Francesco Vezzoli: Right You Are (If You Think You Are)

Throughout his career, Francesco Vezzoli has focused on people's fascination with celebrity. At the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on October 27, 2007, he restaged Right You Are (If You Think You Are), the renowned play by Italian Nobel Laureate Luigi Pirandello that examines the fundamental ambiguity of truth. Vezzoli assembled an extraordinary cast of top-billed actors, implicating his audience in an investigation of rumor and celebrity mongering as substitutes for a deeper understanding of the individual. Pirandello, like Vezzoli in his own art, points to these empty distractions as a means of drawing attention to existential and humanist concerns. Vezzoli's visionary approach to Pirandello's jewel of a work playfully exposes the relativity of truth, the necessity of illusion, and the instability of the human persona. Co-produced by the Gagosian Gallery of New York, the staging is fully documented in this book in which you can literally be reflected as in a mirror, thanks to the inside of the cover.