“Minchia”: tha artwork that disturbs Palermo

From the Artist's Shit by Piero Manzoni to the Marcel Duchamp's oratorio, contemporary art envisions to amaze and to be outraged.

Inserted in this context, the work of Fabrizio Cicero, who in the last week is making so much sensation, does not seem anything extraordinary. Presented at the twelfth edition of Manifesta, the nomadic biennial of contemporary art and culture that takes place in twenty locations in the city of Palermo until November 4, the project consists of a luminary with the word "Minchia" in the center, surrounded by a series of decorative motifs. The installation located in via Alloro, entitled aichnim, incorporates the term local dialect that originally indicates the male sexual organ, over time, has become a common interlayer, an expression that, depending on the context, can expressing exclamation, contempt, appreciation or amazement.

Despite being a word almost completely cleared, many were indignant, throwing themselves against the work of art, exacerbated by the fact that it was turned on the very day of the visit of Pope Francesco in the city. Trying to explain his reasons and quell the controversy, Cicero said:

"What may seem like a desecrating and ingenuously breaking operation, is instead a small, modest hymn to the sacred. Write a dirty word in the sky or re-appropriate the most ancient sense of the sacred through an art, among the most recent, from the origins associated with religious celebrations: the lumen symbol of life and tension towards the heavenly home may seem like a desecrating and ingenuously breaking operation, is instead a small, modest hymn to the sacred".

What do you think? A big deal out of nothing?