In Memoriam of Andy Cameron

giugno 5, 2012 11:38

We at Share Festival were heartbroken to hear of the death of Andy Cameron. We met Andy Cameron for the first time in 2009, when Luca Barbeni introduced him to the Share crew. He accepted the invitation to be the guest curator of four seasons of the Share Festival with great enthusiasm, constantly bubbling over with ideas to contribute in so many different fields.

He was brilliant and full of ideas, with a wonderfully intuitive grasp of what is happening in this moment of world history. As guest curator of the festival, he focused it one year on Market Forces, offering a significant point of view on what was then called the ‘credit crunch’ and anticipating the crisis we are living through today three years before it happened.

The Share Festival brought out his critical spirit, which was just one of his many talents.
His AntiRom manifesto was a sort of riot against market forces, and we were delighted to hear his ideas and his conceptual way of criticizing the market. Often, when someone claims to hate the business they end up becoming the business; in Andy’s case, he was in the business but kept a healthy distance.

What really impressed us was his talent in understanding what was art and what was garbage. He had great intuition in this and we enjoyed working with him and appreciating that instinct of his (he would never be a curator or art critic). He was the chairman of the Share Prize in 2009, lending the Share Festival that year one of its most interesting exhibitions ever. He was a great worker with a great soul.

Now for some more personal memories of him. Having spent ten years in Italy he was really an honorary Italian — the only Englishman we knew who spoke Italian so fluently.
Language means culture, and he was warm and funny rather than cold and ironic in hishumour. He became a natural part of the famiglia!

It is so hard to believe that his huge, generous heart should have stopped working like it did. We miss him dearly. After first working together in 2009, we never lost touch and he would always get involved in the Share Festival.

There’ll be no more drinks with him, with his favourite glass of red, in Piazza Vittorio Veneto in Turin.

Condolences to Andy’s family and to the friends who loved that great man.

Andy Cameron was also a columnist for Creative Review.
Patrick Burgoyne, editor of Creative Review, has written a tribute to him covering his whole career.
This is the AntiRom manifesto.
Together with Richard Barbrook he co-wrote the famous essay ‘The California Ideology’, which can be found on Wikipedia
And this is Share Festival 2009, curated by him.