Dear Friends,

this is to remind you about a big italian scandal not well known abroad: Oliviero Toscani (former Benetton advertiser) sued unknown people for unlawfully using his name and fame in order to participate at the Tirana Biennale
(September 2001) organized by Giancarlo Politi (Flash Art director).
These are the facts: a while ago, the organizer of
the Tirana Biennale received an email signed by Oliviero Toscani. After the first one, a long exchange of emails followed between the two. During this dense exchange of electronic messages, Politi invited Toscani to participate to the Tirana Biennale as co-curator and to design the official poster of the Biennale. Toscani accepted immediately. Toscani wrote texts for the exhibition catalogue and invited 4 artists whose work was successfully shown at the Tirana Biennale were, despite their absence, drew the attention and appreciation of all the other internationally established curators and artists involved in the project; too
bad that neither Toscani nor his artists have enjoyed the general praise as none of them have actually attended the opening of the Biennale: in fact, Toscani ended up being false and the artists non-existent.
When the “real” Oliviero Toscani received the
catalogue of the Biennale by post, he immediately called Politi and ask about the bad joke.
This is now the big issue of the Italian art
world and, so far, many articles have been published about this story on the national press like Il Sole 24 Ore, l’Espresso and CARTA.
So far, the real curators of this attack to the
art world have not yet been discovered.
Francesco Bonami

“The Tirana Conspiracy”

In other words-The Genealogy of an Attack on Contemporary Art.

It was early last century that artists began to posit the
equivalence between art and everything else that was to have such far-reaching consequences. Take Marcel Duchamp and his pioneering presentation of urinals and bicycle wheels on the art scene.
Modern art began to make clear that what differentiated
an object in its field from another was the definition of work of art attributed to it or otherwise. In short, modern art was actually constituting itself through a ritualistic and arbitrary discourse among “initiates”.
Lacking a primary social function other than that of
being a status-symbol and conferring social distinction upon those that “possess” it, art becomes first and foremost the object of a discourse that attributes it meaning despite its proximity to the meaningless: for those uninitiated in the language of art, that which (as a result of the cultural and economic capital it represents) the artistic discourse considers to be a work of art is actually something quite different.
The objects that have since benefited from this
attribution of meaning, and have consequently been identified, classified and confined within the sphere of artistic action and investigation, best represent the arbitrary power of legitimisation of this discourse.
The consequences of this development in modern art were
such that in the Sixties a radical artist like George Maciunas was legitimately able to claim that “everything is art”.
Still on the subject of the nature of art, the
celebrated four minutes and forty-three seconds comprising John Cage’s famous musical piece “The Silence” are exemplary in that they provide a reverse image
of both the conventional nature of the work of art in modernity and the experience of its dissolution that has long been possible. Such was the influence of the trend that while everyone remembers the Mona Lisa with Duchamp’s moustache, the work in which Duchamp removes it is less famous.
In truth, there had already been harbingers of what
might (or might not) come to be considered as a work of art in 1927. At that time Constatin Brancusi took the United States customs service to court in New
York in order to defend (successfully as it happened) his work Bird in Space.
Acquired by an American collector, the work was not recognised as such by the US administration and on entry to the country it was taxed like any other imported good rather than being granted that complete exemption from duties that works of art enjoyed under the prevailing legislation.
Neither was it any coincidence that in advance of its
exhibition in the Venice Biennial, Duchamp’s notorious door was painted by a conscientious decorator who had failed to recognise it for what it was – a work of art.
Nor that four young people in the early Eighties managed to
persuade the most illustrious experts that the stones they had sculpted with a Black and Decker drill and allowed to be discovered on a river bed were works by
Amedeo Modigliani. Nor that a cardboard box “conceived” by Gianfranco Baruchello for an exhibition was unwittingly opened by a group of employees.
Nor that a butter sculpture by Joseph Beuys was scraped away by a servant. Nor, more recently, that the fast-food cartons, plastic beakers and toilet rolls in a Damien Hirst installation at the Eyestorm Gallery simulating the disorder of the artist’s studio were tidied up by Mr. Asare (the cleaner).
In truth, again, not even what remained of painting, locked
away in its corner, was spared by the disaster that struck contemporary art. In the years of informal painting and abstract expressionism, the ethologist Desmond Morris demonstrated the formal equivalence between the works of painters and the scribbles of trained apes “competent” in painting in exactly the same style. Those were thus years in which, alongside sacred cows of the stature of Jackson Pollock and William De Kooning, Congo the ape was doggedly pursuing similar ends.
At this point the game was up: while a work of art might
have become extremely difficult to recognise as such but easy to create, it was no longer easy to identify and categorise the artist with any certainty.
The history of modern art not only destroyed the idea of
the work of art, actually making capital of this enthralling and far-sighted destruction (“the best art is business” being one of Andy Warhol’s sacrosanct phrases), but at a certain point it also undermined all certainties regarding value and even the identity of any artist.
It is thus no coincidence that by the late Fifties, as an
alternative to art reiterating the reproduction of an ever more sophisticated nullity exchanged in the form of consumer goods, the Situationalist International was already looking to the utopian overcoming of art, of the concepts of the work of art and the artist in a radical critique that eventually even hit out at the social model of which art was the expression.
After all, embracing the ideas of his son-in-law Paul
Lafargue with regards to the “right to leisure”, in The German Ideology Marx had
already called for a utopian society in which every one of us could “do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon,
rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic”.
Starting out from this generalised critical stance that
questioned all aspects of daily life dominated by the power of economic reason, Guy Debord abandoned “The Society of the Spectacle” advocating barricades of pictures in the streets of Dresden and paintings taken hostage in Caracas, allowing us to see the work of artists and critics as the work of policemen and servants without quality who reproduced the void in which they survived.
In an era in which the dissolution of art operates above
all in favour of the constituted order, becoming part of its modus operandi, it is worth recalling a number of rare and exalted examples contrary to this order.
Back in 1975, the book “Sulle ultime possibilità di
salvare il capitalismo in Italia” (“On the last chance to save capitalism in Italy”)was published in Italy under the nom de plume “Censor”.
While up until then that which may not have been
recognised for what it claimed to be had involved that concept of the work of art that continued to survive the dissolution to which modern art had brought it, Censor made sure that the very concept of the artist had a similar fate.
The opinion makers and the press generally attributed
Censor’s book to powerful Italian establishment figures such as Guido Carli or Raffaele Mattioli, Giovanni Malagodi or Cesare Merzagora; in fact, it was actually written by one of the greatest enemies of the very system from which it appeared to derive.
Here we are talking about Gianfranco Sanguinetti, the
literary figure who had broken up the IS in 1972 with Guy Debord and was now having fun with writing a successful libel that could incredibly be attributed to his worst enemies; as Rimbaud might have said, “I is another”.
In his next pamphlet dedicated to the “Prove
dell’inesistenza di Censor” (“Proofs of the non-existence of Censor”), Sanguinetti himself proved to be aware that what he done, with out letting on for a while, had a number of noble precedents. This was the case with Marx who
together with Bauer wrote and published an anonymous pamphlet in 1841 with the pretext of denouncing Hegel, but actually aimed at the Hegelian right.
In terms of its tone and style the work actually appeared to derive from the metaphysical extreme right of the times.
Over ten years ahead of Dolly the sheep (the first example of a biological photocopy), and making “the end of history” its own, art after 1980 introduced us to the “appropriationist” auteurs Sherry Levine and Mike Bidlo and their “indifferent repetition” of masterpieces by Jackson Pollock, Walker Evans, Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian among others.
Just as art rendered itself otherwise elusive, unrecognisable, invisible, suicidal and concealed (in as much as it was the work of an auteur), the art system grasped at the suspicion that a path to its own economic salvation might be cultural cloning, the indifferent and standardized repetition of established authorial models to be seen by a new generation of artists who were no longer ashamed of being nothing more than a double or a simulacrum.
In a society unwilling to free itself of an art that
reproduces its own vacuity, there may be room in alternative for an “art” that
takes to extreme and destabilising consequences the Beuys motto whereby “every man is an artist” in order to reveal in any case contemporary art as an imposture bartered in the form of goods.
Considering the Situationalist objective of doing away
with art(and the surrogates we exchange in its name) more unfeasible than
radical, other more devious and subliminal forms of radical criticism have been adopted in order to continue to dissect, X-ray and rout works of art and artists, in a situation that is theatrical yet set in a climate of war.
In an art world celebrating the cult of the auteur with
a nod to the star system but producing a meagre yet costly farce, there are those who would unashamedly appropriate one of these celebrated names for their own purposes.
This is what happened in 2001 in Italy, Miami,
Marrakech, Tangiers, Algiers, Little Albany in the Bronx, Chinguetti and Lagos and that first came to light in the Balkans in the autumn of that year on theoccasion of the Tirana Biennial.
An international contemporary art event organised by the
publisher and editor of Flash Art, “The Europe’s leading art magazine” in the years of its decadence, the first edition of the Tirana Biennial held in the September of 2001 brought together leading curators, critics and artists from throughout the world. In a tried and trusted role-swapping game a number of figures were invited to participate in the Tirana Biennial as exhibition curators, even though they were better known as artists or otherwise. This was the case with jesters and stars of the international firmament such as the artist Maurizio Cattelan and the advertising photographer Oliviero Toscani, both invited to presented the artists they wanted in the Albanian capital’s National Gallery.
Appropriately enough, in his Commentaires sur la Société
du Spectacle Guy Debord writes that “it is in these conditions that a parodic end of the division of labour suddenly appears, with carnivalesque gaiety, all the more welcome because it coincides with the generalised disappearance of all real ability. A financier can be a singer, a lawyer a police spy, a baker can parade his literary tastes, an actor can be president, a chef can philosophise on cookery techniques as if they were landmarks in universal history. Anyone can join the spectacle, in order publicly to adopt, or sometimes secretly practise, an entirely different activity from whatever specialism first made their name.
Where ‘media status’ has acquired infinitely more importance than the value of anything one might actually be capable of doing, it is normal for this status to be readily transferable; for anyone, anywhere, to have the same right to the same kind of stardom.”
In that tried and trusted role-swapping game mentioned
earlier, Oliviero Toscani was invited to design the logo and the official poster of the Tirana Biennial as well as wear an unfamiliar curator’s hat for this international exhibition in order to present a number of artists regarding whom we still know only their images and their names.
The poster immediately appeared to be a typically
Toscani-esque provocation, the latest in the serial repetition of his scandalous clichés. It showed a distorted reproduction of the flag of that Greater Albania for which the ethnic minorities of Kosovo and Macedonia were risking the social and political order as well as their own lives. The two-headed black eagle featured in the poster in fact recalls the one made famous during the Nineties by the UCK Army of Liberation, even though here the disturbing symbol appears with a tattered outline verging on a complete loss of definition and white text on its breast reading “Bienlja e Tiranes”. The poster certainly proved to be unacceptable to the majority and to the right-minded establishment men in particular. As President of the Biennial, Edi Rama, the mayor of Tirana and a former Albanian Minister of Culture, as well as a “sensitive painter up to two years ago”, initially rejected Oliviero Toscani’s design, considering it to be inappropriate and dangerous. However, the determination of the designer of the poster to defend his ideas and the unconditional support for this stance provided by the organisational and artistic director led to the Tirana Biennial being presented to the art world with the official logo and poster designed by the great and impertinent photographer, despite the initial opposition of the head of the Balkans art institution.
At this point the Tirana Biennial poster was considered
by many in Europe and America as the great photographer’s masterpiece, at least according to Giancarlo Politi who had shown his appreciation for Toscani’s logo
from the outset, preferring it to the one designed by the Fabrica, the renowned crucible of creative talent founded and directed up until a few years ago by Toscani himself.
However, as it happens the famous Oliviero Toscani knew
nothing about what he had apparently done at the famous Tirana Biennial organised by the publisher and director of “Europe’s Leading Art Magazine”.
In the month of September 2001, the lawyers Pier Matteo
Lucibello and Luca D’Auria were engaged by Oliviero Toscani (the real one) and filed a suit at the Milan court against persons unknown for falsification of a signature, defamation and impersonation.
What had appeared to be the autograph work of the famous
photographer subsequently revealed its skilfully camouflaged falsehood and its penal significance for Oliviero Toscani (the unknown faker) who thus became the
object of the investigations of the Public Prosecutors Assistant, Elio Ramondini from the anti-terrorism pool of one of Italy’s foremost Public Prosecutor’s Office.
Quite apart from the decline of the figure of the
curator, replaced by a random star such as Oliviero Toscani, what was much more serious was the revelation that behind the aristocratic name of the star was not who we believed to be one of the world’s most famous photographers but rather whomsoever had organised a conspiracy, The Tirana Conspiracy, appropriating that name to serve his/her own ends and subsequently inventing further names.
Oliviero Toscani (the faker) appeared to want to want to
let us know that he had been faking the creation of works of art for some time, that it was equally possible to fake being one artist, more than one and more besides, for one’s own pleasure or displeasure and that of others.
In turning to the magistrates and entrusting himself to
the penal code, Oliviero Toscani (the original), instead appeared unwilling to remember that the art discourse had long exercised the power to change names, starting with those of the images.
For example, changing the name of pornography or
paedophilia, exchanging pornography and paedophilia in the name of art, proved to be successful artistic endeavours in the last decade of the last century. It had also had the effect of actually rendering tolerable, if not licit and luxurious, what was otherwise appalling if not condemnable. The authors of the Tirana Conspiracy had ensured that their Oliviero Toscani, in his role as the curator of the international exposition of the Tirana Biennial took the success and the taste for the obscene, the contemptible and the perverse so prevalent in the art world to extreme consequences: the conspirators had, in fact, decided that worse could be done.
The fake Oliviero Toscani had in fact attempted to make
this prevailing taste intolerable, inviting artists to the Biennial who did not
even recognise their “work” as a form of art but simply as the trash it actually
was: “ there are no excuses for what I do, not even art can excuse me as original as they may seem, they’ll always be the photos of a filthy paedophile”,
affirms Dimitri Bioy in the fake interview granted to the fake Toscani.
Dimitri Bioy was actually an artist who had never
existed if not in the form of his fake curriculum, in the texts of the fake Oliviero Toscani and in the images sent from Miami to Tirana for this contemporary art Biennial of which he had become a kind of icon-star, attracting
the attention of the press and public more than any other participant (when what lay behind his name and images was still unknown), Dimitri Bioy was, in fact, none other that a chimera, fool’s gold, a con-trick lasting the duration of an
international exhibition, amidst the crème de la crème of critics and the contemporary art scene.
Art nowadays can be treated as a pile of clichés, trendy
models with which to fall in line, banalities and commonplaces.
In a society that satisfies itself with poverty that
capitalises, the figure of the “subversive impostor” interpreted by Oliviero Toscani, Dimitri Bioy and then Carmelo Gavotta, Hamid Piccardo, Bola Ecua and
Rocco Toscani meant that all the others could be revealed for what they actually are and are worth.
With regards to Carmelo Gavotta, the conspirators had the
fake Oliviero Toscani present his porno-amateur video shorts that “point out with frank simplicity that today pornography may be produced by whomsoever
possesses an instrument for recording images that each one of us may try out and explore as we see fit” writes the fake Oliviero Toscani in the Tirana Biennale catalogue presentation of the “artist”.
In both cases the conspirators were thus suggesting to
the art public that the “work” of the two “artists” was better not considered as a form of art. Nonetheless, the critics, artists and curators homing in on Tirana from around the world demonstrated not the slightest suspicion or doubt,
with both “artists” actually being considered as pertinent to the art discourse and one even being acclaimed as a star.
After all, the investigation conducted by the American
secret service in the wake of the 1998 attacks on the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya revealed that the groups associated with the Saudi emir Osama
bin Laden exchanged information, documents and photographs by infiltrating pornographic web sites apparently light years away from the ideology of fundamentalist Islam. The information was inserted in the chat rooms via special
stenographic techniques that allowed the dissimulation of messages indecipherable to those without the correct access key.
The conspirators must have had this disturbing precedent
in mind when their Toscani actually invited Hamid Piccardo to infiltrate the Tirana Biennial.
“Hamid Piccardo cannot be described simply as an
“artist’”, claims Oliviero Toscani. “His Islamic fundamentalism places him on a higher step, his kafans inscribed with phrases from the Koran relating to the
apocalypse are acts of faith and no less conceptual than the religion he practises. Usama bin Ladin put him forward as the spokesman for the Jihad in the art world.” It was Toscani again who recalled that in 1993 the artist
“inaugurated an exhibition entitled Sharia in a beautiful abandoned mosque-style gallery in Cairo, in which he had dressed like all those who along with him were
part of the exhibition, all of them wearing beards longer than a fist like so may sons of Osama bin Laden, and rather than an exhibition it seemed more like a
nightmare rally”.
Oliviero Toscani and Hamid Piccardo immediately aroused
the facile suspicion that the “nightmare rally” might have been something else in spite of art’s ability to confer upon a very different name.

Not by chance, the art discourse had however long demonstrated its ability to give the best of
itself when contemplating a completely empty gallery.
“Usama bin Ladin put him forward as the spokesman for the
Jihad in the art world”: derisively Oliviero Toscani immediately placed Piccardo over the abyss separating the small sphere of contemporary art from the
rest of the world. In a world in which the global diffusion of the “universal” language of contemporary art dissimulated the separation between cultures, the
artist Hamid Piccardo, “tragic but not serious”, short-circuited the cheerful and advantageous spiral of identity between art and life concocted by the
western or westernised artists with their Happenings ever since the Fifties - from Hallan Kaprow onwards. What appeared to the art public to be a happening, was actually interpreted and described by Toscani as an absurd comic-book rally
for a ridiculous rabble of “artist-terrorists” that actually extolled the holy war against art, its performances and its happenings!
The artist infiltrating the Tirana Biennial could thus
have been recognised from the outset thanks to that hilarious stereotyping of Islamic fundamentalism that in effect it was, rather than being misunderstood by a kleptomaniac and degenerate art scene.
As a result of this condition affecting contemporary art
and meaning that it reflected values and produced works that not all recognised as their own, it was no coincidence that as early as 1992 the Chinese artist Wu Shanzhuan who had found his way into the westernised world of art, deliberately used one of the Marcel Duchamp urinals conserved in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm just as any of us might be tempted to do when we are desperate.
Thus was inaugurated the globalisation of cultural
exchanges that rendered visible the conflict between the cultures jointly developing that “universal” language of contemporary art held up to 1989 in the
museums of the west, but which today can instead proliferate even through the sewers of Tirana.
Rather than being violated by the Chinese artist in
Stockholm, the Duchamp readymade appeared to have been taken literally, for that which it effectively is. Above and beyond its historical and productive glorification, the Duchampian readymade did not intend to acknowledge a greater
value in one object than another - all objects were considered equal - and a conceptual and
all - embracing category that potentially made a readymade of the entire world naturally included art, or rather its disappearance.
Again it was no coincidence that in 1997 the Russian artist
Alexander Brener visited the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam to demonstrate his absolute disdain for the values of capitalism of which art exchanged in the form
of goods was an expression. On that occasion the artist spray-painted the green dollar symbol over the work Suprematismus by Malevich, Brener was using the
dollar symbol as ammunition and appropriating the violence of unrestrained capitalism and the Far West with which he had only recently come into contact.
In an era in which Russia was exchanging the planned economy of the state mafias for the anarcho-liberalism of the anti-state, the artist seized upon that
“creative destruction” which the economist Schumpter attributed to the economic
enterprise as a quality that allowed it to reproduce. In this case the “creative destruction” proved, however, to be directed against itself, against any economic speculation whatsoever and, in a form of Luddite action, in favour of a
gratuitous and expensive cultural guerrilla war.
Early in 2001, the wax effigy of Pope John Paul II, lying
agonising on the ground after having been struck by a meteorite (in a work by Maurizio Cattelan) was actually kicked to bits by two Catholic Nationalist
members of the Polish parliament when it was on show in the Warsaw exhibition curated by Harald Szeemann. The destruction of Cattelan’s work proved to be no
more than an excessive interpretation of legitimate self-defence by a culture that felt itself to be offended by an image so disrespectful of its values.
The three cases described here in sequence that
contextualise the conflicts arousing from the global cultural exchanges of recent years, share the condition of being desperate attacks on the consolidated values of contemporary art; above all, they appear as elementary and primitive
examples of this conflict when compared with the sophisticated subliminal and subversive project of the conspirators which saw the participation of, among
others, a non-existent artist such as Hamid Piccardo. Similarly, the terrorist operations of Black September at the Munich Olympics in 1974 or the kamikazes in
Israel in the 1990s appear primitive when compared with the “geometric power” of the inhumane Twin Towers attack.
The apocalyptical performance of the two Boeings that
speared the World Trade Center towers that Karl Heinz Stockhausen (regretfully) defined as “a great masterpiece”, in any case marked a point of no return.
“Masterpiece” or not, what happened in New York on the 11th of September had previously only been seen in films and became reality for the first time.
It should be noted that through a deliberate decision
taken by the American authorities, as well as the deaths of thousands of people, that day was marked by the disappearance of their images. The area occupied until then by the Twin Towers became off-limits to the television crews who were
thus unable to record and broadcast the images of the dead, The day after, on the 12th of September, the US authorities also provided the nation’s radio stations a list of song titles they considered to be inappropriate for broadcasting.
The American authorities, the radio and the television
stations,controlling their every move, appeared to make a strategic use of Adorno’s affirmation regarding the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz and what eventually was seen and heard was conditioned by decisions regarding what was not.
During those very September days, the director of that
Tirana Biennial already crowded with images by phantom and non-existent artists, received a laconic letter from Maurizio Cattelan who in his turn affirmed that
following the events in New York he would be unable to participate in any other way than by showing nothing.
While an existent artist such as Cattelan decided at the
last minute to show nothing, the Conspirators had instead long decided that the time was to show and celebrate an art that would prove to be a non-existent trifle giving form to its own disappearance.
On this subject, Oliviero Toscani had also invited the
artist Bola Ecua to the Biennial.
While for Duchamp “it’s always the others who die”, for
Bola Ecua instead “Africa is more beautiful than Europe, but in the end tombs are tombs wherever.” According to Oliviero Toscani, “his works are apparently further damning testimony to the legal homicides that persist in Africa as in
Asia and the Americas”, and that “the tonal poverty of his photocopies seems better suited to the last hours of a man condemned to death than a colour photo.” Again according to Toscani, “the artist has always rejected the typically local means of artistic expression, whether sculpture or painting, that frequently degenerate into Afro-kitsch, and I believe that he was the first African artist to use photocopies as a means of revelation/statement, a kind of Yoruba Andy Warhol who with the strength of his monotone images denounces the crimes of the philo-military Nigerian government”.
Writing in The End of the History of Art or the Freedom
of Art in 1990, a distinguished art historian, Hans Belting, somewhat improbably called for art historians to adopt the techniques of assemblage developed by the
artistic avant-garde in order to create a definitive history of art without words and to play on/with art. Towards the end of that decade, the Greek-American artist Miltos Manetas, with the support of the powerful gallerist
Gagosian, instead entrusted a prestigious advertising agency with the task of finding a name to replace the word “art” in order to continue, one supposes, with the very same nonsense. We are, in fact, surviving in an era in which as
Debord says “the name may be conserved when the thing (a beer, beef maybe or a philosopher) has been secretly changed”, on in which “the name may be changed
even when the thing has developed secretly”.
In the case in point, the meagre photocopies of Bola
Ecua,politically correct according to the International Style and Amnesty International, are nothing more than pathetic documents, that have been visible for some time and can be attributed to other “names” and other situations. Bola Ecua was nothing more that what has already been seen (perhaps not seen), only indicated with another name in the small and myopic worlds of art. Crowing the episode in a delirium of omnipotence, in the summer of 2001 Oliviero Toscani actually had the promotional postcards for the Tirana Biennial created by his son by direct descent, but present here in a farce, Rocco. Alternating sobriety and exaggeration in the choice of stolen promotional images, the cards portrayed an Arab TV camerawoman shouldering her camera, the face of a young Japanese majorette swamped with sperm, two young
couples sunbathing and none other than Osama bin Laden wielding a machine gun.
It was a just a matter of days after the 11th of
September and it was no coincidence that the painter Mark Kostabi, advising the director of the Tirana Biennial to turn to the CIA or the FBI, noted that
between one stupidity and another, that the Tirana Conspiracy “was an attack on art just like the attack in the United States of America. Four artists chosen by
the fake Toscani, four aircraft hijacked on the 11th of September and four postcards by the fake Rocco Toscani”.
The “comic catastrophe” of the Tirana Biennial had finally been consummated.