Speakers 2012

Gillo Dorfles (b. 1910 in Trieste) is an art critic, painter and philosopher. Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Trieste and the University of Milan, in 1948 he was among the founders of MAC, the Concrete Art movement (along with Atanasio Soldati, Galliano Mazzon, Gianni Monnet, and Bruno Munari), and in 1956 helped found ADI, the Italian industrial design association. He made a considerable contribution to the development of post-war Italian aesthetics, beginning with Discorso tecnico delle arti (1952), which was followed by works such as Il divenire delle arti (1959) and Nuovi riti, nuovi miti (1965). In his critical investigations of contemporary art, Dorfles has often examined the social and anthropological aspect of aesthetic and cultural phenomena, even drawing on the tools of linguistics. Dorfles was the first to point out echoes of the Baroque in modern art, and specifically in modern architecture, in Barocco nell'architettura moderna (1951). In 2008 he published Horror Pleni: La (in)civiltà del rumore (2008), which analyzes how the “mass-media slag” of our times has replaced cultural activities; and in 2009, Conformisti and Fatti e Fattoidi, as well as Arte e comunicazione, in which he measures theory against cinema, photography, architecture. In 2010 he published Irritazioni - Un'analisi del costume contemporaneo and 99+1 risposte di Gillo Dorfles, a “century-long” interview in which the critic looks back over his life and certain landmark encounters: from Italo Svevo to Andy Warhol, and from Leo Castelli to Leonor Fini.