When Even Art No Longer Takes A Vacation

There used to be summers when it was hard to talk about art. In the city, under the heat, galleries would lower their sails, collectors would head to their seaside or mountain homes, people would visit the few local galleries and there was a fleeting interest in the beachfront auctions. Those that, every evening, offered paintings, antiques, carpets. All medium-quality stuff. A typical summer evening ritual, sure, but everything unfolded in a soft, quiet tone, maybe with an ice cream in hand, after dinner, following the rhythms of a classic vacation period. Then came the internet, phones that never switch off, and the need to stay constantly connected and everything slowly changed. August is no longer a time of stillness and rest. Quite the opposite. Auction houses continue to offer a 34 wide range of events, bids can easily be made online, many are already previewing what’s coming in September and October. Sirens of all kinds, for all budgets. While first-half figures are being tallied, new and ambitious galleries are popping up in nearly every decent vacation spot, ready to offer the best of Italian and European art, naturally open to negotiating terms and payment methods of any kind. In some places, holidays have now turned into full f ledged art fairs, with an overwhelming variety of choices every evening. It’s the metamorphosis of the art world. Profoundly transformed over the past thirty years into an infernal machine that grinds through movements, artists, expectations and results. Meanwhile, private TV channels never let up, offering a nightly stream of varied content. From prestigious, high-value works to mediocre artists hiding behind French-sounding pseudonyms. And the wheel keeps spinning, frenetically, in search of the next art enthusiast flipping through those channels. At the same time, databases keep dispensing their knowledge, telling us everything about a painter: their early market responses, their development, their rise or the steep decline they may have faced in recent years. And so the collector increasingly feels like an economist, studying trajectories, balance sheets, graphs, calculating whether it’s smarter to buy now or wait for the fall auctions, the ones that will reveal whether an artist truly has a future in the vault of our certainties or is a shooting star destined to burn out by Christmas.