Vite d’artista : Forme, enfasi e mercati del documentario biografico d’arte contemporanea

The article is the result of an academic research project on the media subgenre of the biographic documentary on contemporary visual artists, as both a tool of dissemination and study of art. Based on the analysis of a corpus of twelve documentaries and six contemporary artists, with a focus on the Italian market, the survey was conducted over three axes: a) the relationship between artist and documentary; b) the storytelling modes; c) financing and circulation. While these products help to improve the research on art, repositioning the artists’ lives as a source for interpretation, this study also reveals their weakness, from a media-industrial standpoint, in terms of dissemination.