98 Hemingway, Kerouac, Roth and Pasolini wrote milestones, but also Cormac McCarthy, author of masterpieces such as No Country for Old Men and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize The Road. Masterpieces come out of a Lettera 22, in the first decade of 2000. Which does not risk viruses or Trojans, does not fear blackouts or somebody else’s copy-and-paste, does not distract with notifications, but above all, facing a major commitment, it pushes you to think about what you are going to write. Through it, Adriano Olivetti not only embodied the best of Artistic Capitalism, cannibalizing his own products for continuous improvement and entering the most famous international art collections, but he was able to demonstrate that Italian could have been the language of globalization, as long as this would have meant to decline it in glocal, focused as he has always been on ethics. «This typewriter comes from Agliè14», was the advertising slogan that accompanied the Lettera 22 around the world, to underline that it incorporated a kind of work, the Italian one, made of technical and aesthetic excellence. The Olivetti method was able to shape every piece of the production and commercialization of its products: the last of these, turned itself too into art and culture, has been advertising. from the olivetti factory to the warhol factory: art is advertising With the advent of the bourgeoisie, when life became consumption, the Capitalism became Artistic, and the boundary between art and industry, and creation and communication, became thinner and thinner, to the point of making Marshall McLuhan – father of modern communication – say that advertising is the greatest form of art of the twentieth century. In fact, it has always been, from the commissions of the Church to the wishes of the power, for one simple reason: art communicates, in the most immediate and powerful way, because its universal language is image. But if, within the Artistic Capitalism, advertising is the greatest form of art, in Olivetti its mirror was also true: art has been its greatest form of advertising (and it could not have been otherwise, in one method, the Olivetti one, infused in culture). Every single person has an equal single kind of communication – as we well know today, that every single person turns himself into product through his social profile. But the Olivetti method is exemplary for the real consistency between the cultural values of the company and its, the first in Italy, communication strategy. A precise leitmotiv connected its industrial architecture, its aesthetics of the product, its advertising and editorial graphics and its intense cultural activity. In a house organ celebrating Olivetti 1908-1958, Costantino Nivola, recalling his role as graphic director at the Development and Advertising Office, wrote that Adriano Olivetti «required that all the visual aspect of Olivetti was done on an artistic level». Starting in 1938, with names such as Nivola, Xanti Schawinsky, Marcello Nizzoli, Giovanni Pintori, the graphic office gradually replaced the figure of the secretary/mannequin that stood out in all the sectorial advertisements, in favor of an iconography made up of light geometries, in which shapes were stylized and dried to the bare essential, to immediately convey on a visual level those values of refinement and lightness that Olivetti also pursued on a technical and mechanical level. An iconography that baptized Made in Italy overseas in the main aisle, in 1952 at the MoMA in New York, with the exhibition Olivetti: design in industry, where Leo Lionni's installations interacted with Nizzoli and Pintori’s graphics, marking the clearance of a precise imaginary, the Italian one, associated with keywords such as excellence and art, from cinema, to costume, to technique, and affixing a brand to it: Made in Italy. Renzo Zorzi, Veronese intellectual among the closest to Adriano Olivetti and director of Edizioni di Comunità since 1952, was the main pivot of the strategy that shifted the center of gravity of Olivetti’s communication from advertising as art, to art as advertising. A strategy fully endorsed by Adriano, proud of saying: «Other companies may finance art exhibitions, but we organize them» (in: Bruno Caizzi, Gli Olivetti, ed. UTET, 1962). Following the sudden death of Adriano, Zorzi – the man who, before joining Olivetti, took on the responsibility for De Silva publishing house to print If this is a man by Primo Levi, suggesting its title and after several other publishing houses’ rejection – moved to Olivetti, in 1965 and until 1986, to cover the role of manager responsible for image, design and cultural activities promoted by the company. Zorzi knew how to be the most refined creator of a corporate image based on art, picking up Adriano's baton, indicating guidelines to inspire graphic and editorial communication, product design and relations with the press, but above all organizing renowned international exhibitions, promoting Italian artistic heritage’s restoration and conservation initiatives, contributing to the creation of art books and strenna-objects commissioned to great designers and artists. And there it was, in Olivetti, art as advertising, the noblest declination of the Artistic Capitalism, the 14 Agliè is a small municipality in the Canavese area, not far from Ivrea, where Adriano Olivetti moved the assembly of the Lettera 22, to support the crisis that hit the municipality, when the town's textile factory had to close. Olivetti immediately intervened to ensure that the social equilibrium of the territory wouldn’t have been broken.
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