MAXXI (and MACRO) opening: too much is never enough

There were over 75,000 visitors, in four days, to the two new museums in Rome: the MAXXI by Zaha Hadid (inaugurated with four major exhibitions) and the Macro by Decq Odile (which will begin activities from October).

Too good to be true, with its opening, the MAXXI demonstrates itself to be an excellent machine for exhibitions, receiving a quantity of exhibitions and works that might even be excessive: an Eccles, however, that is the necessary price to pay to enter the big circus which is the world of show business, which each city with the ambition to become one of the capital knows. Finally, Rome is too, thanks to the talents of Zaha Hadid and her collaborators, to the resistance of officials and politicians who were right to support it all the way through to its construction and, of course, to the skill of the artists who are exhibiting there, or who have exhibited: from Kapoor to Diller & Scofidio, from Carlo Scarpa to Anselm Kiefer, from Maurizio Mochetti to Luigi Moretti, with sensational design of his original research work.

Even poor old Gino De Dominicis, who would never have imagined it, becomes an authentic symbol of Italian art, able to prophesise much of the production in recent years, in the exhibition curated by Achille Bonito Oliva. So it is that the "I" in MAXXI doesn’t signify simply the first century of the third millennium, it also stands for both Italian and International. So perhaps it’s no coincidence that the one work that could find consensus among everybody about the metamorphic capacity of the new museum in Via Guido Reni, is the installation by Alfredo Jaar dedicated to Antonio Gramsci, when he throws back to infinity the image of physical reclusion, that the magic of art and artists (or a writer, as Gramsci) simply makes useless, opening the mind up to new spaces and new sensorial experiences.

PS: Equally useless is the controversy MAXXI versus MACRO incited by the gossip about the simultaneous ‘must’ inaugurations: MAXXI both operates and works on a large scale, while Decq Odile’s MACRO is a smaller but efficient exhibition vehicle, enhanced by the quality of detail and the ability to establish itself firmly in this difficult and august context.
Stefano Casciani