It Is Love

Say love now

If there is a word that brings hives to today's artists, it is "love".

I knew a band that melted because the lyricist had written a text with the abused rhyme "heart-love": the rest of the band had found the choice of an inadmissible bad taste. The most characteristic and complex feeling of the human being has been for so long at the center of his creative attentions (from Catullus, to the Stylists, to Sanremo), which now no longer seems to find credible forms to be described.

To dispel this prejudice, I visited the exhibition "Love, contemporary art meets love". Artists of the present day who have questioned themselves on the subject, have been reunited in a suggestive path, well lit, explained in detail by a well-prepared audio guide.

The two disabled people fixed in marble by Marc Quinn, who try to embrace each other despite having a severed arm and a stump, have moved me to the tender obstinacy; the algida Madonna photographed by Vanessa Beecroft while nursing two twins of black leather, intrigued me for the spiritual yearning; to appreciate the crazy blow-ups of the duo Gilbert and George I looked for more information in the brochure.

Once the tare of amazement was lifted, at every step the feeling grew that everything I observed did not possess the taste I demand to turn a journey into an experience. Perhaps since contemporary art has chosen the way of the conceptual, it has become more suited to conjecture than to feelings. Nothing wrong, for heaven's sake. But undeniably in contrast to the large hearts exposed on the exit stairs.

I felt a strong emotion at the bookstore, buying a fridge magnet that reported some words of the artist Piero Manzoni: "There is nothing to say: there is only to be, there is only to live". I left the gallery satisfied with the original afternoon, I shook hands with my royal wife, thanking that life has no explanatory notes.