The Museum at Capodimonte has a great collection, including a large part of the Farnese heritage of Italian Renaissance paintings and, also, many distinguished Neapolitan works. But nowadays, when most visitors come to museums primarily to see temporary exhibitions, attracting an audience is a real challenge. And this is a special concern in Naples, for that fascinating city, which can be difficult to love, is only just starting to be recognized as a major art tourist’s destination. As recently as 2014, this large institution had only 126,000 visitors. Here, then, the very imaginative conception of Sylvain Bellenger, the relatively recently appointed director, and Andrea Villani, director of the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina, known as Museo MADRE, the Neapolitan Kunsthalle devoted to contemporary art, was to ask ten famous intellectuals—artists, industrialists and professors – associated in some way with Naples, to select works illustrating thematic concerns from the permanent collection. And, also, the curators offer a reward to that visitor who proposes his or her own best personal supplement to this exhibition. The resulting show, Carta Bianca: Capodimonte Imaginaire, is a popular success – for the first time in visits now over more three decades, I actually found crowds in the galleries. And, this is equally if not more important, the exhibition offers a dramatic conceptual challenge to our usual ways of thinking about art history.

In the show Paolo Pejrone, who is a landscape artist, collected paintings showing gardens. Gianfranco D’Amato, who runs a packing company, gathered pictures—Jacopo dè Barbara’s Portrait of Luca Pacioli (1500) was one example—displaying various containers. Laura Bossi Régnier, a historian of biology, presented paintings with medical themes. The French intellectual historian Marc Fumaroli organized a display arguing that Bernardo Cavallino, a painter whom he greatly admires, is as significant as the more renowned Jusepe de Ribera. And the great Neapolitan-born conductor Ricardo Muti chose to display but a single work, Masaccio’s Trinity (1426), accompanied by a large photographic reproduction, a picture which in his judgment encapsulates the values of the entire collection. Too often, Bellenger and Villani suggest, “the traditional narrative of the History of Art,” an historical presentation, “is too often considered as the only key for understanding art.” By opening up discussion of that cliché, Carta Bianca aims to inspire up reflection, offering a real alternative to these interpretive traditions, which poses challenging questions about how to we are to understand the history of art. Walking out of the show into the permanent collection, inevitably one thinks critically about the adequacy of our usual ways of understanding visual art. Is there not something inherently limiting, one asks, in focusing too exclusively on historical thinking about the arts. It happens that Bellenger is in charge not only of the museum, but also of the large surrounding park, which like the hanging of the collection has now been renovated. On a plaque at the entrance he offers a statement from Michael Foucault: “A garden is the smallest particle of the world, and, at the same time, it is the totality of the world.” I believe that this quotation suggests how museum collections, like gardens, also can reveal the power of imagination. Certainly it demonstrates how old master art may be seen in ways that reveal its living significance. And that is a very important goal for museums devoted to traditional painting.

Carta Bianca: Capodimonte Imaginaire at the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples on view December 12, 2017 to June 17, 2018

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Shepard Fairey: #Obey at Palazzo delle Arti Naples (PAN)
December 6, 2014 to February 28, 2015
Via dei Mille, 60, 80121 Napoli, Italy

There is a vital distinction to be made between the kinds of works of art that are made to be shown in galleries and museums and what Joachim Pissarro and I have called “wild art” (in our 2013 book of that title from Phaidon Press), art that is initially presented outside this art world system. There is a great deal of wild art—for example, graffiti, tattoos and most of the art displayed in hotels and restaurants. But since in the contemporary art scene there is actually no significant difference in kind, besides location, between this wild art and art-world art, works of art can move between these two kinds of display sites. This distinction is important, however, because normally the art world—a system that relies upon exclusion to justify its aesthetic values—holds wild art at a distance. Occasionally, however, the distinction breaks down—and that is what has happened in this most instructive exhibition when Shepard Fairey’s graffiti was presented in a Neapolitan kunsthalle. The goal of what he calls his ongoing experiment in phenomenology, Fairey has explained, “is to reawaken a sense of wonder about one’s environment.” Thus his OBEY sticker attempts to stimulate curiosity and “bring people to question […] their relationship with their surroundings.” He wishes to cause them “to consider the details and meanings of (these) surroundings. In the name of fun and observation,” a self-description that makes him sound like a modernist landscape painter or many other art museum artists.

This large-scale exhibition provided the welcome opportunity to trace Fairey’s stylistic development. In 1997 and 1998 he did images of Stalin, Mao, Lenin, with the politically ambiguous “Obey” logo attached, ironical takes on images of familiar leftist heroes. Marylin Warhol (2000) made an explicit allusion to art-world art, a procedure which didn’t really come off, however, as this image superimposing a depiction of Warhol on a Warholesque picture of Marilyn Monroe is weaker than Warhol’s own depictions of Monroe or himself. Fairey was more successful in Malcolm X (2006) and his screen prints, Nixon Money, Mao Money, Lenin Money (2003)—punchier images with a clear political impact, as he was in his Uncle Scam (2007), Rise Above Cop (2007) and, most especially Two Sides of Capitalism: Good and Two Sides of Capitalism: Bad (2007) which complicate his earlier concerns by juxtaposing words and images. He became internationally famous for the advertising image of Barack Obama for the 2008 presidential race, an image of which was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. Thanks to his fame, he was invited to do beautifully decorative all-over red images of Angela Davis, Arab revolutionaries and St. Mark’s Horses for his show in Venice, 2009. The stunning mixed media collages Eye Alert Cream and Eye Alert Red (2010), close ups of faces with a dollar sign in the tear and a skull reflected in the eyeball, represent a new, richly suggestive development of his portraits.

Like any successful art world artist, Fairey has a developed personal style. His posters looked great in this site. Street artists normally seek one-off effects—you see their graffiti, and then stroll on. But when wild art moves into a gallery, it inevitably gets seen differently, in the context of an artist’s development and, also, in relation to that of contemporaries. Although a gifted designer of visually striking two-tone frontal images, Fairey’s development is relatively limited in formal terms, and yet the introduction by stages of more complex subjects makes for a visually rewarding retrospective. He has moved a long distance from his striking point. It was appropriate, surely, that I discovered the exhibition not through publicity in some art magazine or web site, but by seeing his ad in the streets. Open your eyes and you will discover that there’s a lot of wild art out there! Palazzo delle Arti is located in the upscale neighborhood of Chiaja, the one place in graffiti-filled Naples where little street art is found. “#Obey” reveals how art is transformed when wild art become art-world art. And so, now, as you can see from the upscale catalogue, his art is found in many private Italian collections.

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