This year celebrates the hundred year anniversary of Futurism. As a young student of art history the Futurists seemed like a brethren to my desire to repudiate the academy and its dull strictures. I would argue endlessly about the pointlessness of the rote study of the figure or the need to copy the masters. In retrospect this was of course vanity and foolishness that youth engender but nonetheless I still hold or held a place in my heart for the futurist manifesto of burned museums and the beauty of the machine age.
ah youth.
In the new issue of Artforum I was forever disabused of my romanticism for Mr. Marinetti and his writings. He was merely a rich boy parading about decrying the status quo that had given him the luxury of time to make such pronouncements and not have to live by them. He was as Ezra Pound and others in over his head with his proclamations and in fact retreated in the end to his wealth.
But he and the more effective practitioners such as Giacommo Balla and Umberto Boccioni did bestow upon us Art Deco, Vorticism, Constructivism, Surrealism and Dada.
So rest well Filippo.
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