Founded in 2012 as a non-profit and free-of-charge event, ARTCaffè holds monthly art talks in which a guest artist gives a speech to a multicultural and diverse crowd, activating a conversation among artists and art lovers.

The idea behind ARTCaffè is that contemporary art is for everyone: you don’t need to be an expert to get a response in front of a work of art.

In art historian Sheila Greenspan’s words:

“People come in a gallery or a museum and they think what they see doesn’t look like art, or that their kid could do it. Then the docent or the teacher comes in and gives what looks like a very good Notice-this-and-notice-that tour. People are then thinking: I didn’t see it. I knew I was stupid. I knew I couldn’t do it by myself: I needed this crutch of this person.

What I’m trying to do is to convince them they don’t need it: they have to take away the crutches and feel comfortable about having their own experiences and making intelligent judgments with works of art, even challenging ones!”
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By creating a direct connection between the audience and the artist, with no filters in between, ARTCaffè is the perfect opportunity for people who are not experts in the field to gain insights about the artist's work, and engage in an interaction with the guest speaker in an informal and nonjudgmental atmosphere.

Being very international, with connecting nodes active around the world, ARTCaffè is a great chance for artists to present their work to a wide-spread community and to receive first-hand reactions and feedbacks from the viewers.

ARTCaffè takes place in the living room of a private house, not in a conference room, nor in a museum or a gallery. This peculiarity gives the event an informal touch, encourages relaxed mingling, and helps activate meaningful discussion. This is the reason why, over the years, a community of enthusiastic followers has been growing around this event.

The program of ARTCaffè aims to cover all media, from painting to sculpture, from photography and video art, to performance and multimedia. To offer also other points of view on the industry, since 2018, ARTCaffè has hosted once per year a non-artist: among the guest speakers, so far, it accounts a collector, an art historian, a designer, a curator / critic / writer.