PREVIEW/ Memorabilia Autumn 2019 di Roberto Ruggeri
Love is the answer but, while you’re waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions.” This aphorism by Woody Allen, so ferociously sarcastic and ironic, could be the premise for an iconic couple of the 90s, Jeff Koons and Ilona Staller, aka “Cicciolina”. The first, apparently light, is the distorted image of a culture that has lost the aesthetics of beauty. Art, which dominates with the monarch’s sneer, is a seductive and captivating object that Koons creates in our image and likeness: kitsch and sublime, excessive in form and colour, ready for fast and serial consumption. The second is a Hungarian pornographic actress who, in the Italy of the First Republic in 1985, was registered and elected in Marco Pannella’s Partito Radicale (Radical Party) with 20,000 votes. A subtle provocation with a sprinkle of explicit eroticism, which led her to found the “Partito dell’Amore” (the Party of Love) in 1990 with Moana Pozzi. The erotic performances of the two were transformed into images – including the “Made in Heaven” photo shoot. The next auctions of Memorabilia and Collectables will include an “Erotica” catalogue that will contain a photo printed on canvas with original applications and Cicciolina’s signature, which portrays her along with the soon-to-be most paid sculptor in the world. A unique and truthful memory of the encounter between two crazy fragments of a society, happily confused between absolute values and abyssal hypocrisies.