8 pages Edited by Lara Vinca Masini 25,4 x 20,4 cm Language: Italian Paperback Publisher: Giunti 2003
Volume seven of Masini's twelve-part survey dall'Espressionismo al Multimediale, and the one that matters for anyone tracking how graffiti entered the Italian art-historical canon. Alongside the Transavanguardia — Bonito Oliva's coinage, the return to painting and myth at the start of the 1980s — Masini devotes substantial space to graffiti, treating it as a movement within the period rather than a curiosity appended to it. That was not the standard editorial choice in a general survey of twentieth-century art, and it is why this volume turns up in graffiti bibliographies while the other eleven do not.
Masini, a Florentine critic who wrote contemporary art as it happened for six decades, built the whole series on a refusal to separate canonical movements from the minor and marginal figures working beside them. The series ran weekly through Italian newsstands as an Espresso supplement, reprinting the text of the four-volume Giunti edition at a fraction of its price — which is how a serious piece of writing on graffiti ended up in a kiosk edition.
