ROME—The Italian culture minister, Sandro Bondi, has outraged members of his country's arts community with his derogatory comments on contemporary art and architecture. "I struggle to find evidence of beauty in contemporary art,” said Bondi, in comments to Grazia magazine that were reported in the Guardian. “If I go to an exhibition I pretend to understand, like many others. But, honestly, I don't understand."

The comments follow a wave of attacks by Italian politicians on recent or ongoing architecture projects. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a sometime subject of Bondi’s poetry, recently called Daniel Libeskind’s plan for a curved skyscraper for Milan "horrifying" and asked that it be straightened. Rome mayor Gianni Alemanno has initiated a campaign against the new building to house the ancient Ara Pacis altar, designed by the American architect Richard Meier. And just last week Bondi himself ripped the ultra-modern new loggia for Florence's Uffizi gallery designed by the Japanese architect Arata Isozaki.

The minister’s comments drew swift condemnation from Francesco Bonami, a curator who organized the 2003 Venice Biennale. "Bondi appears to have fallen asleep in 1895, when the Biennale was launched, to then re-awake in 2008," he told La Stampa. "You cannot rely on an antiquated concept of beauty, that's like wanting to go back to the horse and cart."