Long before we, as a species, were categorized as Homo sapiens, Plato proclaimed humans to be “featherless bipeds.” As a retort, Diogenes grabbed a chicken, plucked it, raised it aloft, and sarcastically declared “Behold: Plato’s man!” Not be outdone, Plato added “with flat nails” to his description. Aristotle later weighed in on the matter by declaring that we are communal beings who possess language, which we use to divide the world into categories available for rational and political inspection. Though a final decision was never reached in ancient Athens, one thing is certain: these dudes were obsessed with definitions. Considering that museums began as collections of objects grouped by kind, it could be said that they too are products of the urge to collapse reality into neat taxonomies. However, the world is a bit messier. While most humans share psychical features, we do not necessarily share similar minds, histories, or desires—and the reduction of these social characteristics into set and didactic narratives has led museums to misrepresent, and even marginalize, aspects of society and nature at the cost of privileging other figures. The group exhibition “Metamorphosis – Let Everything Happen to You,” curated by Chus Martinez at Castello di Rivoli, attempts …

It was difficult, having recently attended the opening of an art fair, to dispute Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s assertion that “we live in the age of oligarchs.” The newly appointed director of two of Turin’s most celebrated arts institutions told me, as we meandered through the halfway re-hung galleries of the Castello di Rivoli, that one consequence of the international proliferation of private museums showcasing collections amassed by a small number of competitive collectors “with little interest in the past” is a phenomenon akin to cultural-historical amnesia. It is her responsibility, she said, to use the extensive public collections at her disposal to foster interactions between past and present, teasing out the connections between different eras rather than reinforcing the illusion that our times (and by extension our artists) are divorced from the past. The architecture of Turin provides a neat analogue for the productivity of such intergenerational dialogue. My taxi from Castello di Rivoli—situated in the former residence of the Royal House of Savoy on the city’s picturesque outskirts—to Artissima—which occupies a Renzo Piano-designed conference center in the heart of what was once the city’s industrial district—passes ancient Roman settlements, Guarini’s dome for the Chiesa di San Lorenzo, and, adjacent to the …