation and canon formation. Read historically though, this collection of work from the likes of Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, and so on, articulates many of the trends of neoliberal and platform capitalism: deregulation, appropriation, arbitrage, as well as the production of value through recombination, memesis, and transmission.
McKenzie Wark offers us the concept of the vectoralist class to describe this kind of value extraction through transmission, recombination, and analysis, and Jodi Dean suggests it’s simply an updated version of Feudalism for the digital age. Sianne Ngai develops an analysis of this cultural production in their Theory of the Gimmick, situating the valuation of this type of conceptual art in an era of financial capitalism, offering that this gimmickry both under-performs and over-performs in its bid for value and attention. What this conceptualization might imply seems to be a general crisis of value, mores, and ethics characterizing our anomic era of anthropogenic mass extinction. Cattelan offers us a humorous sublimation of these anxieties, for truncated attention spans and art markets. It is a curious—if not exactly new—imperative that art should have an idealistic and socially-restorative function. This becomes an untenable position as the art industry swells into the world's largest unregulated market speculated in by so many financially motivated and ethically questionable actors. The art industry as such becomes the culmination of individuals and ad hoc alliances produced in service of the production and manipulation of markets. Today, this happens with a dizzyingly complex set of social practices and technological practices, one might even say relational aesthetics.
What I found pleasurable about Maurizio’s Instagram practice was its openness, its loosened sense of subjectivity, and its dialogic disposition. However, when skimming the comments sections in the final goodbye/fuck you post, one can’t help wondering if the popular dialogue is not overrated. Its fleetingness made each post feel like a special gift, while also perhaps capitulating to the art market's injunction of scarcity.
Richard Prince, after a tedious and costly, many-years-long litigation battle, recently settled for $650,000 regarding his use of Instagram screenshots. After commenting profusely on other artist's IG posts he would screen capture the preexisting image and authored commentary, then sell the resulting print in the art market. Prince’s practice, a paragon of The Pictures Generation, offers these provocations-as-rarefied-art-objects in a gesture that perhaps, more than anything else, valorizes the capaciousness of financial markets. His practice seems to rehearse in miniature the legal restructuring of intellectual property rights through the circulatory mechanisms of social media and visual culture. Art in the age of attention economies could perhaps be viewed as the ideological staging grounds for the legitimation of competing theories of value, in addition to establishing infrastructural projects and legal precedents.
The project of Web3, and Silicon Valley more generally, is primarily an infrastructural one, allowing for the financialization and transaction of all life; bonded in blockchains. Art, as the most plastic and promiscuous of commodity forms, can be adapted to virtually any kind of object, relation, concept, intellectual property, and recombination thereof, making art a perfect handmaiden to the emerging digitally-enabled frontiers of potential commoditization.
This, of course, is counter to what makes the internet, and life more generally, beautiful, enjoyable, useful, social, and—increasingly–existentially possible. The commons of the internet, as exemplified by collective endeavors of shared knowledge like Wikipedia, and viewed in stark contrast to platform monopoly capitalism, create a very different kind of internet. One of generosity, abundance, helpfulness, and relative freedom from abuse of power. What makes Cattelan’s work more than just hilarious is the promise of conviviality and common exchange without the burden of artistic ownership. The crux of the issue remains that the dictates of financial doctrine demand a more-than-human sociality, which efficaciously distracts us from the axiomatic shift needed to literally save life on Earth.
Interview by Oliver Kupper
Maurizio Cattelan is the ultimate artist as prankster, poet, and philosopher. He is brilliantly mischievous in his exploration of the capitalistic machinations and power imbalances of the art world. Cattelan has organized imaginary biennials (it was just a party for his friends on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts), crash-landed a meteor on the Pope, held a gallery exhibition with no physical artwork; only a sign that read “Back Soon,” and when Peter Brant commissioned him to make a portrait of his wife, the supermodel Stephanie Seymour, he created a nude sculptural bust that was nicknamed “Trophy Wife.”
For his 2011 retrospective at The Guggenheim, Cattelan hung his life’s work by rope from the museum’s oculus; a startling vision that forced visitors to view his work with a sense of awe and acrophobia. Afterward, he famously retired. But his return to global notoriety came in 2019 when he duct-taped a banana to the wall of his gallery’s booth at Art Basel Miami—a Duchampian ready-made that became a viral sensation. For the 2024 Venice Biennale, Cattelan has been selected by The Vatican to exhibit at the Holy See Pavilion, which will be held at the Giudecca Women’s Prison.
OLIVER KUPPER I want to start with the theme of this issue, which is levity—the literal definition is lightness, and irreverence, especially when confronting serious subject matter—do you think your work fits this definition and what is your own personal interpretation of levity?
MAURIZIO CATTELAN Levity is what comes after tragedy. I looked for levity with the Guggenheim show, when I sort of broke up—and even broke down, maybe!—with the art world. With All, I was trying to get to some levity: in that void, I suspended all my neuroses and all my memories together. The solution I found was to retire after that. An extreme gesture for sure, but necessary and urgent for my well-being. At that time, I did not think too much about when and if I would have ever been back at work, and that was a moment of levity, indeed.
KUPPER Eventually, you went back to work—what did that feel like? Did you feel a sense of jubilation or duty?
CATTELAN I felt a sense of inescapability. I had no other option than to return to work.
KUPPER The world is in a bit of a shitstorm right now. What do you think is the power of levity, irreverence, and lightness in a time like this?
CATTELAN I believe that the path to levity is acceptance. Acceptance of our human limits, of the mistakes one might have made, of every bit of bad news that gets to us. One can learn from everything that happens around them. It does not mean that you must do nothing about it, but acceptance is the only way to surf the shitstorm hoping not to fall from the surfboard. Then, you can start drafting a plan of action for change.
KUPPER About naming Comedian, you said in an interview that “a comedian is doomed to make people laugh—an actor has the option of making people cry”—do you feel doomed to make people laugh and have you ever made anyone cry?
CATTELAN Outside the art world, yes, sure, I made more than one person cry, and people also made me cry. In the art world, I’m not sure my works have that power. I've had epiphanies, and works by other artists that have destabilized me. They have the power to make you reconsider everything, or make you decide something you never imagined. Masterpieces can be a trigger for transformation.
KUPPER Even though the sculpture was called Comedian, it clearly played with the value systems of the unregulated art market and the inflationary tactics of boosting an artist's worth—were you hoping that Comedian would open a wider dialogue in the realm?
CATTELAN With Comedian I was trying to understand something about myself and the world I live in, that’s where all my works were born. I don’t feel like I have a specific audience, my arena is the world, and I think every artist wishes to be as ecumenical as possible. It can also be seen as a comment on the dangerous aspects of walking through an art fair, focusing on the art on the walls without looking at where you put your feet. There could be a new version of it: you can place a banana peel on the floor in a fair aisle, and title it Clown.
KUPPER Did you expect the piece to have such a powerful impact? Did you expect that people would buy it?
CATTELAN When Comedian went viral it was totally unexpected in its proportions and enthusiasm, both by the media and the market. It was also broadcast on Good Morning America. I was shocked. My mother would have been proud.
KUPPER Comedy still seems to have the power to shock, especially when it comes to religious imagery. What attracted you to the provocative power of religious symbology?
CATTELAN The fact is that religion is undeniably part of me. I grew up in a very Catholic context. Everyone brings their own cross—that's what makes us unique. I’ve always thought that in a parallel world, I would have ended up in a seminary, and eventually, I would have become a good priest. I grew up immersed in the Catholic sauce, and you can’t get rid of it, no matter how much you wash your hands. Also, Catholic symbology is some of the most influential and powerful imagery I know: not even the most followed influencer can beat thousands of years of influence on our minds and souls. That’s why I’m pretty excited to participate in the Vatican Pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year.
KUPPER Can you divulge what you will be showing? I can’t help but think about your famous and controversial 1999 sculpture, La Nona ora, which depicted the pope being struck down by a meteor. Where did the idea for that piece come from and was there a moralistic message behind it?
CATTELAN In 1999, I participated in the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale with a performative work in which a fakir was buried in the ground for two hours at a time with only his hands visible above the dirt in a position of prayer. It was titled Mother. Twenty-five years later, I will bring his counterpart, Father, to the facade of the chapel outside the prison. Father is a mural-size, black-and-white image of the soles of a man's feet. It may recall Renaissance iconography such as that of Mantegna's dead Christ, or the crucifixion painted by Caravaggio. Neither in this nor in La Nona ora is there any moralistic intention: I believe they both work as a memento mori.
KUPPER Your single post Instagram page was a sensational exploration of the memetic powers of social media. Where did the idea first originate?
CATTELAN It has been inevitable to be attracted to it since I've always been obsessed with images, but the usual way didn’t work for me. The idea of looking back at previous posts and reviewing what I had posted seemed anachronistic, selfish, and useless. I've followed my rules: posting a single photo that erases each time the previous. It’s no different than doing an exhibition and leaving the empty gallery with the sign “Back Soon.”
KUPPER What was the process of determining the captions?
CATTELAN It was like looking for a title for a work, but with some more levity, because it wouldn’t have lasted more than a day.
KUPPER Your final post had a wonderful quote by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.” Why did you end the single post Instagram project?
CATTELAN It started as an experiment and it ended up like a real job. By the end, I would wake up every day obsessed with the task of posting something: it was the closest thing I’ve done to being an employee in my life. As soon as I realized it, I escaped the cage I built by posting one last time.
KUPPER You once constructed a replica of the Hollywood sign in Palermo near the municipal dump. I’m curious how you feel about fame and the star system of Los Angeles?
CATTELAN We dream and we live for them! How would we entertain ourselves without them? They are our deities. It would be like being in that period when humanity did not yet discover how to make a fire. What would you do every night? Can you imagine how boring? Also, it would be sad … we would read more books.
KUPPER How can an artist best respond to their times without appearing trite, or is it even the artist’s responsibility to respond to the times they are living in?
CATTELAN A work of art is never just the artist’s individual experience, but rather, the thing that it is in the world. It is a moral, social, and practical identity, a being that is recognized by, and relates to others. It is not merely a physical object, but a social one too. And the more it has meaning for those other than the artist, the more it is relevant. To me, art should be incendiary; it should never satisfy expectations. In the latter case, it is a style exercise and a waste of time, both for the artist and the audience. Art must change your life, you should not remain the same in front of it. On the other hand, I believe that art is also not about providing commentary on the news.
KUPPER For you, it seems like failure is an option, what is it about failure that intrigues you?
CATTELAN Failure is the best occasion we have as humans to learn something, and I believe that by learning something you become a better person. So, you fail to improve yourself. I’ve always agreed with the one who said that failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor. It does not taste good alone but is the only factor that makes you aware that the bite you’re chewing is excellent.
KUPPER Do you think levity and optimism could allow us to break through our current atmosphere of doom to look at a brighter future? Why are we so obsessed with the end of things?
CATTELAN Because we cannot avoid death.