Constructing Artistic Success: Institutional Gatekeepers, Mobility, and Recognition in Contemporary Italy

This thesis applies Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to the official communications of MAXXI, the Venice Biennale, and Fondazione Prada (2019–2024), asking how these institutions discursively construct artistic success and what their language means for emerging Italian artists. Using Fairclough’s three-dimensional model, the study identifies the formations through which each institution naturalises its evaluative criteria as universal standards: at MAXXI, research-as-legitimation, national-universal conflation, benevolent discoverer, and corporate-public hybridity; at the Venice Biennale, historical-credential, curatorial-autonomy, urgency-and-novelty, and diversity-as-inclusion; at Fondazione Prada, epistemic-necessity, research-programme, institutional self-critique, universal-stakes, and luxury-disavowal. Comparative synthesis identifies five field-level convergences and four institutional divergences. Three original contributions emerge: an extension of Bourdieu’s field theory to discursive mechanism; a revision of Bowness’s sequential recognition model demonstrating simultaneous rather than sequential consecration; and the identification of a fifth recognition condition — private capital endorsement — inaccessible to public institutions. The analysis reveals a hidden curriculum of eligibility whose compound threshold systematically disadvantages the nationally rooted, geographically peripheral, and discursively untrained emerging artist.