{"id":18271,"date":"2026-04-26T12:30:13","date_gmt":"2026-04-26T10:30:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.marsilioarte.it\/?post_type=magazine&#038;p=18271"},"modified":"2026-04-26T12:30:13","modified_gmt":"2026-04-26T10:30:13","slug":"interview-maurizio-cattelan-joseph-kosuth","status":"publish","type":"magazine","link":"https:\/\/www.marsilioarte.it\/en\/magazine\/interview-maurizio-cattelan-joseph-kosuth\/","title":{"rendered":"13 questions from Maurizio Cattelan to Joseph Kosuth"},"content":{"rendered":"<strong>Maurizio Cattelan<\/strong>: Joseph, you\u2019ve filled the entrance hall of Casa dei Tre Oci with a text by Michel Foucault discussing \u2018resemblances\u2019 and \u2018conveniences.\u2019 But if, as your exhibition title (<em>The-Exchange-Value-of-Language-Has-Fallen-To-Zero<\/em>) suggests, the exchange value of language has dropped to zero, wouldn\u2019t it have been more consistent to leave the walls completely blank?<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\n<strong>Joseph Kosuth<\/strong>: I was tempted to respond \u2018How can you be sure that I haven\u2019t?\u2019. With then, the suggestion being that my text has a meta-esque relationship with the site of the whole exhibition. The point being that the relevant questions in art, remain ontological.<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\n<strong>Cattelan<\/strong>: You\u2019ve lived in Venice for many years and witnessed dozens of Biennales. In your opinion, is Conceptual art the only thing that hasn\u2019t yet drowned in the lagoon, or has it become an antique-as reassuring as 18th-century furniture?<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\n<strong>Kosuth<\/strong>: Not just \u2018witnessed\u2019 but participated in many Biennales, which is a significantly different view. In other words I\u2019m no passive victim. It\u2019s been my experience that when it was any good the conceptual art actually removed the furniture from the room.<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\n<strong>Cattelan<\/strong>: The work \u2018<em>A Chain of Resemblance\u2019<\/em>\u00a0transforms philosophy into a luminous object. Do you think visitors actually stop to reflect on epistemology, or has neon simply become the perfect lighting for a well-angled selfie?<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\n<strong>Kosuth<\/strong>: The beauty of what the visitors bring to any work of art is their own special level of ignorance toward what they are viewing. Your question elegantly covers the range of possibilities.<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\n<strong>Cattelan<\/strong>: You\u2019ve dedicated works to Piet Mondrian, Immanuel Kant, Franz Kafka, and now Foucault. Do you feel more like an artist creating worlds, or a translator shedding new light on the genius of those who are no longer with us?<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\n<strong>Kosuth<\/strong>: How can you say they aren\u2019t with us?\u00a0 The discourse your question refers to contradicts you. The implication of your question is risky, so let\u2019s not denigrate all the work of the dead just because we happen to be alive. Apparently.<br \/>\r\n<h2>CATTELAN INTERVIEWS KOSUTH<\/h2><br \/>\r\n<strong>Cattelan<\/strong>: For Ca\u2019 Foscari University, you worked on Carlo Scarpa. He used concrete and water; you use dictionary definitions. In the end, which of you has left a more \u2018concrete\u2019 mark?<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\n<strong>Kosuth<\/strong>: I used dictionary definitions between 1966 and 1968. We need to go back nearly sixty years to find relevant examples? Thanks for the compliment, but you are too kind! But, to respond in another way, what I\u2019ve contributed has been useful, and we\u2019ve seen in what ways, but what Carlo contributed is actually useful in a practical way.<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\n<strong>Cattelan<\/strong>: You\u2019ve always maintained that art is an idea: \u201cArt as Idea as Idea.\u201d But today, with ideas flying through the cloud at high speed, is the weight of an intuition still measured by intellectual intensity, or is it now measured by market value?<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\n<strong>Kosuth<\/strong>: Well, those are the horns of our dilemma, no? The enterprise of making art is making meaning, and we find ourselves as artists in a struggle with the market over who\/what will provide that meaning. Probably \u2012 and I say this optimistically \u2012 it\u2019s only our \u2018intellectual intensity\u2019 that will provide sufficient authenticity to resist the collapse of artistic meaning into what the market offers.<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\n<strong>Cattelan<\/strong>: You\u2019ve used neon for decades. When a letter burns out in one of your installations, does the work acquire a new meaning, or do you view it simply as an unexpected silence in the conversation?<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\n<strong>Kosuth<\/strong>: It mutely retains its old meaning as it waits for a repair.<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\n<strong>Cattelan<\/strong>: Joseph, have you ever had the forbidden urge to paint a sunset \u2012 or perhaps a dog \u2012without feeling the need to explain why you were doing it?<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\n<strong>Kosuth<\/strong>: This is not the kind of \u2018forbidden urge\u2019 that worries me.<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\n<strong>Cattelan<\/strong>: If you could erase a single word from every dictionary in the world just to see the effect it had on reality, which one would you choose?<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\n<strong>Kosuth<\/strong>: The word \u2018Dictionary\u2019 on the cover.<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\n<strong>Cattelan<\/strong>: Is it more rewarding to be understood deeply by ten philosophers or to be loved by a thousand people who don\u2019t even know who Wittgenstein was?<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\n<strong>Kosuth<\/strong>: My goal has always been to be understood by a thousand philosophers who would each then explain convincingly and deeply to ten people each, why Wittgenstein matters.<br \/>\r\n<h2>ART ACCORDING TO KOSUTH<\/h2><br \/>\r\n<strong>Cattelan<\/strong>: Has Conceptual art truly won its battle, or has it become the \u201celegant font\u201d of a system that has run out of things to say?<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\n<strong>Kosuth<\/strong>: Conceptual art, as I see it, is a methodological reconsideration of the practice of art, and thus its meaning, freeing it from an a priori definition. So it sees art as a verb, not a noun.<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\n<strong>Cattelan<\/strong>: What is the next exhibition you\u2019re going to see?<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\n<strong>Kosuth<\/strong>: This one I really can\u2019t answer.<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\n<strong>Cattelan<\/strong>: One last question \u2012 the hardest one. If you were a philosophical text, which one would you be?<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\n<strong>Kosuth<\/strong>: The menu on the last spaceship leaving earth.<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\nInterview made in collaboration with <em>la Lettura<\/em> of <em>Corriere della Sera<\/em>","protected":false},"featured_media":18261,"template":"","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categorie_magazine":[343],"class_list":["post-18271","magazine","type-magazine","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","categorie_magazine-words-from-marte"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>13 questions from Maurizio Cattelan to Joseph Kosuth - Marsilio Arte<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Protagonist of the exhibition at the Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice, Joseph Kosuth answers questions from his colleague Maurizio Cattelan\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.marsilioarte.it\/en\/magazine\/interview-maurizio-cattelan-joseph-kosuth\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"13 questions from Maurizio Cattelan to Joseph Kosuth\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Protagonist of the exhibition at the Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice, Joseph Kosuth answers questions from his colleague Maurizio Cattelan\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.marsilioarte.it\/en\/magazine\/interview-maurizio-cattelan-joseph-kosuth\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Marsilio Arte\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/MarsilioArte\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.marsilioarte.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Banner-eventi-Kosuth-Cattelan-low-scaled.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"2560\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"1280\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@MarsilioArte\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.marsilioarte.it\/en\/magazine\/interview-maurizio-cattelan-joseph-kosuth\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.marsilioarte.it\/en\/magazine\/interview-maurizio-cattelan-joseph-kosuth\/\",\"name\":\"13 questions from Maurizio Cattelan to Joseph Kosuth - Marsilio Arte\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.marsilioarte.it\/en\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.marsilioarte.it\/en\/magazine\/interview-maurizio-cattelan-joseph-kosuth\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.marsilioarte.it\/en\/magazine\/interview-maurizio-cattelan-joseph-kosuth\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.marsilioarte.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Banner-eventi-Kosuth-Cattelan-low-scaled.jpg\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-04-26T10:30:13+00:00\",\"description\":\"Protagonist of the exhibition at the Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice, Joseph Kosuth answers questions from his colleague Maurizio Cattelan\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.marsilioarte.it\/en\/magazine\/interview-maurizio-cattelan-joseph-kosuth\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.marsilioarte.it\/en\/magazine\/interview-maurizio-cattelan-joseph-kosuth\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.marsilioarte.it\/en\/magazine\/interview-maurizio-cattelan-joseph-kosuth\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.marsilioarte.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Banner-eventi-Kosuth-Cattelan-low-scaled.jpg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.marsilioarte.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Banner-eventi-Kosuth-Cattelan-low-scaled.jpg\",\"width\":2560,\"height\":1280,\"caption\":\"Da sinistra a destra: Joseph. 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