Despite the criticism of the show, it is notable that mounting a large-scale display like this took a private institution run by a foreigner and a curator who has lived overseas so long he’s practically a foreigner. Italy lacks the infrastructure to promote contemporary art properly. It does not even have a national museum. Bonami says that many of his country’s artists have gone unrecognized in recent decades because the system has been "raped by political fundamentalism": Those who didn’t belong were pushed out of the nest. "Italy never constructed a network of museums or schools that was able to intersect with the production of artists and allow them to mature in their own territory," he explains. "It abandoned artists to an intimate relationship with dealers and collectors, who provided economic support but not the necessary rigor in the presentation of the work."

"There was a period when you didn’t need an institution," says the arts writer Angela Vettese, who is the director of the visual-arts department at Venice’s University Institute of Architecture and the president of its century-old Bevilacqua La Masa art foundation. She explains that her country started slipping in 1977, the year the Centre Pompidou was inaugurated in France. "What changed in Italy was not the quality and quantity of artists but the dysfunctional politics, which did not give enough resources to contemporary art to create institutions at the same level as other countries." As Vettese tells it, the reasons that Italian artists have fallen behind their contemporaries in England, Germany and the United States are as complex as why the country itself is in near-constant disarray. Art has been integral to the exercise of power, patronage and prestige in Italy since before the Renaissance. The government has traditionally favored the existing over the emergent. Admittedly, it is difficult to fund new works when you’re continually maintaining and restoring old ones. Opinion is driven mostly by a few critics, such as Celant and Achille Bonito Oliva, who have dominated the field for nearly half a century. Moreover, says Vettese, politicians often underestimate the need for skilled museum directors and curators, making appointments based on friendships rather than competence.

The ongoing saga of two museums in Rome illustrates several of these obstacles. The Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome is housed in a former brewery, located in an elegant residential district, for which the French architect Odile Decq designed a dazzling expansion of glass, steel, black walls and red lacquered wood that is currently under construction. On a tour of the site this past fall, Lorenza Bolelli, head of communications, was unable to answer many questions about the building’s future, including whether it would open this year as planned. That’s because the museum’s director was asked to leave the day after Rome’s center-left municipal government was voted out, in spring 2008, and the new, right-wing government had not yet appointed a replacement. "Of course, there are budget problems," Bolelli says, shrugging, when asked how the institution will pay its operating costs.

The future is even murkier for the National Museum of the XXI Century Arts. A new building by Zaha Hadid is still unfinished, with the construction budget already spent. Here, too, a respected director was ejected when the national government changed hands. His replacement at the time of this writing, Anna Mattirolo, isn’t a political insider and is therefore relatively weak.

Private undertakings, regional museums and foundations in various cities have taken up the slack left by the failure of national institutions. Turin, a once-drab metropolis that’s increasingly hip, is home to the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, which exhibits the international contemporary holdings of the collector Patrizia Sandretto, and to the excellent Castello di Rivoli museum, whose chief curator, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, was recently named the director of Documenta 13. In Naples, the Madre museum benefits from a long-term loan from the collection of the late dealer-collector Ileana Sonnabend. The outstanding Contemporary and Modern Art Museum of Trento and Rovereto has holdings of more than 12,000 works. Also supporting the arts are fashion fortunes, including the Nicola Trussardi Foundation, based in Milan; the Maramotti collection, on display in the old Max Mara garment factory in Reggio Emilia; and the Prada Art Foundation, which will move into a huge industrial site reworked by the architect Rem Koolhaas in the south of Milan in a few years. Milan, of course, is home to many contemporary galleries, such as Massimo de Carlo, Christian Stein and Lorenzelli, which show homegrown and international artists.