That Style of Fake Illiteracy Familiar to us from Basquiat

Basquiat, "Man From Naples" 1982

But later that same day I felt that I really had to go and see the Sistine Chapel. For this there was a long line. I had to wait for two hours. In front of me in line was a great crowd of Japanese tourists all talking at once, and behind me another group of Germans talking a little louder.

I don't know what I thought about while standing in line. I thought about the second world war. I thought about how everyone is going to see the Sistine Ceiling, and Disney world. When it came time to buy my ticket, I got out of line and went away instead. I didn't see the ceiling, but lately I have been lying about it and telling people I went to see it.

I did, however, go to see both sections of the Quadriennale. One part was at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, and the other part at the Stazione Termini, which is the train station. I went to the Palazzo building first and once safely inside I turned all my attention to looking at the works of art. At the entrance, I was distracted for a moment by a homeless man who was making up a bed for himself in the porch of the Palazzo. I forced myself to ignore him and went directly into the exhibition without stopping.

I began looking at the paintings one at a time, spending about a minute on each work, going along in a pattern so that I wouldn't miss anything, but I soon began to encounter difficulties because the paintings were not hung on the walls but on strange monstrous portable walls that had been placed in the rooms in a very helter-skelter fashion. In some rooms, as many as six of these huge walls were crowded in at strange angles and there were very few works of art on the actual walls of the Palazzo.

I am a very traditional person and I like to go through a museum one room at a time and one wall at a time, and--like a mouse that runs along a wall and only changes direction when he gets to a corner--go through the space like I am sweeping it up in an orderly way. My intention of looking at everything carefully, therefore collapsed and I found myself looking at the blank walls instead of the art work. But the walls did not disappoint me. On the contrary, I have to state that I found the empty walls to hold my interest much more than the portable walls with their various paintings, but before I attempt to describe the walls I want to say something about the paintings on the portable walls.

You have already seen this kind of painting many times before. There were many large works of brooding textures and colors kind of smeared together over which some cryptic shape had been drawn in black by someone who must have gotten his or her arm broken. Also, in many paintings were unfinished words and phrases which had been smudged out in the style of fake illiteracy so familiar to us from Basquiat. There were many works which were large vague photographs of obscure subject matter, sometimes almost erotic, to which something had been done to to make them into art. Then there were an equal number of paintings in a traditional style in which some aspect of the image is meant to remind you that this is not 1496. There were unabashed attempts to do traditional Renaissance painting and sculpture that failed in all the various ways that paintings and drawings can fail, and finally there was a gondola.

The gondola spoke for itself, but the artist found it necessary to add a message to it in blue neon, but I confess that I didn't really look at these things very carefully and am probably not doing justice to them. I stood for a long time looking at the gondola, pretending to look at it because two firemen were also looking at it and were discussing something in Italian. I knew they were firemen because they were dressed up as firemen. I stood looking at the gondola because I was hoping to find out what Italian firemen think about modern art, but I was disappointed. They were discussing mushrooms, either how to find them or how to cook them, I don't know which.