Is Jago Really the Problem? Italian Contemporary Art Has Stopped Taking Risks

While Jago wins over audiences and institutions, part of the art system still dismisses him as obvious, rhetorical and media-driven. But what if the real problem is an art world so correct that artists no longer dare to use the sixteenth word?

Jago does not always convince me. Some of his works seem too explicit. Others appear designed from the beginning to become instantly recognisable images. At times, he pushes emotion so far that the sculpture almost tells us what we are supposed to feel.

I understand many of the criticisms. What I understand less is the confidence with which part of the contemporary art world continues to dismiss him as too obvious, too media-friendly and too popular, as if those three accusations were enough to close the discussion.

Jago Has Entered the Institutions

Meanwhile, Jago continues to enter institutions. Expo, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, the Italian Parliament and Capri already form part of his unusual trajectory. Now an installation at Palazzo Lombardia and Corpi Esposti at the MA*GA Museum in Gallarate will place his work inside another institutional context. A museum does not automatically turn an artist into a great artist, nor does institutional recognition settle the question of artistic value. Yet reducing everything to marketing has become an equally convenient response.

Jago knows how to communicate. He knows how to transform marble sculpture into images that travel far beyond the physical location of the work. He understands the mechanisms of public attention better than many of his critics. His museums, exhibitions and public projects confirm that this relationship with audiences is not incidental to his practice. Once we have acknowledged all this, however, one question remains: what exactly is the alternative?

I do not believe art should be easy, and I certainly do not believe it should try to please everyone. Letting Instagram decide what matters would be depressing. But between becoming viral and leaving almost nothing behind lies an enormous territory. That is where an artwork can produce a consequence. Someone slows down, turns back, becomes irritated, experiences pleasure, fails to understand but feels the need to understand. It is also where the apparently simple question of what can still be called contemporary art becomes difficult again.

For years, we have explained the distance between contemporary art and the public by saying that the public lacks the necessary tools. This is often true. But when an artwork is not understood, there are at least two possibilities. The viewer may lack the tools to enter it, or the work may offer no reason to look for them.

Jago and the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale

The Italian Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale offers a useful way to examine this contradiction. Con te con tutto, Chiara Camoni’s project for the Italian Pavilion, is a beautiful, sensitive and coherent project, carefully built through sculpture, plants, ritual, memory and collective work. Curated by Cecilia Canziani, the installation brings together twenty-four life-sized sculptures and a wider environment based on collaboration, reuse and the relationship between living and inert matter. The curatorial homework has been done well. Very well.

That is precisely why the question becomes more uncomfortable. If we show Con te con tutto to someone who does not work in the art world, and then show the same person Jago’s Habemus Hominem, which image will remain in their mind one week later?

I am not asking which is the better artwork. That would be a much simpler argument, and probably a useless one.

In Habemus Hominem, the portrait of Benedict XVI loses the Pope’s vestments and remains the body of an elderly man. Power becomes skin, age and mortality. Is it simple? Yes. Can it become rhetorical? Certainly. But the image arrives before the explanation. You do not need to know the curator, read the press release or recognise the approved theoretical vocabulary before entering it.

This does not prove that Jago is greater than Camoni. It reveals that memorability, accessibility and emotional force have become strangely suspicious qualities within part of contemporary art. As if being remembered were already evidence of intellectual weakness.

Memorability, however, is not the same as consequence. Advertising can be unforgettable, propaganda can be emotionally powerful, and a viral image can reach millions without changing anything beyond the duration of its own attention. The question, then, is not simply whether Jago reaches people. It is whether contemporary criticism has developed sufficiently precise tools to distinguish emotional simplification from an encounter that actually leaves something behind.

The Fifteen Words of Contemporary Art

The question goes beyond Jago and Camoni. Who decides the boundaries of contemporary art today, and through which vocabulary?

The same words return across press releases, biennials, institutional exhibitions and interviews: body, identity, care, community, ecology, archive, participation, decolonisation, memory, gender, territory, vulnerability, relationship, collectivity and transformation.

Let us call them, provocatively, the fifteen words of the system.

None of these words is wrong. Many describe urgent political, social and historical questions. The problem begins when they become a passport for being recognised as contemporary. It is no longer enough to make a work. The artist must also know how to position it within an approved linguistic territory. This is part of a broader mechanism through which museums frame, legitimise and neutralise institutional criticism.

Hans Ulrich Obrist is one of the most visible symbols of this world, not the person responsible for creating it. The point is that the system has developed such a precise common language that artists have learned to speak it perfectly. Perhaps domestication begins exactly here.

Using the fifteen words correctly is relatively safe. The sixteenth word is not.

The sixteenth word is the one the curator did not predict. It may embarrass a gallery, complicate a museum’s position or divide the people who supported the artist until yesterday. It is the word whose acceptability has not yet been tested. We do not know in advance whether the institution will translate it, absorb it or abandon the artist who dared to use it.

When Political Art Already Knows the Correct Answer

Something happens when an artist becomes less politically correct, in the least banal meaning of the expression. This does not mean becoming racist, sexist or professionally provocative. It means entering a question without already knowing which position one’s own environment will consider correct.

Part of contemporary art has absorbed political correctness almost as a material. Artists know which subjects to address and which side to occupy. The result can be formally powerful and intellectually serious. But when every conclusion has been established in advance, risk disappears.

We are then confronted by a strange form of radical art that risks almost nothing.

It speaks about war, capitalism, migration, identity, climate, colonialism and power, but frequently knows its conclusion before the work begins. It does not enter the fracture. It describes it, sometimes brilliantly, while remaining protected from its consequences.

The work may look dangerous without ever becoming dangerous to the structure presenting it. It can accuse power in general while leaving every specific relationship intact. It gives the institution the appearance of conflict and gives the artist the security of belonging to the correct side of it. This is precisely the contradiction raised by Pyotr Pavlensky when he rejects the increasingly elastic category of “political art”.

Santiago Sierra and the Sixteenth Word

Santiago Sierra’s presence at ARCO Madrid in 2018 provides a useful counterexample. For years, Sierra had worked on exploitation, inequality, labour and power. Then he presented Presos políticos en la España contemporánea, a series of pixelated portraits referring to people whom the work identified as political prisoners in contemporary Spain, including figures connected to the Catalan independence movement.

At that point, “power” stopped being a general word. It became that power, in that country, inside that fair, at that precise political moment. At IFEMA’s request, the Helga de Alvear gallery removed the work from its stand. The institutional reaction immediately became part of the work’s meaning.

That is where the sixteenth word appears.

The episode does not mean that every censored artwork is important or that censorship automatically proves artistic value. It shows what happens when political art stops pointing safely elsewhere. The conflict is no longer contained in the subject of the work. It enters the institution hosting it.

Has Radical Art Become Perfectly House-Trained?

The Italian critic Christian Caliandro has used the expression arte fighetta to describe art that has adapted perfectly to its own environment. The phrase is difficult to translate without losing its tone. “Cool-kid art” comes close: art that is intelligent, informed, fashionable and apparently radical, but so familiar with the rules of its own world that it almost always avoids the point where something might actually break.

This does not produce bad art by definition. It can produce elegant, complex and even moving work. But it also creates a protected radicalism, one whose language announces risk while its structure prevents it.

Artists may speak about instability while following an extremely stable professional script. They learn which references to cite, which urgencies to activate and which theoretical language makes a project legible to curators, foundations and selection committees. The work remains contemporary because it resembles the contemporary art already recognised by the system.

The sixteenth word threatens this agreement. It may be aesthetically unfashionable, emotionally excessive, politically inconvenient or impossible to translate into the language of a funding application. It might even be wrong. That possibility matters because art cannot take a risk if failure has already been removed from the process.

Art Criticism Is Part of the Problem

Those of us who write about art must include ourselves in this discussion.

If a work does not move us, we say it was never intended to be emotional. If people do not understand it, we say it is complex. If nobody remembers it, we say it operates subtly. If it produces no visible effect, we say its resistance cannot be measured through immediate consequences.

All these explanations are possible. None of them can be true every time.

Sometimes an artwork simply does not work. An artist can fail. A curator can fail. A museum can fail. Critics can fail too. Admitting this does not mean handing authority to the public, attendance figures or social media engagement. It means refusing to transform every weakness into evidence of sophistication.

The public can love terrible art, and Jago’s popularity does not automatically demonstrate his importance. But a specialist system can also end up rewarding the art that resembles its own language, confirms its values and protects its structures. The history of contemporary art in the 2010s repeatedly showed how museums could absorb criticism while preserving the systems being criticised.

Why Jago Matters Even When He Fails

This may be what makes Jago interesting even when he does not convince. His trajectory has moved in the opposite direction from the one the art system usually considers legitimate. First came the public and recognisability. Then came an increasing number of institutions.

This does not crown him. It does not eliminate the rhetoric in some of his sculptures, the emotional pressure or the suspicion that certain images were conceived to circulate. It does, however, force the system to look at something it might prefer not to examine.

Why does a technically traditional sculptor reach people whom much institutionally approved political art cannot reach? Why is immediate emotional legibility treated as a weakness, while the inability to communicate outside a specialist circle is so often protected as complexity? These questions become harder to avoid when a museum places Jago’s sculptures in dialogue with more than a century of Italian art. Why has distance from the public almost become a certificate of seriousness?

The real problem is not choosing between Jago and Chiara Camoni. It is determining whether contemporary art has turned linguistic correctness into a cage and public distance into proof of quality.

Art does not need to explain itself completely. It should preserve ambiguity, resistance and difficulty. But it should still be capable of entering the fractures of society without already knowing how it will emerge, what the correct conclusion will be or whether the institution will remain on its side.

If art risks nothing, shifts nothing and leaves nothing behind, calling it political does not make it political. It remains a beautifully curated internal conversation.

Perhaps Jago is too much. That is possible. But part of Italian contemporary art may have become too little.

At that point, Michelangelo Pistoletto’s mirrors might still be useful. Not as another elegant quotation, but as a surface in which the art world can finally look at itself without distorting what it sees.