The hostile élite. The battle for contemporary art in Italy (1948-1975)

Abstract

In 1958 Dorfles defined as “aesthetic absenteeism” the lack of understanding, often paired with ho-stility, of the cultural elites towards contemporary art, a conflict influenced by Lukàcs’s condemna-tion of the avant-garde and by the ideological tightening of the Italian Communist Party in the di-spute between abstraction and figuration, as well as by the heritage of the Classicism and the con-flictual relationship with Modernism before and Postmodernism after, partially seen as an “ameri-canization" of the cultural field. The paper will trace back the history of this never truly pacified cultural war, focussing on the de-cade marked at its beginning by the first great Duchamp’s retrospective in Italy (1964) and at its end by the performance Intellettuale in Bologna (1975), keystone to understand both the relation-ship between Fabio Mauri and Pasolini and the attitudes of the latter - reactionary only at first sight - toward the “new art”.