By Fabio Lanna, Founder and Editor of Nordrom Kunst
I spent many years around contemporary art in Italy.
Exhibitions, galleries, openings, artists, curators, collectors, institutions.
Today, as Founder and Editor of Nordrom Kunst, I work from Northern Norway, looking at contemporary art across the Arctic and Sápmi. That geographical distance has unexpectedly changed the way I look back at the art system I came from.
Not because I discovered a better art world in the North.
And not because Italy lacks extraordinary artists, institutions or critical practices.
But because encountering artistic practices in Sápmi, where questions of land, knowledge, sovereignty, memory and cultural survival can be inseparable from the work itself, has made one question increasingly difficult for me to ignore.
What happens when the system surrounding contemporary art becomes more visible than the art itself?
The empty walls
The discomfort is not mine alone.
In the Quaderni d’arte italiana published by Quadriennale di Roma, Lorenzo Madaro addressed the growing distance between contemporary art and Italian society in an essay titled Il vuoto alle pareti. La scomparsa dell’arte dalle vite del ceto medio.
His starting point is revealing.
Italian artists of previous generations could become recognisable far beyond the specialised art system. Contemporary art participated in a broader cultural imagination.
Today that relationship appears far less obvious.
Madaro asks why contemporary art has progressively disappeared from the lives and homes of the Italian middle class, while expenditure on design, furniture and other forms of cultural consumption remains entirely normal.
The question is not simply why people do not buy paintings.
It is why contemporary art has become so distant from ordinary cultural life that many people no longer feel that it belongs to them at all.
That is already a more serious problem than the size of the market.
It is a problem of relationship.
When the system becomes the subject
Another essay published by Quadriennale di Roma approaches the issue from a different direction.
In Storia di una schizofrenia. Dal critico al curatore: una specie in via di trasformazione, Roberto Pinto examines the changing relationship between critics, curators and artists.
His argument is not that curators are unnecessary.
Contemporary exhibitions clearly require research, interpretation, organisation and intellectual frameworks.
The problem appears when the machinery surrounding the artwork begins to acquire an authority greater than the work itself.
Pinto discusses the growing power of curators to include and exclude artists from important exhibitions and collections.
He also questions situations in which the curatorial framework becomes so dominant that the specificity of individual artistic practices risks being compressed beneath the concept of the exhibition.
Stefania Zuliani, writing elsewhere in the same Quadriennale research context, similarly reflects on the increasing centrality of the curator and the exhibition system, as well as the changing relationship between criticism, communication and contemporary art.
These are not attacks coming from outside the Italian system.
They are questions being asked from inside one of its central institutions.
The artist returns
The 2025 Quadriennale itself appears to recognise part of this tension.
In the development of Fantastica, curator Francesco Stocchi explicitly proposed giving total autonomy back to the artist.
His position responded to an exhibition system characterised by increasing professional specialisation, where artists operate alongside curators, designers, communication teams, technicians and an expanding infrastructure of production.
The significance of these choices is difficult to ignore.
If one of Italy’s most important contemporary art institutions feels the need to insist again on the autonomy of the artist, it suggests that something about that autonomy has become worth defending.
This does not mean that the curator has replaced the artist.
It means that the relationship between them has become important enough to question.
Art, value and ownership
Then there is the market.
Italy has a substantial art economy.
The country maintains a dense ecosystem of galleries, fairs, dealers, foundations, auction houses and collectors.
But another transformation has taken place alongside this ecosystem.
The language used to describe art increasingly overlaps with the language of wealth management.
Research and services directed towards Italian collectors discuss artistic patrimony, portfolio diversification, market trends, acquisition strategies and the potential economic value of artworks.
Intesa Sanpaolo Private Banking has developed research and advisory services specifically around art collecting and the management and valorisation of artistic assets.
Recent research has examined the behaviour and strategies of hundreds of Italian collectors.
This does not mean that collectors buy art only to make money.
It does not demonstrate that collectors lack artistic knowledge.
And it certainly does not mean that collecting is inherently superficial.
Many collections are built through genuine intellectual engagement and support for artists.
But the vocabulary matters.
When an artwork can simultaneously become an aesthetic object, a social marker, an asset and an investment category, the relationship between cultural value and financial value becomes increasingly difficult to separate.
The fair as cultural landscape
Italian contemporary art also lives through fairs.
Artissima, miart and other major events create important opportunities for galleries and artists and bring international networks into Italian cities.
The distinction between market and cultural institution is therefore increasingly porous.
Again, this is not necessarily negative.
Artists need economies.
Galleries need sales.
Exhibitions need money.
Artworks need collectors.
The idea of an art world entirely detached from economics is itself a fantasy.
The more interesting question is what happens when the economic and professional machinery becomes so developed that it begins to determine how contemporary art is encountered.
The opening.
The fair.
The curator.
The collector.
The installation.
The communication strategy.
The social image of the exhibition.
At what point does the infrastructure become more visible than the artistic necessity that produced the work?
Looking north
Moving to the Arctic did not provide a simple opposite.
There is an art market here.
There are curators.
There are professional networks, institutions, competition, hierarchy and cultural power.
Artists in Norway struggle economically.
Public grants are highly competitive.
Institutions make choices about whose work becomes visible.
There is no innocent art system waiting somewhere beyond the Arctic Circle.
But the structure surrounding artistic production is noticeably different.
In Norway, public cultural policy explicitly treats the ability of an artist to continue producing work as a legitimate matter of public support.
Statens kunstnerstipend exists specifically to give artists time and economic conditions in which to develop their practice and potentially make artistic work their principal occupation.
In 2026, an annual working grant is worth more than 342,000 Norwegian kroner.
The existence of such a system does not guarantee security.
Most applicants do not receive a grant.
But the principle behind the system is significant.
Artistic production is recognised as something that a society may have an interest in sustaining even when the result cannot immediately be sold.
What becomes possible when the artwork does not need to become an object?
This economic difference has artistic consequences worth thinking about.
An artist whose practice depends entirely on selling objects encounters one set of pressures.
An artist who can obtain public funding for research, performance, archival work, community projects, moving image, sound or long term experimentation encounters another.
Neither system automatically produces better art.
But they can create different conditions for what kinds of art are possible.
This becomes particularly visible when looking at contemporary Sámi practices.
Here the question often moves far beyond what an artwork looks like.
It becomes:
What does it do?
What knowledge does it preserve?
What territory does it describe?
What political structure does it confront?
What community does it speak from?
And what forms of relationship does it make possible?
Art and land
Pauliina Feodoroff’s work provides an extraordinary example.
For the Sámi Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2022, Feodoroff developed a project connected directly to Sámi land threatened by extractive activity and environmental pressure.
Images of the territory entered the art economy.
But the relationship between buyer, image and land was deliberately altered.
Suddenly the familiar language of collecting becomes unstable.
The artwork can still be bought.
But purchasing the image cannot be separated from the territory represented by it.
The collector enters a relationship that extends beyond ownership of an object.
This does not abolish the market.
It redirects it.
Buy the art, not the land
The distinction is radical.
The art market normally transforms an artwork into property.
Feodoroff asks what happens when that transaction is connected back to land that should not simply become another commodity.
The artwork therefore exists simultaneously as image, economic transaction, political intervention and relationship to territory.
This is difficult to describe through the conventional opposition between aesthetic art and political art.
The work is still visual.
It still enters an exhibition.
It still circulates internationally.
But its purpose does not stop at representation.
The image participates in something outside itself.
This is where my experience of contemporary art in Sápmi began to challenge some of the assumptions I had carried with me from Italy.
When land is not a metaphor
The Sámi Pavilion presented Pauliina Feodoroff alongside Máret Ánne Sara and Anders Sunna.
The project centred Indigenous knowledge, sovereignty, history and Sámi perspectives.
These questions are not theoretical additions placed around the artworks by a curator.
They emerge from political and historical conditions affecting Sápmi itself.
Borders have divided Sámi territories.
Mining, forestry, energy infrastructure and other forms of development continue to create conflicts around land.
Reindeer herding depends on connected landscapes and migration routes.
The consequences are material.
This means that when contemporary Sámi artists work with territory, the landscape cannot automatically be reduced to subject matter.
It can be livelihood.
Ancestral memory.
Law.
Language.
Ecology.
Political conflict.
Home.
Girjegumpi
Joar Nango‘s Girjegumpi provides another model.
It is an archive, a library, an architectural structure and an evolving gathering place.
Its collection contains hundreds of publications connected to Sámi architecture, design, traditional building knowledge, Indigenous practices, activism and decolonisation.
The work does not ask the viewer simply to stand in front of an object.
People enter it.
Read inside it.
Meet inside it.
Knowledge circulates through it.
The artwork becomes infrastructure.
Again, the familiar categories begin to collapse.
Is it sculpture?
Architecture?
Library?
Archive?
Social space?
Research?
Perhaps the question itself matters less than what the project makes possible.
The danger of romanticising Sápmi
This comparison needs caution.
Sámi contemporary art should not become a convenient moral answer to problems in Italian contemporary art.
Sápmi is not a metaphor for authenticity.
Sámi artists are not valuable because they can teach southern Europe how to make meaningful art.
Their practices emerge from specific Indigenous histories, knowledge systems, political conflicts and relationships with land.
Nor is the Nordic art system free from power.
Public institutions determine funding.
Museums create hierarchies.
Curators select.
Artists compete for limited resources.
The international art world can itself aestheticise Sámi identity, turning political histories into desirable cultural visibility.
The fact that Indigenous art has become increasingly visible internationally creates its own questions about who benefits from that visibility and how it is framed.
There is no pure outside to the art system.
Two different questions
So perhaps comparing Italy and Sápmi is not useful if we ask which one produces better art.
That would be absurd.
The comparison becomes useful when we ask what different systems expect art to do.
A contemporary artwork in Milan, Turin or Rome can obviously be political, socially engaged, research based or deeply connected to place.
Italian artists have produced extraordinary practices of this kind for generations.
And contemporary Sámi art can exist inside museums, biennials, collections and international art markets.
The boundaries are not absolute.
But the dominant conversations around art can still reveal different priorities.
In Italy, institutions themselves are currently questioning the distance between contemporary art and society, the increasing power of curatorial structures and the relationship between art, collecting and financial value.
In Sápmi, many of the practices receiving international attention force different questions into the room.
Who controls land?
Who writes history?
Which knowledge survives?
What happens when state borders divide Indigenous territory?
What does environmental transformation mean for a culture whose practices depend on access to land?
Art cannot answer all of these questions.
But it cannot escape them either.
What is art actually for?
Perhaps the most uncomfortable difference is not aesthetic at all.
It concerns what we expect contemporary art to accomplish.
One system increasingly asks how art should be presented, circulated, collected and contextualised.
Another contains practices for which the distinction between artistic production and the conditions of life around it can become almost impossible to maintain.
That is an interpretation, not a measurable conclusion.
And there are many exceptions on both sides.
But after years of working around contemporary art in Italy, moving north has made the difference difficult for me to ignore.
It has made me suspicious of exhibitions where I remember the curator’s concept more clearly than the artists.
Suspicious of a cultural conversation in which price can become easier to communicate than meaning.
Suspicious of an art system that becomes exceptionally sophisticated at producing exhibitions while struggling to explain why contemporary art should matter outside them.
These are personal observations.
The criticism published by Quadriennale di Roma shows, however, that the discomfort is not entirely personal.
The Italian system is already asking itself similar questions.
Leaving Italy to look back at it
Sometimes distance changes the way a familiar landscape appears.
I did not move to Tromsø in order to discover a better art world.
I found another one.
Smaller.
More publicly supported.
Geographically dispersed.
Closely connected to questions of territory.
And increasingly shaped by Sámi artistic practices that challenge many conventional distinctions between artwork, knowledge, politics and place.
From here, the Italian system looks different.
Not empty.
Not culturally irrelevant.
Certainly not without exceptional artists.
But perhaps increasingly enclosed within structures that have become extraordinarily good at speaking to themselves.
Curators speak to institutions.
Institutions speak to collectors.
Fairs speak to galleries.
The professional art world speaks fluently to the professional art world.
The question is who else is listening.
And that returns us to Il vuoto alle pareti.
Perhaps the empty wall is not really the problem.
The problem begins when the relationship between contemporary art and the society outside the art system becomes empty too.
Sápmi does not provide a solution to that problem.
But it provides a powerful contrast.
Because when land, language, history and cultural survival enter an artwork, asking whether the piece fits beautifully on the wall suddenly feels like a very small question.
The larger one remains.
What is contemporary art for?