Una festa smisurata. L'Art's Birthday, Robert Filliou, Aldo Spinelli

Art’s Birthday is a feast proposed in 1963 by French Fluxus artist Robert Filliou. In the poem L’histoire chuchotée de l’art (Whispered History of Art), Filliou suggested that one million years ago someone invented art with a simple gest, and placed this event on a specific day, the 17th of January (the day of Filliou’s birthday). In 1973 the city of Aachen accepted to declare a public holiday to celebrate Art's Birthday. In recent years, varied forms of celebrations take place annually around the world; in 2019, for the 1.000.056th art’s birthday, Italian conceptual artist Aldo Spinelli realized a series of drawings on graph papers – whose dimensions cover a surface of 1.000.056 square millimeters - to pay homage to 24 masterpieces of art history.