TURIN. Massimo Melotti, one of the best-known contemporary art critic and expert in Italy, died in the hospital of Vercelli, his hometown. He was 70 and had been battling head cancer for years. He fell ill two days ago while he was in dad with his students at the Albertina Academy in Turin, where he taught Cultural Anthropology. He lost consciousness and died after two days in a coma. “We lose a friend and a professor of great value, an ironic and discreet intellectual purpose,” said the president of the Academy, Paola Gribaudo.
Melotti has written numerous books on art criticism, after starting as a journalist in a radio station in Vercelli, Radio City. He has organized exhibitions, covered the role for years of head of the press office and then consultant to the management of the Castello di Rivoli and has taught at the Polytechnic of Turin as well as at the Academy. Among his best-known texts “Pistoletto’s Works” (2011), “Vicende dell’arte in Italy from the postwar period to the 2000s” (2017) and “The age of fiction. Art and society between reality and ecstasy “(2018).