Germano Celant: Fashion phobic?
Tomorrow’s NY Times Magazine is The Art Issue.
Yeah, right.
Except for one serious piece by the estimable Arthur Lubow about Latin American art in U.S. museums (focusing chiefly on curator Mari Carmen Ramirez of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts), it’s all about art-and-catering (“Affairs of the Art World,” complete with recipes) and art-and-fashion (including not one but two spreads foisting designer clothes on non-major artworld figures, the second of which seems to suggest that artsy women have a thing about black lipstick).
I particularly had to laugh at one line from Michael Kimmelman‘s piece on Miuccia Prada‘s artworld peregrinations. Writing about how the director of the Prada Foundation, Italian curator Germano Celant, first got involved with that art-commissioning and art-presenting entity, the Times’ expatriate art critic quotes Celant saying:
They were suspicious of me, and I was suspicious of fashion.
Come again? Wasn’t Celant the co-curator of the Guggenheim’s infamous Armani show? I guess he must have been suspicious about that one too.