Just Not to Work. Stories about Contemporary Art

«Just Not to Work» — a collection of witty portraits of people from the contemporary art sphere by the Italo-Swiss curator Andrea Bellini, director of the Center for Contemporary Art and art director of the Biennial of Moving Images in Geneva. Bellini describes the daily life of artists, curators, and gallery owners — openings, dinner parties, closed events, conversations over a glass of wine in a restaurant, and night walks around the city. By concealing the prototypes of his characters with varying degrees of thoroughness, he brings out characteristic types: a late curator who failed in his career as an artist; the director of a major fair who dreams of turning it into a global brand and is willing to ruin more than a few billionaires on a safari in the United Arab Emirates; a wealthy collector who, like a Roman patrician, reclines on a couch in his own palace surrounded by a court artist and curator; a crab-like entrepreneur who sees art only as capital and a way to democratize the investment market.