Anything but Work is a collection of witty portraits of people who work in contemporary art by Italian-Swiss curator Andrea Bellini, director of the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève and artistic director of the Biennial of Moving Images.
Bellini describes the everyday lives of artists, curators, and art dealers: exhibition previews, dinners, invitation-only parties, conversations over a glass of wine in a restaurant, and night walks in the city. Some of the prototypes behind his characters are more easily recognizable than others, but what he is interested in are types: a late-blooming curator who failed to make it as an artist; a director of a large fair who dreams of turning it into an international brand and is ready to let dozens of billionaires die on safari trips in the UAE to achieve that; a rich collector, resting at his palazzo like a Roman patrician and served by a resident artist and a resident curator; a crab-like entrepreneur to whom art is but capital and an opportunity to democratize the investment market.
Bellini’s characters come to life in his brief, sharp descriptions, which are as tender as they are satirical. The collection reflects the situation in art in recent years, especially in the post-COVID period.
