The Vanishing 'Attributed' in Art Exhibitions: Certainty Over Scholarship

In exhibitions of ancient art, the term 'attributed' (or its abbreviation 'attr.') is disappearing from labels, a shift that art historian Fabrizio Federici criticizes as a loss of intellectual honesty. The word once signaled the provisional nature of art-historical attributions, acknowledging that linking an artwork to an artist involves research and doubt. Its removal, Federici argues, falsely elevates curatorial proposals to the level of certain attributions backed by signatures, archival documents, or scholarly consensus. This change reflects a broader commercialization of exhibitions in the third millennium, where museums prioritize selling certainty to audiences. Exhibitions have transformed from research and communication into commercial products aimed at satisfying aesthetic-emotional demand. Other symptoms include focusing only on movable works (ignoring frescoes, intarsia choirs, sepulchral monuments) and adopting self-congratulatory advertising rhetoric that labels every artist a 'protagonist' and every work a 'masterpiece.' Federici laments that customer satisfaction, not knowledge dissemination, is now the goal, ironically suggesting a 'satisfied or refunded' policy. The article was published in Grandi Mostre #5 on Artribune.