Christian Caliandro Analyzes Cultural Shift from 1990s to 2000s

Christian Caliandro, art historian and professor at Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze, examines the transition from the late 1990s to the early 2000s as a pivotal cultural moment. He argues that this period, marked by creative experimentation through montage and citation in music, film, literature, and visual art, later gave way to conformism and market-driven art. Caliandro cites examples such as Smashing Pumpkins' 1995 album 'Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness,' Quentin Tarantino's 'Pulp Fiction' (1994), and Maurizio Cattelan's 'La nona ora' (1999) as emblematic of the era's innovative spirit. He notes that after the early 2000s, citation became an end in itself, leading to academicism and mannerism. The article references Germano Celant's 2007 observation that artistic radicality risks being annihilated by market forces, where commercial value replaces alterity. Caliandro describes the period from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the 2020s as an 'Interregnum' between the 20th and 21st centuries, with the 21st century truly beginning only recently amid COVID-19, systemic Western crisis, the war in Ukraine, and the genocide in Gaza. The piece is published on Artribune and promotes the author's book 'Artmix' (Feltrinelli, 2021).