1.
entry
May 2003
installation
art; Anish
Kapoor
The city of Naples-in its
never-ending quest to bring art to the masses and
especially to the masses who ride the subway to
work-is not just going to spruce up the
soon-to-be-finished university station at Monte
Sant'Angelo with a few paintings or statues or even
bronzed old jalopies disguised as installation art.
They have hired British/Indian artist Anish Kapoor to
turn the entire station, itself, into a work of art.
The station will be among the deepest in Italy (about
40 meters) and-well, the area is in the Phlegrean
Fields, not far from the mythological descent into
Hades- so, says Kapoor: "We want to create the
impression of a Dantean descent into the underworld."
No one seems to know exactly what that means, and few
are in a hurry to find out. It's hell getting to work,
anyway.
Neapolitans are most familiar with Kapoor from his
gigantic site sculpture, Taratantara, originally
created for the new Gateshead's Baltic Centre for
Contemporary Arts in England in 1999, but then set up
in Piazza Plebiscito (photo) in Naples in December of
2000 as that year's contribution to the annual
exposition of installation art of one sort or another.
The title is meant to be echoic of the sound made by a
trumpet fanfare, as in Roman poet Quintus Ennius'
line, "At tuba terribili sonitu taratantara dixit" -
("But the trumpet sounded with its terrible
taratantara", the onomatopoeia usually left
untranslated). Indeed, the sculpture suggests two
funnel-like trumpet bells joined and flaring out to
both ends, something like those strange geometric
figures that scientists use to describe what sort of
transdimensional hyperspace thing (a technical term)
we shall have to traverse if we ever hope to reach the
stars. Taratantara was made of a shiny red membrane,
glittered in the sun, was about 50 meters long, 20
high and was anchored in Piazza Plebiscito by steel
columns at each end. While it was up, the columns were
scaled by demonstrators. They weren't out to damage
the sculpture-and didn't-but the offices of the Naples
Prefecture bounds the north side of the square and
that's always a good place to have a demonstration.
I am reminded of a clipping I read once in the paper:
An English art student's work was thrown out, literally,
after an official at a Birmingham art center mistook it
for trash from the opening day party. Ceri Davie's
"Piece de Resistance" involved red jellies displayed on
plates and was intended as a metaphor of decay. 'Months
of hard work had just gone to waste,' the artist said.
"I was quite horrified. Very few of us realize the tough
row that artists have to hoe in dealing with Philistines
such as that art center official. This is probably
because practical hoes weren't even invented until the
Middle Ages. As far as we know, the Philistines just got
down on all fours and grubbed their rows into shape with
their hands.
Many years before the Decadent Red Jelly affair
referred to above, one of the artist's earlier works,
Empty Paper Picnic Plate-which consisted of an empty
paper picnic plate-was not at all well received by
critics, who found the title too hard to say five
times real fast and who also mistook "empty paper" as
a metaphor of life instead of a Minimalist description
of paper picnics, the plate itself being just a
secondary, but sardonic, applique -which is just as
well, since it too was given the old heave-ho.
Fortunately (maybe), it was saved, since the art
center official who tossed it, threw it into what he
thought was a trash bin, but which, in fact, was also
past of the art show.
And then there was the artist's Hamburger, those
little pointillist nibbles of semi-conceptualist
cholesterol-laden ground Boeuf, a yummy but still
youthful version of her later, futuristic,
Quarter-Pounder With Cheese, in which patrons of the
art show were required to flip burgers in the kitchen,
then ask themselves in the drive-through microphone if
they "would like fries with that?" and then-ah, the
stochastic power of it all!-eat or not eat the work of
art! How was the artist to know that they had
scheduled the exhibit in the same hall as a dog show?
It was to her credit as a resourceful master of
Performance Art that she retitled the whole thing,
Gone to the Dogs, A Metaphor. (Or Maybe It's a
Simile).
Davies is not the only artist who has had this
trouble. Fortunately, I am in the possession of a
section of the diary of Michelangelo (the National
Library knows nothing about this):
January 8, 1504. Dear diary. I'm ruined. After years
of work in chipping away the pieces, I have finally
figured out where beauty is, and it's not in chubby
women with smiling faces. I busted my hump on this
one, too! (Alas, even in a society where males with
humps are considered good omens, there is not much use
for a sculptor with a busted one, I'm afraid.)
I spent three years on this! A veritable mountain of
chips, shards, bits, detritus, little stone chunks
lying where they fell, all at different odd angles,
each one with a special metaphor to it,
deconstructing, as it were, the sordid and complex
confusion of our times. And in stone!-in Carrara
marble as eternal as the plots, counter-plots and
intrigues that surround us. I was going to call it
something like Plots, Counter-Plots and Intrigues.
(Ok, I hadn't given it that much thought, yet.) I
figured it was about time someone put it all into
permanent artistic form. Why paint anymore?! The
colors will just fade and then someone will come along
and invent cartoonists and hire one of them to touch
up my Sistine Chapel with paint-by-the-numbers
Day-Glo!
So I finish it and leave it outside. Where else am I
going to keep it, in my living room? This morning it's
gone. Those morons took the waste rock and put it on
display! 'It looks just like a boy with a slingshot.
Cool!' they said. And my work of art? 'Oh, that crap?
We threw it away,'they said.
I was talking about this with Leonardo From Vinci
(man, what a one-horse burg that dump is!). He has
strung an invention of his, a 'talk gizmo' between his
house and mine -two ceramic cups and a very long
thread. It works all right, except that since our
houses are many miles apart, communication kind of
breaks down when Tuscan peasant women somewhere in
between start hanging laundry on the line. He says
he's working on a very long thread on a spool, which
would actually let you converse as you walk around the
street. Like I'm going to hold my breath waiting for
that one. He asked me what I was doing wasting my time
with rocks, anyway, when I could be building things he
called 'aeroplanes'. He told me he was undecided about
what to paint on the part he called the 'fuselage' -
an eagle carrying lightning bolts in its talons or a
chubby women with a smiling face. I suggested a
smiling woman holding lightning bolts. He was not
amused. A weird man, Leo. Frankly, I don't think the
old geezer is playing with a round boccie ball,
anymore.
I'll see your metafour and raise you five.
2.
entry
Dec. 2002
installation
art; memento mori; "skulls"
The large and spacious square
between the main facade of the Royal Palace and the
Church of San Francesco di Paola is Piazza del
Plebiscito. It is ideally suited for outdoor concerts,
street musicians, jugglers, and large groups of
tourists to shuffle nervously as they are efficiently
herded from statue to statue by stray dogs.
The square also lends itself to modern sculpture of
the kind that art critics call "installation art" and
the rest of us rustic dullards call, "What in the
world is that supposed to be?!" Generally speaking,
installation art requires
some-well,installation-something in the way of
mounting, draping, hanging, digging or soldering. The
displays, themselves, may include ("...but are not
limited to...," as lawyers so craftily hedge) metal,
wood, plastic, rubber, and assorted minerals, fabrics
and liquids.
And so, in past years, Piazza del Plebiscito has seen
a gigantic mountain of salt dotted with pieces of
machinery, apparently a metaphor of whatever it is
that salt represents confronted with whatever it is
that machinery represents-maybe life beset by
technology. (Hmmmm, not such a "rustic dullard" now,
huh?!) Then, one year, there was a large wooden
replica of an ancient lighthouse that used to guard
the harbor of Naples. Last year, there was a gigantic
replica of the Angevin Fortress made entirely of
soft-drink cans (photo). These exhibits go up in early
December and are left in place for the Christmas
holidays, at which time they are "uninstalled". Most
of them are environmentally friendly enough to be
dismantled easily or, in some case, vacuumed up.
In December 2002, they tore up
the paving stones in the square. According to the
paper, no one in the city administration recalls
giving the go-ahead for any of this digging, but the
latest piece of ephemeral sculpture was duly
installed. It is a work by German sculptor and film
maker, Rebecca Horn. Her history includes mechanical
and body-extension sculpture as well as installation
art on the premises of an insane asylum in Vienna.
Austria. Her work is often controversial.
The work consisted of a number of bronze skulls
implanted in the pavement (photo). The work, thus, is
Horn's tribute to-or variation on-the well-known
Neapolitan "cult of death" (so-called by some) that
centers on the vast collection of human skulls on the
premises of the Fontanelle cemetery in Naples. The
work is "site specific," a sub-genre of installation
art, in that it makes sense only within the context of
the place where it is exhibited-in this case, Naples.
The Fontanelle cemetery is carved out of the
tufaceous hillside in the Materdei section of Naples.
The vast chambers on the premises served for centuries
as a charnel house for paupers. At the end of the 19th
century, Father Gaetano Barbati had the chaotically
buried skeletal remains disinterred and cataloged.
They then remained on the surface, stored in makeshift
crypts, in boxes and on wooden racks. From that
moment, a spontaneous cult of affection for, and
devotion to, the remains of these unnamed dead
developed in Naples. Defenders of the cult pointed out
that they were paying respect to those who had had
none in life, who had been too poor even to have a
proper burial. Though the practice has largely
disappeared, devotees used to pay visits to the
skulls, clean them-"adopt" them, in a way, even giving
the skulls back their "living" names (revealed to the
caretakers in dreams). Yes, all that.
a
memento mori mosaic
from Pompeii
National Museum, Naples
In the church
of Purgatorio dell'Arco
The
display of skulls gives the whole thing a
resemblance to the memento mori. This Latin
phrase means "Remember you must die". As a noun, it
thus means "a reminder of death". Historically, it
recalls the slaves whose job it was in ancient Rome
to ride in the chariot beside the conquering hero
and whisper that single killjoy phrase ("Remember
you must die") in his ear, just to keep Hero from
believing his own press releases. In a Christian
context, the "memento mori" plays a significant part
in Neapolitan iconography. It is seen as a reminder
to live the kind of life that will be judged worthy
when that time comes. The courtyard of the museum of San
Martino (an ex-monastery) displays carvings of
skulls prominently, and a few churches in
Naples have depictions of them on the facades
or within, most notably, the Church of Purgatorio ad
Arco on via Tribunali.
As grisly as it
may seem to outsiders, the Fontanelle cemetery is
less a reminder of death than it is a popular
manifestation of the desire to show affection for
those who had so little of it in life. The point,
then, of the work of art in Piazza Plebiscito
dedicated to that bit of Neapolitan history is
perhaps to connect the city a bit to its past, to
its unusual-even bizarre-traditions, especially at
this time of year. Some have welcomed the
display, sight unseen, as a way to force one to
shake off, even for a moment, the great mid-December
haze of globalized Christmas kitsch. After all, what
better way to remember the birth of the Saviour than
with Bing Crosby singing "White Christmas" as he
stands with his reindeer in the traditional
Neapolitan manger scene, the presepe, with
the Holy Family, the Three Wise Men, and the
Redeemed Grinch, all of whom are watching the
colorized version of It's a Wonderful Life
on a new broadband palm computer? (Sigh. I've seen
that one. The movie, too.)
[Also see "Memento vivere", a painting.]
3.
entry
Jan. 2004
Installation
Art '04
This
This year's ritual installation of artyear's
ritual installation of art in Piazza Plebiscito
features a work entitled "Naples," by the master of
massive minimalism, San Francisco artist Richard Serra
(1939-). It is a large spiral (already called
"Contraception of the Gods" by those who view with
some disdain the city's unabashed dedication to this
kind of display). Entering into the giant orange
sculpture of curved and bending steel plates, you
spiral in, leaning in and out with the curves of the
walls, to the center, where you can look up and see
the clock tower on the facade of the royal palace (see
photo and insert). Your perception as you navigate the
deceptive geometry of this small, tilted space set in
the larger space of the square, itself, is what gives
validity to the work, says the artist. Clearly, to be
a private experience-to be at all touched by the
suggested metaphor of yourself in a similarly skewed
private life-space set in the space of the world at
large-the wandering in and out is best done slowly and
alone and not as part of a curious herd elbowing their
way in and out-unless, of course, you spend much of
your time elbowing your way through life wondering
what it's all about. That, too, is possible.
The work bears an amazing resemblance to
Serra's earlier "Torqued Ellipses," done in 1996,
separate curved plates of towering steel, which, to
the untrained maximalist eye-with a bit of
imagination-might be fit together into a spiral.
4.
entry
Jan 2005
Installation
Art 2004/5
It
has been ten years since the city of Naples
started adorning the vast Piazza Plebiscito with
examples of "Installation Art"-exhibits of various
kinds put in place in December and then taken down
after the holiday season. Some of these works have
evoked bewilderment in the eye of the beholder. Or
hostility. Or admiration. That of, course, is what
such art is meant to do: spin a web of extended
discourse around itself, made up of people's
reactions, which themselves become part of the answer
to that nagging question: "What in the world is that
supposed to be?" Such works in the last decade
in Naples have included Mimmo Paladino's "Salt
Mountain," Anish Kapoor's "Taratantara" (#1, above),
and Rebecca Horn's exhibit of bronze skulls, "Spirits
of Mother of Pearl," embedded in the pavement itself
(#2, above).
This year's work is Luciano Fabro's Italia
all'asta (photo, left). Asta means
auction in Italian; thus, "Italy for sale" or "Italy
to the highest bidder" captures the spirit of the
title. It is a 30-meter tower wrapped round by a
convoluted map of the "Two Italies"-North and
South-one part of which is inverted. The halves touch
and, thus, are joined. The sculpture is marked in
places with the names of various sections of the
nation that have been sold off for one reason or
another during the centuries-Nice and Savoy, for
example, ceded to the French in 1859 in return for
French help in the Italian wars of independence
against Austria. The tower is also marked by the names
of private corporations that have been allowed to buy
"what belongs to the Italian people" (to cite the
explanatory notes given out at Piazza Plebiscito);
that is, fundamental resources in the areas of
communication, energy, and the chemical and automobile
industries, most of which have now been "privatised".
The exhibit does not bill itself as a protest, but it
doesn't have to. Anyone who has been keeping up with
recent government attempts to sell off historical
monuments in Italy will understand what the exhibit is
all about. ("Welcome to Rome. See the Nike Colosseum!"
Am I kidding? So far, yes.)
First of all, the division of the gigantic
representation of Italy into two-the Two
Italies-recalls that split in the national psyche,
something that might not occur to foreigners, but
which is ever-present in the minds of all Italians,
even a century and a half after unification. Second,
in spite of the metal construction, the tower is
probably best called by the religious or Baroque term,
"spire"; it is set up in the middle of a large square,
recalling two other large, permanent spires in Naples
(at Piazza del Gesu Nuovo
and Piazza San Domenico
Maggiore), and is, in fact, a tribute to the
importance of the piazza
in Italian history-the public gathering place. TGhis
is where people talked, danced, bought and sold, where
revolutions started, proclamations were read and even
executions carried out. "The city is born from the
square, not vice versa," says Fabro, in an original
poem that accompanies the explanatory notes. It is the
perfect site in Naples to generate questions about the
modern identity of Italians, a people that are among
the great bearers of European culture over the
centuries.
The exhibit has some interesting sidelights.
One is the presence of various mathematical and
musical symbols affixed to the colonnade of the church of San Francesco di
Paola, the building on the west side of the
giant square. (These are, I suppose, tributes to the
Greek origins of Naples and Italian scientists and
musicians of the past. It also reminds me that one
year, the entire exhibit consisted of a single
Fibonacci sequence arrayed around the semicircular
facade of the church; 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34...
They stopped when they ran out of columns or when
Fibonnaci died-I forget which, but I am still engaging
in my own internal "extended discourse" about that
one. Stay tuned.) Also, Fabro has put together a sound
track that will be heard around the square for as long
as the exhibit lasts, repeating 25 segments; they
range from an ancient Greek chorus to an Ambrosian
chant to the classical music of Cimarosa and Pergolesi
to, ultimately, a recording of Marconi's first radio
message.
5.
Dec.2008
For
some reason, there will be no exposition of
installation art at Piazza Plebiscito this year. I've
just been down there and it is bone-bare, unless, of
course, Christo has managed to install a gigantic
sculpture of thin air of emptiness hanging over the
entire square, called Thin Air of Emptiness. On the other
chisel, the on-going shoring-and-sprucing up of the Galleria Umberto may be viewed
as installation art, of sorts. I call it Shoring-and-Sprucing Up
of the Galleria Umberto (photo, right). Alas,
this means that there will be no large Christmas Wishing Tree this year
on the premises. Come back in Twenty-oh-Nine.
6.
entry
Jan 2009
Installation
Art 2008/9
I
spoke too soon when I said there would be no
installation art at Piazzadel
Plebiscito this winter. They put it up a bit
later than they normally do, and I didn't check back.
This year's artist is Jan Fabre (b. 1958 in Antwerp,
Belgium). He is described as "multidisciplinary"; he
is a playwright, stage director, choreographer and
stage designer. He also founded the Troubleyn theater
company in Antwerp in 1986. Fabre has recently
exhibited at the Louvre in Paris. His exhibit at Piazza del Plebiscito
consists of five bronze sculptures, some of which have
previously been shown individually in public spaces
elsewhere. Thus, while the positions of the "parts" in
the square no doubt mean something, the "whole" is not
technically "site-specific" (that is, not made
specifically and only for this square in Naples, say,
in the sense of Rebecca Horn's Skulls a few
years ago-#2, above). The five sculptures are: The man who measures
the clouds (1998); The man who gives fire (or...with a light)
(1999); The man who
cries and laughs (2005);The astronaut who
directs the sea (2006); and The man who writes on
water (2006).
The
pieces are all of brilliantly polished bronze and are
life-sized; they are set around the large semicircular
piazza in
front of the church of San Francesco di Paola
(background, photo on right); ...cries and laughs
(photo, above) and ...writes on water (photo, right) are
in the main portion of the square; ...gives fire
(below, left) is off to the side; ...measures the clouds
(not shown) is actually atop the far-left half of the
colonnade of the church; and ...astronaut who directs
the sea (not shown) is not in the square at
all, but on a balcony of the Royal Palace, which faces
the square. Currently (as you can see in these
photos), the entire display is cluttered by
scaffolding and bleachers being set up for the New
Year's Eve celebration.
I
say "clutter," but maybe it's part of the display.
You never know with installation art. In the pompous
vocabulary of art critics (cue professorial
throat-clearing...ahem...),such
displays are meant to interact with the viewing public
and invite comments, comments that then become part of
the "extended discourse" of the work, itself. In the
case of Fabre's display, the morning after it went up,
there was a single car parked directly next to the
centerpiece, The
man who cries and laughs (top photo); it is
in the center of the square and shows a man atop a
pedestal, facing the royal palace. His facial
expression, as the name implies, shows laughter and
crying at the same time. You are invited to interpret
that as you wish. (That is, he is holding a book in
his left hand, so maybe he's a student or, even worse,
a scholar. He is staring at the grand Royal Palace and
smiling at the centuries of culture therein contained;
he is also crying because Naples is in such a mess.
That sort of thing. That is only my own "extended
discourse." Feel free to extend your own. Maybe we can
throw a few punches.) The lone car in the morning
hours was interpreted by passers-by in various ways:
(1) It's part of the work; (2) It's the world's
cleverest example of illegally parking a car, since
the owner knows that people will think the vehicle is
part of the work and leave it alone.
(Conversation between two traffic cops in the
square):
-"What in the...?! He can't leave that car there!"
-"Luigi, maybe it's
part of the sculpture. If we ticket or tow it, we
look like idiots."
-"Do I look like an
art critic to you? Call someone."
A few hours later, the car was gone. That
doesn't necessarily mean that it was not part of the
sculpture. Maybe it was a piece of mobile extended
discourse. The exhibition runs through Jan 18, but
these displays sometimes run past the announced
closing date. There was no printed explanatory
material for this year. Here extendeth the discourse.
7.
Dec
20, 2009
This
year's installment of "installation art" at Piazza Plebiscito was
supposed to open yesterday, but there was an
unspecified technical hitch; thus, we'll have to wait
a few days to see "Pioneer II." It is an example of
what is called "sound art" or "Cymatics"-the
visualization of sound; that is, seeing the patterns
caused, say, in sand or in a liquid, by sound
vibrations. This physical link between the heard and
the seen has interested a number of artists. You can
test the effect by covering your Stradivarius with
flour and starting to play. You see pretty pattens in
the flour as it is "excited" by the sound-just as you are excited
by the sudden drop in the value of your fiddle. This
year's artist is Carsten
Nicolai (b. 1965, Karl-Marx-Stadt, Germany).
He has installed three large balloons moored with
metal cylinders in the square (photo, right). The
balloons are equipped with internal light sources and
are electronically linked to motion detectors on Mount
Vesuvius. Rumbles at the volcano are translated into
audible pitch and run through loud speakers set up in
the square. The effect of that sound causes something
to happen to the balloons, but I don't know what. The
purpose of it all is to show how intimately the city
is linked to the volcano. So, if the metaphorical
"balloon" at Vesuvius really does "go up" next week, I
think the physical artsy balloons, too, will really go
up like crazy and explode. So far, the cylinders are
all you see. The exhibit will be in place through Jan
12. Art is hell.
8.
Dec
27, 2009
Art is hell redux.
The installation art at Piazza Plebiscito (above) didn't get off the
ground. The art has been "uninstalled"-that is, the
balloons have been removed from their cylinders. The
display was too fragile, the windy weather wasn't
helping, and, apparently, one of the components had
already been damaged by a pre-New Year's firecracker.
The museum that contracted for the display, MADRE
Museum (an acronym for Museo d'Arte Donna
Regina), spent €500,000 on it and now says that
the artist, Carsten Nicolai, has some reserve art
warming up on the sidelines. It will probably be
called "Clouds of Light" and will probably reuse the
same cylinders that contained the balloons. It should
be in place by tonight. Ho-hum. The suspense is
killing me.
Dec
29
OK,
art is only heck. Except for the ongoing stink about
how much money was spent on this fiasco, the crisis
has been overcome by the installation of three
"volcanoes of light" in place of the three large
balloons. The physical set-up is almost identical;
that is, there are now three large cylinders
representing Vesuvius (and his two twin brothers?) in
the square. At night you can enjoy the light display
over the rims of the "volcanoes." The display is
accompanied by volcano-ey rumbles of sound effects. At
night, that is. Interesting point: this particular
work of installation art is "site specific" (that is,
the theme is bound to a particular place-in this case,
our local volcano). That is not uncommon for
installation art (Rebecca Horn's 2002 display in
Naples was another example-#2, above). But this one is
also time-of-day specific; you can only see it at
night. If you know nothing of the display and walk
across Piazza Plebiscito on a bright sunny day and see
only the cylinders, you will no doubt work out some
plausible interpretation of what it all means. This,
of course, will have nothing to do with volcanoes. Not
to fret-in the parlance of modern art criticism, your
interpretation then becomes part of the "extended
discourse" on, of, around and about the work. Feel
better?
9.
Dec.
2010
This
year's "installation art" is
significantly different than most of the
displays since they were first started
over a decade ago in Naples. For the
first time, the display will not be set
up in Piazza Plebiscito. This is (1) bad
in that not as many people will see it
but (2) good in that there is much less
chance of damage, accidental or
otherwise, to the installation from
Christmas and New Year's revelers. Also,
the display will be "site specific"
(much like Rebecca Horn's "skulls"
exhibit-#2,above-from
some years ago). This year, the venue
will be the Piazza
dei Martire, the monument
column in that square includes four
statues of lions at the base. The
display could be set up nowhere else
since it consists of six life-sized
fiber-glass replicas of one of the
originals, the "prowling" lion by Tommaso
Solari. The replicas have just
stepped off their monument pedestal,
symbolizing, according to the artist, a
"reawakening" of the city. The
installation is the work of Neapolitan
artist,
Nadia Magnacca
(b.1958). She has a degree in biological sciences
and has studied and taught photography; since the
early 1990s she has exhibited photography and
audio-visual displays throughout Europe. That she is
a local artist-while not unique-is the exception
rather than the rule for these exhibits of
installation art in Naples. Maybe that's a good
sign, too.
As it turns out,
there is nothing new under the sun. In 1972, a group
of local artists calling
themselves the "non-existent gallery" installed a
plaster lion in the same square near the memorial
column. No one seemed to mind, so they graduated to
trying to unload a whole parade of similar critters
along the seafront leading from the Castel dell'Ovo
to Piazza dei Martiri (more than a half-mile!). This
time, the local gendarmes were not amused. The
artists did get permission, however, to put a few in
the square, itself. The display was called Hic sunt leones-"Here
there be lions." And here they are again.
10.
Dec. 23, 2012
This
year the city has taken a step back from
its yearly tradition of presenting large-scale
"installation art" at Piazza Plebiscito (or
anywhere else, for that matter) during the
holiday season. (I don't know if this means
anything as far as the format of future displays
is concerned.) Maybe people were tired of the
very large and very expensive single-theme works
(see the items above this one on this page).
They were often by artists from abroad, so
maybe, too, local artists got tired of being
snubbed. This year, the theme seems to be "local
artists," presented under the title of Percorsi
di Luce [Trails of Light]. Essentially,
most art and photo galleries, artists'
workshops/studios around town, and other venues
where displays can be set up (such as hotel
lobbies) are open almost constantly and will
remain open through January 6. It amounts to a
large-scale moveable art show, with you doing
the moving from exhibit to exhibit, from the
works of French illustrator (who lives in
Naples), Christophe Mourey, to video-art by Tony
Stefanucci, to papier-mache sculpture by
Rosa Panaro, and two-dimensional flat sculpture
by Annamarie Bova, etc. etc. Generally speaking
the displays are on premises spread through the
traditional shopping streets from the San
Ferdinando and Chiaia sections in the east
(roughly starting at via Chiaia, near the Royal
Palace) and then west to the Posillipo area past
Mergellina. I am almost certain that the
displays are all indoors. If there are
exceptions involving real "street art," I
haven't found them.
11.
Also for 2012, Opera per Cantalupo. See this link.