A Vision for the Art Right with Giovanni Pennacchietti

"The great art movements of history mimic the trajectory of civilizations.”

It’s 2025 and we’re still ahead of our time, but maybe time is finally catching up with us.

Last year I decided I was going to do what I had been wanting to do for over half my life, which was to start my own art gallery in NYC. This year is the year it becomes a reality. I could think of no better artist to collaborate with than Giovanni Pennacchietti, a well-known personality in the online sphere who has made a name for himself on his various podcasts with his unique takes on digital subcultures and politics.

Yet the online world was never enough for artists and philosophers like Gio. They needed a wider stage, so I made it my mission to showcase their art in a refined gallery setting. Offline would become the new online, and we’d do it live in America. Since my gallery is a finely tuned endeavor and our space is still under preparation, I’m hosting a pre-launch party on January 9th at my friend’s beautiful church in NYC.

The night will begin with us reading our manifestos, followed by a break to connect and discuss forbidden ideas. This will be followed by a curated dinner for a select group, culminating in an art auction featuring works from two of my gallery’s acclaimed artists, the unrivaled Alexander Adams and Gio the man himself. More details about our night will be announced soon. Yes, being a paid member of The Cultural Futurist gets you into all my IRL events.

So, let’s usher in 2025 with a glimpse into the mind and vision of Giovanni Pennacchietti. What follows is my interview with him.

Special thanks to The Floating Signifier for help with the edit.

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Rachel Haywire:

Hello, Gio! Happy to be catching up with you again. You’ve been deeply involved in what some might call the dissident art scene for a while now, yet your work is quite sophisticated and high-brow. What drew you to this part of the art world?

Giovanni Pennacchietti:

Hello Rachel, I'm glad to be here and it's been a long time coming. I remember picking up your book and thinking we were kind of on the same wavelength with certain things. To begin with, my development started out as sort of like a hazy dream, the temporality marked by a distinct beginning and murky progression. I started off in the reactionary blogsphere, completely by accident, or rather, by taking a gamble with things. Even then I never thought of becoming an actual poster, let alone posting my art online.

I really didn't know there was a dissident art scene back then. I was just interacting with some friends of mine like Matthew the Stoat. It took me some time to share my art. There was always meme culture, people doing things like fashwave edits, and video edits were all a big part of it. A lot came from things like Hyperborean edits and the old Million Dollar Extreme buffers. You could also trace a lot of influence back to the video art of NobodyTM.

There’s something in the soul of the scene that longs for the graininess mixed in with nostalgia for things like 80s machismo kitsch and the Y2K aesthetic. The scene to me is a home because there really isn't any other place for me in the contemporary art world. Of course I'm not the type to say all of contemporary art is trash, but the critiques of the politics on the contemporary art world are more or less sound.

I approach my art in the same manner as posting. It’s a sort of quietest endeavor, something you do in the freedom that solitude provides. After grad school, posting art online came naturally. It's not that I wanted to cultivate some detached, aloof character for myself, but that everything I did and continue to do was a product of my own idiosyncrasies and desire to do things my own way.

RH:

What artists, historical or contemporary, have had the most profound influence on your work?

GP:

NobodyTM had a very profound effect on me. A lot of the post-impressionists and expressionists influenced me, especially Edward Hopper, Edvard Munch and Kathe Kollwitz. Munch is an artist I’ll probably write about much more in the future. His work truly speaks to the sensitive young man in ways that mainstream culture wishes to ignore. He was one of the few artists of his day at the dawn of the “sickness of the century” to speak of things like the unique intricacies of male loneliness and longing. I always gravitated towards the German Expressionists because they were laying a powerful critique of modernity while being modernists themselves.

RH:

When and how did you decide to become an artist? Was there a specific period or incident in your life that steered you in this direction?

GP:

There wasn't a specific moment. It just happened, probably around High School. My mother always did these little paintings, you know, kitschy little things like floral stuff or little Christmas landscapes, craft paint, stuff like that. I think this was right around the time I started reading the works of Jung. She suggested that I should try doing something, so I started these little abstract studies using sponges and cheap brushes. I didn't get into the nitty gritty of colour theory, composition, tonal value, or any of the basics until later.

I was doing these abstract experiments that were basically cargo-culting a lot of Abstract Expressionists that I found compelling like Pollock, Milton Reznik, De Kooning, Tobey, etc. I tried to mimic the white writing calligraphic marks that Tobey is famous for. I spent hours just marking up various patches of colour with white lines and squiggles. I was lucky to go to grad school when I did.

I felt compelled towards art when things like words didn't cut it. Doing art and being a theorycel went hand in hand for me. Painting for me is about depicting something that is only implied, or something that could be there.

RH:

Can an avant-garde exist under modern conditions?

GP:

A lot of so-called 'dissident movements' in our current time speak of the need for art and present think-pieces on the need for art, but at the end of the day it’s just propaganda to “own the libs”. I love owning libs as much as anyone else, but if you want to carve out the possibility of an avant-garde then you must take the question of the creation and purpose of art up with the utmost seriousness. Chasing and predicting what is cutting edge is a fool's errand.

RH:

Have the work of figures like D’Annunzio and Marinetti played a role in your art?

GP:

If you’ve read the Futurist Manifesto, you know it’s a celebration of something that humanity had never really enmeshed itself with up until the industrial revolution: speed. The speed of bodies moving in space that go beyond the natural limitations of our feet, or beasts of burden. Speed that (again, in keeping with Deleuze and Virilio) eventually found its way to a form of virtuality that means speed as an ethereal property that can make us traverse entire oceans and worlds. Would Marinetti have been a sigma grindset-influencer? Maybe.

But I joke. It's an odd thing when you think of this notion of speed and what Virilio called 'dromology', imperceptibility, and dropping out in the ocean of data we have at our fingertips.

I think that's what the Italian Futurists were getting at, that in our new reality of speed, there was a form of innocence that longed for the fresh eyes of Zarathustra's child. A total innocence of pure power and vitality. This is why I think in there’s a renewed interest in the Italian Futurists.

There’s an unapologetic dynamist embrace of the modern, the artworks which celebrate that which is made by the human hand, as God crafts the landscapes. It’s a way of breaking through trad, communist, and liberal modalities that offers a true third position. The alchemical stone of our scene is to craft a perfect ideology which keeps what is vital of the past while embracing the future.

As for my own work, there are things here and there that I take inspiration from. There was a trend in later Italian Futurism that embraced religious iconography, which created the best possible fusion of Futurism and Catholicism. This became important to me in my own work.

RH:

You were one of the first artists I chose for my gallery because you understood the vitalist energy I was going for as a curator and impresario. How common do you think this type of energy is for other artists right now?

GP:

The energy is definitely there, something willing to break through the mundanity of the contemporary art world, but it's hard to qualify without looking at the aesthetic experiences most people have online and offline. This leaves us with pop culture slop and meme culture, both which seem to be in an eternal struggle with the last 10 years.

Deep down the positive signs of things to come are in its early stages of crystallization. People want what you’d call “the beautiful, the good, the true”. Online you have “aesthetic posting”, models, peak architecture next to nature, AI images of futurist and ecological themes, Mediterranean seascapes, etc. These images are shared by millions every day, but they are still just posts. It's what Byung-Chul Han called a loss of “gravity” to the image online, because like all things, the image just becomes another form of data and dataism.

I read this longer post recently about the shadow of WW2 and the Austrian painter looming large and heavy over what is left of continental Europe, and by extension the Western world as a whole. No civilization can survive if it's only values and goals amount to grovelling pleading over it's past, an erasure of it's past, and an abandonment of any sense of identity over some fear that a hideous evil will crawl out from the grave. Nothing lasting can be generated out of this total destruction of the collective self.

The great art movements of history mimic the trajectory of civilizations. Spengler was keen in this observation. So yes, there are some signs there that artists could envision something more than just a big long present expanded into the future, but a lot of work must be done for this to happen. A lot of sacred cows would need to be called into question.

My upcoming book deals with a lot of these questions in a weird way, while critiquing what I think is the predominant aesthetic trends of this century, which is largely influenced by the last. On that note, in the early 2000s to the mid 2000s, we got “Post-internet art” that took on a pessimistic tone. I was a fan of this, because Californian tech utopianism had run its course.

Now, when the online world is more integrated into our lives than ever before, we cannot help but have a dower view of the whole thing. Looking at reality for what it is in the work of art is more useful than a fake Utopianism. We can't all be like Lain, a God or Goddess of the wired who sacrifices digital Godhood for the body and for real human connection as opposed to digital omnipotence.

RH:

A lot of your art seems to reflect a certain feeling of loneliness and alienation. If you were to suddenly go mainstream and have the admiration of the luxury art world, do you believe this would tamper your creative output?

GP:

I'm glad you noticed that, because for a long time now I’ve been obsessed with these very lonely images, or rather, the inability of people to feel a sense of connection. There are paintings that I have mapped out, at least mentally, that always seem to come back to that motif of loneliness and alienation. Paintings that at the time, sometimes for years now, I felt I couldn't achieve, especially figurative work years ago.

There is an odd loneliness that comes about from being terminally online, even being constantly connected to the discourse, thoughts and posts of others, at all hours. Of course I have friends and family, but I have online people that I have developed deep friendships with. This is something that is hard to describe because of the dissonance between being alone while constantly connected to others.

As for the second part of your question, I don't know if I would change. Everyone changes with more attention, and I often loathe certain kinds of attention. It's not that I’m cultivating some pastiche of the reclusive artist or something like that. I enjoy being “out there” to some extent. It's just that living in solitude and being a hermit for long periods of time is a hard habit and mindset to break.

RH:

In my book The New Art Right, I made some predictions about the trajectory of the art world and the post-political landscape. Do you think we will have a functioning Art Right in 2025? Where do you see us now, both creatively and culturally? Where do you see us in five years?

GP:

I remember reading your book. I loved it, even though I disagreed with some of the techno-optimist stuff. As for there being a functioning Art Right in 2025, I hate to say this but it hasn't come about yet. Now, I do know there are a lot of artists doing good work who are trying to break out of the usual art world. There were, and still are, groups of artists who have explicit ideological goals in mind. Friends of mine have been hounded by extreme leftist groups and journalists for their affiliations. There were people, let's not name names, who were harassed by these deranged lunatics for entertaining certain ideas. Hopefully the power of that despicable mob is waning.

It always “works” on people who are in the centre or who were on the left for a time, that's just how it goes. If you are coming from the Right to begin with, that carries its own risks, but “defectors” are always more viciously attacked. The obvious problem that me and some of my friends come back to is that people simply want well done propaganda, or art that amounts to a political slogan or ad campaign. We have enough editors and meme makers that do this job very well without any artist training, or else we would be pumping out political kitsch.

Art comes about when there is at least a sincere attempt at doing the best you can do, not with some ulterior motive that ends up being a doppelganger image of what your enemy is doing. It's like what my Co-host Kat says, one day, after a vision of basedworld is realized, there will be Bronze Age cookbooks in Walmart, and there will be little chuddies TV shows for kids on the Cartoon Network and Nick Jr. Do we really want a “based version” of the world we live in now? That's a very painful question we have to think about.

Another problem that I see, that has led me to the conclusion that the Art Right has yet to be realized, is something inherent to the conservative and Rightest take economy. There is something that Nightmare Vision said recently about the old guard of ConservatismTM. If you look at the history, in regards to the Neocon takeover of the Right in North America and the Anglosphere as a whole, you see how it intersected with the pro-life movement and that there was a very narrow focus on political hot takes, elections, legal systems, geopolitical takes, punditry, etc.

What these people did not focus on is arts, culture, sociological observations and the like. This all leads us to what I see as the real problem, and it pains me to admit this. Even the oldheads are replicating their same mistakes. Everyone wants to be a take seller, and there is nothing inherently wrong with being one. I mean, we are obsessed with online discourse. Yet the problem is that the hottest of takes, political analysis, tweeting, podcasting, these things take precedence over any cultural creation that could potentially happen. It's up to people who have a vision of something greater to create an Art Right.

As for the future, I think that if the take economy were to suffer in a lack of predictive power, or if there were to be a severe changing of the guards, there could be a serious cultural force, and you’d have creative people being given more of a central position in our ecosystem. Practical nose to the grindstone politics is necessary, of course. Real world things need to be achieved, but without a vision of what people are actually fighting for, visions that are expressed in the work of art, we end up becoming those same stuffy Neocons and talking heads.

RH:

Where can people check out your content? Is there anything else that you’d like to share with readers of The Cultural Futurist?

GP:

Content Minded is my main podcast. I co-host Digital Archipelago with Prudentialist and The Computer Room with Katherine Dee. I'm also in the process of editing my first book that I hope to get out soon.

Good content will always find a way, even if it isn’t realized in its own time, and Content can Striketh at any hour of the day. So many deleted posts, unrecorded spaces, erased blogs, gone, like tears in the rain, only to be remembered by the select few oldheads who were there and found meaning in them. Everyone should position themselves in such a way as to “be there”, to find good Content, to be the lore-keeper of things long forgotten and obscure. In other words, position yourself to be able to have a propensity towards good Content.

RH: Thank you for taking the time to speak with me on such a personal level. It’s been a long journey into creating this alternative, right? I predict that 2025 is going to be a big year for us and that we’re igniting something of deep alchemical significance. History shows that it only takes a small minority of people to launch an entire cultural front. As we create our own galleries and institutions we will conquer the art world by storm. The real counter-elite has only just begun.

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All images courtesy of Giovanni Pennacchietti

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