«Mettere all′arte il mondo». Nuove geografie dell′arte = “Putting the World to Art.” New Geographies of Art

This article investigates the relationship between geographical thought and art starting from the late 1980s, when three events radically changed the world: the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the creation of the W3 and, in the artistic field, the exhibition at the Centre Pompidou Magicien de la Terre. After an examination of these three assumptions, the article makes explicit three declinations of this relationship between art and geography; the first concerns the fact that the end of the last century was not only, as has been amply documented in the field of architecture starting with the Centre Pompidou, the golden age for the evolution of the museum as an architectural type and as an institution; other forms of exhibition literally exploded and became consubstantial to the very definition of contemporary art, generating precisely a new geography in which the art world meets and is nourished: the biennials; a second aspect concerns the fact that contemporary art spatialises and uses outer space to fulfil itself as a continuous transformative process that does not end with the production of an object-fetish, giving rise more or less in the same years to land art and street art; a third declination concerns the artist as cartographer.