Who's afraid of Transavanguardia? Reassembling actor-networks of visual art and politics in Italy 1976-1986

This study investigates how Transavanguardia rose to prominence in late-1970s and 1980s Italy and how that ascent was materially and discursively entangled with the Italian Socialist Party under Bettino Craxi. Rather than treating Transavanguardia as a coherent stylistic “movement”, the thesis reconstructs it as a cultural event assembled through networks of mediation –– critics, artists, dealers, institutions, media formats, exhibitions, catalogues, and funding flows –– whose alignments produced visibility, legitimacy, and market value. Informed by Actor-network Theory (ANT) and supplemented by art-historical and political analysis, the study asks how cultural authority was fabricated across the PSI’s patronage ecology and what this reveals about cultural legitimation in late twentieth-century Italy.
Methodologically, the research combines ethnographic interviews and oral histories with archival work and discourse analysis of exhibitions, press coverage, party documents, and artworld periodicals. Central attention is given to Achille Bonito Oliva’s “protagonist” and later “total/military” criticism, read as a performative apparatus that translated post-ideological rhetoric, media spectacle, and market logics into an apparently pluralist, depoliticized cultural formation. Case studies include the Venice Biennale (from the 1977 Biennale di Dissenso to Aperto ’80), television and magazine circuits (RAI, Frigidaire), and the infrastructural role of Flash Art.
The dissertation argues that Transavanguardia’s formation, circulation, and later marginalization are best explained as network effects: outcomes of negotiated enrolments and exclusions that reconfigured how “what there is to see” was staged. The Italian case offers a broader model for analyzing contemporary regimes of legitimacy in which authority is produced through mediated visibility, affect, and institutional alignment.