Le Interviste di ProfessioneArte.it

Interview with  Adriana Polveroni Art Writer, Curator and Professor of Contemporary Art

Five questions to know in advance the great art professionals, the daily challenges to face, the choices that have determined their path in the art system and in the art market, the digital changes and the advice for those who want to start the same career in collaboration with ProfessioneARTE.it.

Photo Credits: ArtVerona

The desire to totally immerse yourself in the world of art, understand its dynamics and be part of it, first by telling it and then by choosing to play an active role.

This is the decision of Adriana Polveroni, essayist, journalist and independent curator, a key figure on the national art scene, engaged for years in the investigation of the evolution of the art market and collecting through essays such as “The pleasure of art” or the direction of art fairs such as ArtVerona.

In this interview, Polveroni knowingly states: “Journalism is a profession destined to disappear with the advent of social media”. What solution to make up for the inexorable loss to the world of art? He tells it in this interview waiting to be discovered.

Adriana Polveroni is an independent essayist, journalist and curator.

She is the author of many texts in collective volumes and of three books: on contemporary art museums, the market crisis and collecting.

From 2017 to 2019 she was the artistic director of the modern and contemporary art fair ArtVerona. From 2012 to 2017 he directed Exibart.

He is currently scientific supervisor of the modern and contemporary art fair Roma Arte in Nuvola scheduled for 2021.

He teaches at the Brera Academy, at the Naba and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Frosinone, Museology and the History of Collecting.

1.How did your path into the art world statedf?

In a somewhat casual way.

I started as a journalist and collaborated with the weekly L’Espresso, the most important Italian periodical at the time, then I also worked with other newspapers of the group: Repubblica and D di Repubblica.

And I started working in the Society section, thus often dealing with photography. From there, the step to art was relatively short. Of mine I put a great passion for this world and the desire to understand it.

The interest in deepening dynamics and tensions led me to leave journalism and enter the world of art directly, covering other roles.

2.How would you describe your profession today?

I define myself as an art writer, a person who writes about art, an essential practice for me to understand art itself, even before being a curator or teacher of subjects that have to do with contemporary art.

Unfortunately in Italian there is no exhaustive translation of this term

3. How has your profession changed over time?

In the way I tried to tell before.

A broadening of the theoretical horizon and the arising of questions concerning art in its practice but also in its essence made me feel the inadequacy of journalism. With this, I do not deny that experience at all, which I consider to be decidedly formative, although very hard, and which allowed me to take over the direction of Exibart in a moment of disgrace for this publication.

Even if in the direction I have not always followed typically journalistic criteria.

4. Che impatto sta avendo il digitale nel suo settore?

I have long thought that, unfortunately, journalism is a profession destined to disappear.

Marked, more than by digital, by the advent of social media. If we consider the fallout of digital from the point of view of communication in general, and therefore also that of the market that I have dealt with in recent years, I think it is an indispensable resource in times of pandemic, but, at the same time, penalizing.

In general, digital technology has a double and paradoxical effect: it exponentially expands the possibility of communication while allowing everyone to move in their own world, physically isolated from the others.

5. Cosa consiglierebbe a un giovane che vuole intraprendere la sua professione?

Which one, at this point? As a journalist, as an Academy teacher, as I am today, as a fair director, as I have been in recent years or, in fact, as an art writer?

The only advice I can give is what I repeat every year, at the beginning of the course, to my students: be curious, but above all critical, in the sense of having a critical and original thought, maybe wrong at the beginning, but that is your.

It is a harsh world, that of art, and apart from family or other protections, we only go on if we have something original to say and do