Joan Maria Minguet: "Will they be able to exhibit against the Spanish monarchy again at the Macba?"

BarcelonaThe art historian, critic, and exhibition curator Joan Maria Minguet Batllori (Cornellà de Llobregat, 1958), a retired professor from the UAB, is a restless and sharp mind. He assures that his new book "Contra l'obediència. Per acabar amb els consensos de l'art" (Raig Verd) is a summary of his career and how he began to rethink it about fifteen years ago. "I go very much against things I myself had said," he states.

He warns that we are very submissive in the field of culture.

— We all have the idea that the world of culture is a field of freedom, a field in which creation does is awaken our consciousness, and I come to say that this is not the case. We are subjected to obedience that are imposed on us, but they are not imposed by anyone in particular, but by the times, by tastes, by consensuses, and it is very difficult to break with these consensuses.

"Art that is not understood as a tool of combat also becomes a privilege," he says.

— When I say this, I question myself, because there are many offices of power and the bourgeoisie where, for example, Joan Miró's works are simply decorating the walls. One thing is the use that is made of the work, but it is also true that Miró had a groundbreaking will, even when he makes paintings that he knows he will later sell to the big bourgeoisie. And when he makes posters and the ephemeral mural at the College of Architects of Catalonia in 1969, he is trying to break with this complacent, lazy system.

Warns against intellectual laziness and calls for art that "hurts".

— It concerns me greatly that when we enter encyclopedic museums, it seems we perform an absolute genuflection. In contemporary art museums, this doesn't happen, because there is a type of person who shows their discomfort or even dares to say that the works on display are not art, something that doesn't happen in any other discipline. You read a bad book and don't say it's not literature, or when you hear horrible music, you don't say it's not music. However, with art, people do dare. When you enter an encyclopedic museum, you perform this genuflection, because you enter and see a Velázquez, who was certainly an extraordinary painter in a technical sense, but he was a court painter. Then, sometimes I'm accused of presentism, but I don't feel challenged because I believe we should always interpret from the values of the present, especially if they are values that have dignified the role of women, that have dignified the collective role. Therefore, I think it's good to point out that Velázquez was a court painter, and whether he was good or bad shouldn't be the most important thing nowadays because I believe technical ability is not very important.

Is a lot of supposedly rebellious art in contemporary art museums not, in reality, decorative?

— What really worries the system is violence, collective protests. Art has never concerned it because it ends up devouring any art that is combative or born with the pretension of combat. The system devours everything that goes against the system. And Adorno is the first to detect this when, in the 50s, he begins to point out that the system has neutralized surrealism, which had really been a bomb.

Talking about museums, we are dedicating many resources to trying to redeem an institution that is historically exclusionary and imbued with violence, even though ideas such as the social museum or the museum as a place of care are currently being discussed. Do you think it is possible to achieve this?

— The museum has no solution. During the French Revolution there were voices that raised their voice questioning that a museum be created to exalt the Ancien Régime, that is, the monarchy they had beheaded. But it went ahead and the Louvre was created, which is the example on which all museums were based. One of these consensuses is to make us believe that what was born from the instances of power, of bourgeois power, has now been democratized. But this is relatively true, because our societies can be democratic or imperfectly democratic, but museums continue to be governed by boards where what you see is people with a lot of money; from time to time they put in some university professor to make it seem like it's not so bad. Furthermore, the boards are an undemocratic system because they are created by co-optation, there is no competition, there is no evaluation of merits to be a trustee, you just have to have money. You only need to look at the boards of Macba and MNAC. In all the boards there is a series of people who have studied nothing about the subject, but they are there due to political influences or because they have money. What does this mean? That democratization is not true.

Heritage continues to be a critical issue. The renovation of the Design Museum's permanent collection caused a stir.

— The uncritical defense of heritage bothers me a lot. The heritage that we now defend is a heritage that is what has reached us, but we have left aside a whole popular heritage, of art, which is not what the system likes, which we have already put aside. There is no art of the subaltern classes, there is no memory or history of the subaltern classes. And the problem is that there is also no provision that we can solve it now.

The artistic canon is increasingly questioned. Its exhibition on the Dalmau galleries at the Abelló Museum in Mollet del Vallès continues to be on display. Some of the exhibited artists were forgotten.

— In this exhibition, I have been able to rescue a hundred works, among which are some that were highly valued but have been left out of this canon. And what has remained within the canon? What Lluís Plandiura had bought. He was not interested in modernity at all. Then, when the Generalitat bought the Plandiura collection, what happened was a strange phenomenon: the tastes of a private collector became a public canon, because it passed to the Board of Museums and is now the MNAC. How is this corrected? By abolishing museums [smiles]. And if you can't abolish them, at least let there be a will to rethink them. But this will is not there, because in Catalonia, museum directors have enough to do to keep up with the day-to-day to think about other things. And some are radically against what I say. There are museum directors who see that this continues to be something select, elitist, with a desire to be minority, and that when people visit it is to make that genuflection we were talking about earlier. In general, this rethinking does not happen, among other things, because the system already prevents museum boards from allowing any extravagance, and when there are extravagances they are also within the system; even this book is also within the system. Even though I say so, we are immobilized.

He is very critical of Jaume Plensa and his servility.

— I think Plensa is a very harmful artist, especially because he wants to make it seem like he is a Renaissance artist, and he doesn't realize that Renaissance artists were already what he is, the voice of power. When Raphael sold a Sacred Family to a Florentine prince, the prince next to him wanted one too. So Plensa is building himself based on this copy, on this imitation that power has always had since the Renaissance. He dresses up this commercial operation with certain forms, whether I like them or not is irrelevant. What bothers me most is when, in the midst of the covid pandemic, he made one of these repetitive sculptures for the Community of Madrid, inaugurated it in the presence of Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the king, and representatives of all powers, and he thought that was fine. The other moment is that of the Liceu doors, this barrier to make it clear that the Liceu belongs to power. The other moment is that of the Liceu doors, this barrier to make it clear that the Liceu belongs to power.

As can be interpreted, from an institutional logic, Valentín Roma's return to Macba after the failure of the exhibition The Beast and the Sovereign?

— I believe journalists have a job: when there is a press conference, ask her, not Valentín, but the president of the Macba Foundation, Ainhoa Grandes, if from now on at Macba works against the Spanish monarchy can be exhibited. Will Valentín Roma, who has made public that he voted for the CUP, allow himself to be censored by this irrepressible power within the museum that is the Macba Foundation? I believe this is the big problem. For me, Valentín has done a great job at La Virreina, he has turned it into one of the best centers, and whoever comes after him will have a problem matching his coherence. And at Macba, the first big challenge is to lift the museum, as all directors have tried and failed.

A few days ago I delved into an article published in Vilaweb on the controversial appointment of Maribel López as director of the Fundació Joan Miró.

— Beyond the person, the appointment of Maribel López is an alarming symptom, which adds to others that have occurred in recent times at the Fundació Joan Miró, of the institution's economistic drift. The sole thought is economic survival and the original spirit of the Fundació Joan Miró is being set aside based on the artist's wishes: that it be a center for contemporary art, to build imaginaries for freedom, and not just for economic return.