On the MNAC, identity and lost interest

A few days ago, four museum experts met at the MNAC in Barcelona and expressed their concern about the institution's direction, the decline in visitors from the city's middle class who, as in other European capitals, have lost interest in the culture of the past, and the blurred character of the concept which every museum must define. Specialists considered the MNAC "a unique and magnificent collection," certainly one that "formalizes Catalan identity and contemporary identity." The idea is sound, but it should be borne in mind that Catalan identity and contemporary identity are rather contradictory, because "contemporary identity," in global terms, does not form any unity, but rather a general fragmentation or a bastardized identity. And furthermore: "The public increasingly misunderstands the identity and mission of Catalonia's most important museum."

This raises a crucial question: what does it mean to "understand the identity of a museum"? It's clear that this museum presents the artistic production of Catalonia diachronically, with the ups and downs we already know; but nevertheless, "the function of the MNAC should be to establish a syntax that traces a continuity between one work and another." So far, everything is quite correct, timely, and intelligent, despite any shortcomings.

But these reflections omitted a crucial point: given that a tour of this museum could be conducted chronologically, beginning with pre-Romanesque art and ending with 20th-century pieces, and given that some regrettable gaps would be noticeable, what, then, would be the best thing to offer a visitor? At best, to grasp a vague idea of "unity" and "identity"—an inadequate concept in a museum that brings together pieces from such disparate cultural and political periods—it would be necessary to link each piece, or each group of works relating to a specific historical-pictorial moment, to the social, cultural, religious, economic, and political context of Romanesque, Gothic, 19th-century Realist, and Modernist art. Unfortunately, this would not form a continuity that would allow us to speak of any "identity"—neither artistic nor "national"—and not only because Catalan "national identity" has undergone various transformations throughout history, but also because the works themselves do not always adhere to a semantic connection between art and nation. Sometimes they possess a singularity that makes them resistant to any attempt at semantic accumulation and coordination.

We see no other way to make sense of such a heterogeneous and uneven collection of artworks than to provide visitors with the essential information to place each and every work, or works by style, within the contexts that make them comprehensible. For this, of course, a certain level of prior knowledge is necessary before any visit. What we don't believe should be done is "finding the kind of connections that speak to us about the things that interest us at this moment." Because in a museum of historical pieces, it is not the present that should interest and challenge us, but the past. The present alone does not explain any work of art from history; it is each of the pasts within which they are inscribed that does.