Italian Contemporary Art

From what I can remember, my father has attempted twice to teach a lesson to his son. The first time, with an air of wisdom, he told me that "there is nothing that is worth like matters of principle". The second, a few weeks from then, with those blurry eyes of his that seems like he's looking at something a meter away from you, he told me in an authoritarian tone: matters of principles are for imbeciles.
It took me a couple of years go actually get a lesson out of that, if not fatherly then at least useful for my life.
In the end it felt like relativism, a smell that stayed in my head for a long time.
In these rather cowardly years of contemporary art, years of released and burned out authors, years of monstrous exhibits, it's a smell that I got quite accustomed to. You can count a handful of artists that resisted the fury of the nineties, and amongst these lucky few some are now considered the 'enfants terribles' of the decade. A generation of embryos not fully grown, shot out to mount olympus before being raised. On their opening shows you see their eyes still glowing with their camping fires, while the curators and collectors stand behind them like their coaches.
Besides being thrown unprepared into the ring(a matter that requires some thought please), there is something more refined, more interesting, in this new emerging Italian panorama. That is to say that the connection that these languages have with the experience of the fathers, going beyond that criteria of the use of quotations and the approach to the past, finding an actually novel logic.
For example: In Diego Perrone there is a violent and cynical version of the plasticity of Pascali. In Roberto Cuoghi there is a part of that aristocratic nobility of De Dominicis. In Paola Pivi there is that shameless and surreal bluntness of an early Cattelan. In Caravaggio there is that material act declination of the arte povera with a more soave and sweet composure.
And yet these remakes have nothing to do with the notion of time. You could say that Perrone is before Pascali, after Gabellone and that DeDominicis and is between Cattelan and Paola Pivi, that turns out to be the aunt of Carol Rama. Fits perfectly.
In this use of citations there is a partial and subjective approach to a ransacked past as opposed to an objective and absolute vision of collective history to which everyone tries to add the next step. You take possession of time, taking it from your side, bending the old view points to match your own that are current, contemporary. The meaning of a century becomes an entirely personal pretext, and the strings that have woven the culture of millions of people become knots from which to pull out solitary stories. Hitler is no longer Hitler but my favorite cartoon, Venus reminds me of my grandma, wine reminds me of shampoo and Warhol reminds me of my erotic fantasy. Replicating Kounellis, at this point, would be nothing.
In fact the attitude of these generations is not to derange, there is no utopia of the new, there is no presumption of the unique. And this, is very contemporary.