Art has its own power in the world, and is as much a force in the power play of global politics today as it once was in the arena of cold war politics. Art, argues the distinguished theoretician Boris Groys, is hardly a powerless commodity subject to the art market's fiats of inclusion and exclusion. In Art Power, Groys examines modern and contemporary art according to its ideological function.…
The essay concerns two drawings by the Florentine baroque painters Cesare and Pietro Dandini, coming from the Dandini-Targioni Tozzetti collection. The naturalist Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti (1712-1783), consort of Maria Brigida, daughter of Ottaviano Dandini, brought together the impressive set of drawings belonging to the Dandini family, which were divided into twenty volumes, probably dismemb…