Why artists have stopped arguing: the decline of intellectual conflict in culture

Pericle Guaglianone argues that despite the perception of our era as overly combative, intellectual conflict among major figures in art and literature has virtually disappeared. He contrasts the present with historical examples: Salvador Dalí inveighing against Paul Cézanne, the iconic 1972 photo by Claudio Abate showing Giorgio de Chirico and Gino de Dominicis in a tense standoff, Gabriele D'Annunzio and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti trading insults, and Alberto Savinio dismissing Marcel Proust as "the man of the long sentence and short thought." Guaglianone notes that even criticism of deceased artists, once common—such as Pier Paolo Pasolini calling Cesare Pavese "a mediocre writer" or Guido Ceronetti attacking Pasolini as "a monotonous and poor Lenten preacher"—is now taboo, as seen in the uproar when Michela Murgia criticized Franco Battiato in 2020. He suggests that the absence of sharp, substantive debate reflects a loss of cultural vitality, and that the supposed "age of insult" is actually one of the most muted periods in history.