Gallerist NY

Interviewing the artist Maurizio Cattelan is like trying to extract a splinter with a spatula. The tools in your journalistic toolbox turn out to be blunt and absurd, but you proceed with them anyhow, quixotically. An hour into things, you’re smacking the splinter with the spatula, believing it will come out the other side.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Mr. Cattelan, 51, was born in Padua, Italy, and has lived in New York for almost 20 years. He has made funny art and is an intermittently somber man. Patches of moodiness cross the mountain range of his face, dark clouds on an otherwise sunny day. Read More

I don’t get Maurizio Cattelan’s work. It’s not that I don’t have a sense of humor. I just have never found him funny. His art, which comprises Madame Tussaud’s-style wax figures (like a barefoot J.F.K. in a coffin) and stuffed animals (pigeons or golden retrievers), has always made me feel like the joke’s on me, or on the chump of a collector duped into buying one of these things for an exorbitant price. Granted his “pope struck by a meteor” (la Nona Ora) and his “praying Hitler” (Him) provided some striking imagery, but what of his tasteless figures of homeless people or that ridiculous squirrel that committed suicide with a mini pistol? That stuff is in poor taste. Why would anyone ever want to own one of those goofy jokes? Read More