ABSTRACT
Francesca Alinovi was one of the most up-to-date critics in Italy, reporting on new trends like Graffiti art and Pattern Painting. Published in Flash Art, the most influential art magazine in Italy during the eighties, the text proposed an underground alternative to the pictorial mainstream supported by the magazine itself. In the translated excerpt below, she gives a vivid description of the Lower East Side and the South Bronx art scene. Fashion Moda is a very unconventional gallery, and anything but commercial, but for three years it has been successfully run in New York’s most dangerous and ill-famed neighborhood, the South Bronx. While America, like Europe, is celebrating the triumph of tradition and beautiful painting in art, the impetuous current of the underground is bubbling up like an unstoppable, boiling geyser.
