Let me state the obvious. UA museum is an academic institution designed to collect the best and most significant works of art.heThe fields of study and research that explain who we are, how we behave, how we organize ourselves, and what we believe, both religiously and ideologically and politically. In short, everything that has to do with what makes us human. The museum is, above all, its collection; without it, there is no museum, and this heritage is preserved, restored, studied, displayed, and explained to the public, who are, in the case of a publicly owned museum (the majority in our country), the owners of said heritage. Therefore, its mission is social from the outset and is an essential part of its nature. The museum is an idea, a concept like democracy, to give an endangered example, into which different content can be injected and different ways of managing it can be employed. These contents and ways of explaining them change over time; they are healthily analyzable, criticizable, and changeable ad infinitum. But if the very concept that frames them and their primary function is questioned, be it democracy or the museum, goodbye democracy and goodbye museum. Nor is it advisable that, due to mental confusion, a cultural, historical, narrative, and heritage institution be anything other than what it was created for. It has never been intended that a hospital should assume functions, let's say, of the Ministry of Finance. It's a matter of pure common sense, and yet now, in Catalonia, the art museum is expected to assume functions of the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Social Equality, including the departments of Urban Planning and Housing, by adopting a "livable" museum model that no one knows for sure what the hell it means. All this thanks to Manolo Borja, an undisputed great professional of museography until he started believing his own press, "recovered" for Catalonia in the role of czar of its art museums (it was reported in the press, I'm not making this up) to reorient them without prior consultation with the directors of those institutions, who won their positions in public competitions based on the merit of their proposals. It was obvious that this idea by Jordi Martí (Secretary of State for Culture of the Spanish Government) was doomed to create problems, and it has. This also falls within the realm of common sense.
The debut of Borges's philosophy was the exhibition "Fabulous Landscapes," in which you can see some remarkable works in their own right (good works are seen in all exhibitions) along with a larger proportion of works comparable in quality and execution to first-year Fine Arts exercises, and may the students forgive me. All the works, however, good and not so good, are there merely playing an instrumental role, supporting actors, to illustrate what their curators want to tell us, which isn't much and is quite banal in my humble opinion. It's a terribly curated exhibition, uncomfortable, soulless, confusing, and practically unbearable due to the characteristics of the space and the prevailing temperature. It's not at all habitable. The accompanying part is revealing. of historical art, including objects and documents, displayed in an indoor greenhouse to ensure minimum temperature and humidity conditions to protect the exhibits. It seems, after all, that the best way to display art is in the best possible conditions, one of the reasons museums exist. Finally, I found it impossible to see the million euros that this "theoretical" experiment cost in relation to the outcome and the depth of the discourse in a country that keeps its museums chronically underfunded. People talk anecdotally about colonialism (and that's the way it is) without mentioning the most terrible aspect of this crime: that it cannot be compensated for by more statues of illustrious slave traders being blown up and more plunder being returned. The worst thing you can do with this tragedy is to exploit it.
And here ends my commentary on this failed exhibition because the basic question that one should ask oneself, I believe, about this whole matter is the following: When the two most important museums in Catalonia, the MNAC and the MACBA – the latter being the museum institution with the fewest friends that I know – are beginning their respective expansion processes, is the most important priority that we should be dedicating ourselves to right now really to question them from top to bottom? We have only had real museums in Catalonia for four days, created at the time for often misguided political reasons such as building the MACBA in the Raval, for example, a circumstance that has been at the root of its lack of connection with the neighborhood, which has always identified the museum as a bastion of the gentrifying posh class – although, curiously, this cannot be attributed to the CCCB, since it is in the same place. But well, the imperative is to consolidate what we have in the best possible way, for the benefit of the entire country (not just one neighborhood or a professional clique), so that these institutions speak on equal terms with the best of their European surroundings. There's no shortage of talent. It's been said that before expanding, it would be better to build a Kunsthalle. I have no objection to having one, but we're forgetting that there's already one that's been starved for decades: Santa Mònica. Let's be serious, you can walk and chew gum at the same time. Since when does a museum have to exclude a Kunsthalle or vice versa? The important thing is that both fly like a rocket and inspire.
That's why I don't believe what Manolo Borja is telling us. It's a kaleidoscope of typical proposals generated from inside from the art world mainstream, playing the radical, to feed the conference circuit where the same people always meet to create or perpetuate bases of professional influence. It lasts a while, and then something else, for everything to change and everything to remain basically the same, albeit with some variations of winners and losers in the first-division museum league.
In short, I don't think the solutions that museums in Catalonia need today involve adopting the way of thinking of the indigenous people of Oaxaca, with all due respect. They involve giving the directors who manage them the trust they deserve; they involve consulting with art workers, artists, and technicians; they involve dialoguing with citizens genuinely involved with art and its heritage. Reading the proposals presented by a white man who has never encountered a single angry yamomami in his life and has made the best and most brilliant of his professional career ruling many high-profile museums—which, however, are now, according to him, candidates for the dustbin of history—sounds simply hollow to me. If there's more to this staging, it's something else.
