“Maurizio Cattelan”, Artforum

Read this interesting assessment of Cattelan’s retirement by his friend, the heavyweight curator Francesco Bonami, in Artforum. I think it’s a loving and insightful look. One thing, however, is missed, in my view, which is the very point I missed when I did my own review of the show in the Observer. Cattelan has always played the outsider-insider of the art world, but now with multi-million dollar prices and a full-on Guggenheim retrospective, he’s cemented his status as an A+ list insider; he’s one of the art world’s mega artists with megabucks prices to prove it. So, the joke’s over, he can’t make jokes anymore into art, because the only remaining joke when you are inside the inside of the art world is a joke about yourself, and that’s just a one liner, so it’s not art anymore.

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