Commonplace Book

'The naive painters are finished, done with. There is no longer a painter so ingenuous that he is unacquainted with the tricks of the naive trade. But by way of compensation we have naive collectors. Those who buy everything. It is well known that these collectors, for the most part people concerned with investing capital, are not content with the lesser figures, they want the best signatures, the best periods of such and such an artist. And they buy a little of everything, to make up for one painter's decline with the rise of another. In his pamphlet on Belgium, Baudelaire said: "Here, when they talk about prices, they believe they are talking about painting." Today the whole world is a Belgium, and Italy the worst. "What do you think of my Ottone Rosai?" my host asks me with a smug expression. And I don't know what to reply. He doesn't know that Ottone Rosai painted three thousand pictures, of which four thousand are in Rome.'

from a note in the 1969-1972 section of Occasional Notebooks, in The Via Veneto Papers by Ennio Flaiano