Germano Celant

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Germano Celant (Genoa, 1937) is an Italian writer and curator who coined the term "Arte Povera" (poor art) in 1967 and wrote many articles and books on the subject.

The concept of Arte Povera seemed to be that in Italy art was quite different from the America due to the different circumstances at the time. Italy was going through an industrial period but was not really making the pop art that coincided with the established economy as opposed to American artists like Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and other pop artists. The Italian artists were going for a neo-humanism in their art and not for the coolness and calculated machine made imagery of the pop artists. Celant's manifesto of Arte Povera, Notes for a Guerilla, was originally published in Flash Art in 1967. The "Arte Povera" artists included Michelangelo Pistoletto, Alighiero Boetti, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Giuseppe Penone, Giulio Paolini, Giovanni Anselmo and many others.

Germano Celant edited and curated the Catalogue Raisonné of Italian artist Piero Manzoni in 1974. In 1997 he was the director of the Venice Biennale and is currently Senior Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.