When will this epidemic that forces us to a mandatory confinement end? At the moment, in Italy, although the epidemic has slightly exceeded the deaths caused by seasonal flu, at the same time not only has a large part of the tertiary economy stopped, but has forced a generalized blockade of all cultural activities, and like wildfire the block has spread all over the world, with orders dropped from above or with a responsible sense of self-organization. Many galleries have canceled their programming or have rescheduled their activities after months (see Piero Gilardi’s exhibition at Michel Rein gallery in Paris, which is postponed in  September); some galleries at the beginning (when the rules were less severe) set up the exhibitions without making the opening, other galleries (such as Bianconi in Milan) with an ongoing exhibition (“Umberto Bignardi. Visual experiments in Rome, 1964-67”) continued to to spread the news on the net, keeping at least the communication channels open, others (such as Xavier Hufkens, with the current exhibition by Michel François) kept the offices open and closed the exhibition; some museums (Tate Liverpool) continued the activity with restricted access, others (such as the ICA in Boston and the MoMA in New York) have autonomously decided to close the doors, suspending the entire programming, without fixing a subsequent opening date.

In Italy any institutional appointment has been put in the drawer pending better times. Finally, some brief examples from the world of art fairs: the 2020 edition of Art Basel Hong Kong has been canceled (by moving the visits to a virtual platform: artbasel.com/hong-kong/the-show) and the organizational offices have already set the dates of the 2021 edition: from 25 to 27 March. At this year’s edition, in the main section, these were the intalian galleries: Alfonso Artiaco, Continua, Massimo De Carlo, Arte Maggiore, Mazzoleni, Francesca Minini, Franco Noero, Rossi & Rossi, Lia Rumma, Tornabuoni . Turin and Milan went haywire with spring expiration fairs; in particular Miart had to give in to the impossibility of respecting the programming dates and announced the new date: 11-13 September, with a preview on 10 September, and everyone is trembling waiting to know if Art Basel (the dean of the art fairs) which also had to move its usual appointment from June to September (from 17 to 20) will be able to revive the fate of a system brought to its knees by too many sacrifices. The 17th International Architecture Exhibition (Giardini and Arsenale of Venice, “How will we live together?” curated by Hashim Sarkis) had to surrender to the evidence and its inauguration in May was moved to August 29 (moreover by starting the Educational Activity on the website www.labiennale.org).

Will all this be sufficient to solve the problems that we have accumulated in these days of forced stop? And will these dates find a definitive confirmation or will we have to postpone them again? Will the economy restart or will we fall into a deep recession from which it will take years to come out? How will the real market react (not only that of art, but that of everyday life, essential goods, rents, sale of apartments, production of goods and services)? Just one small example: on 25 November 2018, the road leading to the top of Vesuvius was closed for safety reasons. As a result, in the absence of tourists and hikers, restaurants, bars, souvenir shops, parking lots were forced into inactivity. Inactivity that must be calibrated on the number of 700 thousand tourists ascertained in 2018. Ultimately, albeit limited, a small economic catastrophe.

From any point of view you want to look at the problem, the most disturbing aspect is unfortunately the impossibility of making predictions, that is, of facing long-term planning. We do not think only of the small gallery with owner and secretary and maybe an assistant, we think of the networks, of those names that have offices scattered all over the world and that have staff that are around just under 100 units, including directors, archivists , office workers, press office, etc. I think of Pace Gallery or Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner …

Of course, a great challenge awaits us and, perhaps, when it will be possible to put an end to the spread of this epidemic, it could be the right time to start tackling the problems of a new vision of economic development, a development that knows how to consider the health of planet Earth, with its overcrowding, the ozone hole, the melting of ice, deforestation, the reduction of biodiversity, the safety of many fragile ecosystems. Which, in other words, poses the question in these terms: what must be man’s ethical task on planet Earth? In this regard, I recall a campaign launched in 2019 by a coalition of NGOs, on the spread of palm oil as biodisel and which is believed to be responsible for the deforestation of equatorial forests: #NotInMyTank. The problems triggered by billions of bipeds, scattered in the four corners of the globe, are innumerable, but it is clear that if their number was less, also the requests for drinking water and energy for domestic and industrial use and other basic necessities would be much lower and perhaps tolerable by the planet Earth. Of course, to reverse this paradoxical curve in geometric expansion we should have in mind that we would have decades of economic stagnation ahead of us before a subsequent recovery. On the other hand, there are environmental scholars who speak of a very close date as a point of no return, the one where the destruction can no longer be contained: 2028.

I also recall a thought expressed by Enzo Santese close to this situation of solitude: “In the separateness of the moment, forced as we are to live in symbiosis with ourselves, observing not only the courtesy distances but also the most probable ones of life security, we all feel closer in this hope that the night will pass soon and allow us to find ourselves discussing this problem with the detached eye of those who have overcome the shipwreck “(in Amicando semper no. 14, March 2020). But hope is no longer a sufficient sentiment: perhaps the time has come to act and make necessary choices that lay the foundations for new economic and demographic models of development.

Finally, I would like to mention some other examples of disastrous epidemics, just to understand how numbers should motivate our actions, giving us the strength to act and react. The so-called black plague is the first of these examples: it exploded starting in 1346 in northern China, and through Syria spread in successive waves in Turkey, Greece, Egypt, Balkans, Sicily, Genoa, Switzerland, France, Spain. It landed in 1349 in England, Scotland, Ireland. In 1353 the outbreaks of the disease decreased until they disappeared. According to modern calculations, the black plague killed a third of the continent’s population, causing nearly 20 million victims. The so-called Spanish pandemic was in effect a particularly fatal flu that between 1918 and 1920 infected 500 million people worldwide (including some inhabitants of remote islands of the Pacific Ocean and the Arctic Ocean), causing the death of 50-100 million people out of a world population of about 2 billion.

Perhaps epidemics are more frightening or we talk more about them, but there are other examples of deaths that are numerically significant and on which too little attention is paid. On December 5, 1952, thanks to the high stationary pressure on England, a dense yellowish fog fell over London and lasted for five days: 150 thousand people ended up in hospital for respiratory problems, asthma attacks and infections, and four thousand (above all old people and children) died, but in the following months the victims reached 12 thousand. We also know that Chinese smog is not a lung balm and 1.6 million Chinese are estimated to die each year from air pollution.

These numbers do not pretend to make you don’t take Covid-19 epidemic into proper consideration, but they only want to draw attention to two factors: the first is that death has accompanied the whole history of humanity; the second is that after the emergency, the rubble that will remain on the ground will be worse than the dead that preceded it and without, perhaps, the optimism of the reconstruction. And under the rubble will remain not only the complex network of the entire art system, but to dig for good we will also find bartenders, restaurateurs, hairdressers, tour operators, hotels … And I hope that my prophecy is, at least in part, wrong.