Behind the Pistoletto Interview: When Art Becomes a Way of Living
Why the Third Paradise still matters today, but not only as a symbol
Before he entered the room
Read the shorter Italian version on Artribune
The interview began before Michelangelo Pistoletto entered the room.
I arrived nearly forty-five minutes early. I was not alone. Someone had come with me, and together we entered Cittadellarte with that slight tension that comes before meeting someone whose name has already passed through many rooms before you do.
We met Margherita Cugini, Head of Communications and Press Office. There was coffee. There was conversation. Everything felt relaxed, almost domestic. No ceremonial coldness. No choreography of importance.
Then we went upstairs. His wife was there. We spoke quietly. The atmosphere was simple, friendly, direct.
A few minutes before he appeared, I thought I might feel intimidated.
It would have been normal. I was not about to meet only an artist. I was about to sit in front of someone who had crossed contemporary art from the inside. Not as a spectator. Not as a commentator. As one of the people who helped shape part of its language.
Then, at the exact time, he appeared.
That detail stayed with me. He did not enter late, as if delay were part of his aura. He did not make the room wait for him. He arrived naturally, on time.
He filled the room, but the room did not become smaller for the others.
He was lucid, elegant, brilliant, perfectly natural. Very Pistoletto, I would say. Not theatrical. Not grand in the vulgar sense. He had the kind of authority that does not need to raise its voice.
The distance was real, but it was not humiliating. One understood who he was. One understood the scale of the person in front of us. But the encounter was not built to make that scale oppressive.
Before we began, I forgot to start the recorder.
He noticed it and kindly reminded me.
It was a small moment, almost nothing. But it broke the monument in the best possible way. The man who had crossed Arte Povera, the mirror paintings, the Minus Objects, the Third Paradise, Cittadellarte and the long history of contemporary art was also the person who noticed that I had forgotten the most basic thing.
The full interview has already been published. This is not that interview. This is what remained around it.
Authority without ceremony
There is always a risk when writing about someone like Pistoletto. Authority can turn very quickly into confirmation. A famous name can bend the room around itself. A living master can become a monument before he has even spoken.
But that was not what I found.
What I found was stranger and more interesting: authority without much ceremony.
At one point, while he was speaking about his return from America to Italy, the historical dimension of the person in front of me became physical. He was not speaking about a scene he had studied. He was speaking about a world he had touched.
America, at that moment, meant money, power, market, possibility. It meant the center. To return to Italy was not nostalgia. It was a risk. It was a choice of independence made exactly where another career could have opened.
He did not describe it as heroic. Perhaps that made it stronger. The decision seemed to come from a clear instinct: not to be absorbed by a system in which he did not fully recognize himself.
Then he mentioned Fontana.
At first he said only “Lucio.” Then, almost correcting the intimacy of the name for us, he added “Fontana.”
That small correction said more than many theoretical pages. For most of us, Lucio Fontana is a name in art history. A wall label. A cut. A chapter. A museum room.
For him, before becoming Fontana, he was Lucio.
There, the distance returned. Not as hierarchy, but as time. Pistoletto had not simply learned the history of contemporary art. He had been inside some of the rooms where that history was still unfinished.
Answering with art
The return from America became clearer during the visit.
I saw the Minus Objects, works made after his break from the consumerist logic he had encountered and refused. What struck me was not only the refusal. It was the way he refused.
He did not answer consumerism with a speech against consumerism.
He answered with art.
The polemic was not outside the work. It was inside the form. The Minus Objects do not behave like desirable products waiting to be consumed. They withdraw, interrupt, complicate. They carry a freedom that still feels difficult to domesticate.
Standing near them, I felt something very pure: freedom as artistic necessity.
Nearby was the legendary ball of paper, the one that once moved through Turin as a communal action. It could have felt like an archive object. A historical remainder. Something preserved because it once mattered.
Instead, it still seemed active.
Not because it was moving now, but because the idea inside it had not stopped moving. That ball of paper still touches one of the central questions of our society: what happens when art leaves the isolated object and becomes a shared act?
This is where Pistoletto becomes more complex than a single symbol.
Of course, the Third Paradise was present. It could not be absent. But to reduce him to the Third Paradise would be too easy. The Third Paradise matters because it belongs to a longer movement in his work: from the refusal of the object as pure commodity to the attempt to build social, ethical and relational forms through art.
The Third Paradise as method
During the interview, I did not perceive the Third Paradise as a decorative symbol of harmony.
I perceived it more as a method of transformation.
Not transformation as a vague spiritual word. Not “change” as cultural decoration. More precisely, it seemed to concern the relationship between the self, technology or artifice, and the other.
The “I,” the artificial world we produce, and the “you” who receives, resists, suffers, answers, participates.
Pistoletto does not seem to reject the world. That was important. He does not stand outside it like a moral judge. He accepts that the world exists with its strengths and defects, its violence and intelligence, its traps and possibilities.
He looks at it. He recognizes it. Then he tries to invent radical ways to improve the relation between human beings, society and the systems they build.
The Third Paradise is one of those attempts. Not the only one.
When he spoke about Love Difference, I had perhaps the clearest sensation that he was two or three steps ahead of me.
I had arrived with questions I wanted to make strong, maybe even unusual. I wanted the interview to avoid the predictable path. Yet there were moments when I felt that the questions I was trying to open had already been digested by him long before I formulated them.
He listened. He answered. But he also moved with the confidence of someone for whom certain complexities were not new territory.
With Love Difference, what impressed me was the clarity of the discourse. It was linear, lucid, convincing. Difference was not treated as a fashionable word. Not as an identity slogan. Not as a sentimental invitation to tolerate one another.
It appeared as a real problem of coexistence. Something art must help structure if it wants to matter beyond its own display.
At that point, I began to abandon my prepared order. I followed his answers and built the next questions from them. The interview became alive.
But with Pistoletto there was also pressure. The person in front of you could take the conversation to a level where your next question had to deserve the answer that came before.
After the recorder stopped
After about an hour, the interview ended.
Or better: the recorded part ended.
That distinction matters. What followed was not secondary.
His collaborators accompanied us through Cittadellarte. We saw the permanent collection. We saw the place of the Third Paradise, described to us with a word that sounded almost religious, something close to a sanctuary. I may not remember the exact term, but I remember the emotional impact.
It had weight.
Not the weight of a monument that demands silence. The weight of a place open enough to be entered.
What struck me most during the visit was trust.
Cittadellarte did not feel built on suspicion. It did not treat visitors as potential dangers. It did not protect art through theatrical distance. People moved, entered, looked, spoke.
There was openness, but not carelessness. There was confidence. And confidence is rarer than control.
At one point, during the visit to the permanent collection, there were some sketches by Pistoletto on a table. For some reason, they were there. We opened them, looked at them, touched that proximity for a moment.
In many art contexts, this would have been impossible. Or surrounded by that radical-chic sacredness that makes everything untouchable and everyone slightly guilty for being too close.
There, instead, the sketches were important, but they were not turned into relics.
Art was present without becoming a police force around itself. One could see it, speak about it, approach it, remain human in front of it.
This may sound simple. It is not.
Much of the art world knows how to produce distance. It knows how to build thresholds, languages, rituals, forms of controlled access. It often confuses seriousness with intimidation.
At Cittadellarte, at least in what I experienced, the opposite seemed possible: seriousness without intimidation.
Ambition put to work
We spoke informally. There was no ceremonial separation. His wife had listened to part of the interview, then left. When we went away, she embraced us.
That embrace stayed with me.
I am not even a comma in the history of art, and Pistoletto is a living giant of it. This is not false modesty. It is proportion. The disproportion was enormous. Yet the encounter did not seem organized to remind me of my smallness.
It seemed organized around the possibility of talking about art.
Pistoletto also told me that he is ambitious. He said it without embarrassment. And because of the way he said it, ambition did not sound like vanity. It sounded like a force he had decided to face directly.
There is a small taboo around ambition, especially in art. Everyone wants recognition, but few admit it cleanly. Everyone wants to matter, but many disguise the desire as purity.
Pistoletto did not seem interested in that disguise.
He did not apologize for ambition. He made it sound right because it had been put to work.
Of course, Cittadellarte also produces value, visibility, influence, perhaps economy. It would be naive to pretend otherwise. No institution, even one born from art, remains innocent simply because its intentions are generous.
But from what I saw, money did not seem the deepest engine. It looked more like a tool.
Ambition was the engine. Not the small ambition of personal accumulation, but the ambition to build a place where the results of one’s success could be shared, extended, complicated, given back.
This is why the place felt larger than the interview.
In the conversation, Pistoletto explained ideas. In the visit, those ideas had walls, rooms, people, archives, gestures, habits. They were not just concepts. They had become a way of organizing reality.
Writing the interview
Later, when I sat down to rewrite the interview, something similar happened.
The text came almost in a straight line. It was long, yes, perhaps longer than expected, but it did not feel heavy. The conversation already had its own internal order.
I had told the editor of Artribune that it was a substantial interview, but I had not shown it to him yet. When he finally read it, his reaction was simple: let’s publish it as it is.
I liked that reaction because it confirmed something I had felt while speaking with Pistoletto.
The interview did not need to be dressed up. It needed to be followed. The work was not to make him seem important, but to stay close enough to the clarity that was already there.
What remained
On the way back, in the car, my companion and I kept talking about what had happened.
Usually, after a good interview, one also begins to search for the blind spot. One looks for the crack in the image, the elephant in the room, the possible contradiction hidden behind the elegance of the encounter.
With Pistoletto, something different remained.
Not blind admiration. Not the absence of doubt. I still think every great symbol risks being repeated without being understood. The Third Paradise, precisely because it is so strong and recognizable, can be used badly, superficially, decoratively. Any language of harmony risks becoming harmless if it no longer asks anything difficult from those who use it.
But that was not the dominant feeling.
What remained, and I say it without irony, was beauty.
I do not mean spectacular beauty. Not institutional beauty. Not the beauty of a perfect image produced for visitors. It was more natural, simple, human, realistic.
It was in the punctuality, in the coffee, in the tone of the conversation, in the works, in the collaborators, in the trust, in the openness of the place, in the embrace at the end. It was also in the fact that nothing seemed forced to become more solemn than it was.
Perhaps this is what artists secretly hope for, even when they do not say it like this. Not only to make works. Not only to produce recognition. Not only to enter history.
But to create a form of life around the work that is still capable of touching others.
The strongest final moment did not happen outside me. It happened inside.
When I asked the last question, I realized the interview was ending. At that exact moment, I felt that I would have liked to remain inside that discourse on art much longer.
I could have kept asking. Not only because he had lived contemporary art intensely, but because, in his part of the story, he had helped shape it.
There are interviews that end when the final answer is given.
This one did not.
It continued in the visit, in the works, in the paper ball, in the Minus Objects, in Love Difference, in the site of the Third Paradise, in the sketches on the table, in the absence of ceremony, in the feeling of trust, in the drive back home.
That is why the Third Paradise still matters today, but not only as a symbol.
It matters because it belongs to a larger proof: that art, when it is not reduced to display, career, market or commentary, can still become a concrete form of life.
This is what I carried away from Cittadellarte.
The greatness of Pistoletto was there. His humanity was there too. So was the freedom of his art, and the generosity of the place he built. But what stayed with me most was something harder to summarize: the feeling that art can still enter reality without surrendering to it.
It can accept the world without pretending the world is innocent. Then it can try to move something inside it: a relation, a habit, a way of entering a place, perhaps even the use of ambition itself.
Many artists build symbols that later become easier to repeat than to understand. Many places created by artists slowly become monuments to the artist.
At Cittadellarte, at least in the day I spent there, I had the opposite impression: the work had not stopped at the edge of the object.
It had continued into a room, a conversation, a city, a method, a form of trust.
In that sense, the interview with Pistoletto was not only an interview.
It was a door.
And when I left, I had the uncomfortable feeling that the real conversation had only just begun.
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