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.

I just turned 77, and my wife, a Brooklyn native, and I'm considering leaving the United States for good, where I arrived 53 years ago in 1972. There had already been a first departure in 1967 to Paris, where I spent two years. But America was a different story; it was a matter of personal survival. I wasn't going to bury myself alive in a country, Spain, that was literally the arse end of Europe, controlled by a fascist dictatorship that couldn't be seen ending, not even with Franco's death, one day. I left because I wanted to; I wasn't being pursued by the social police or the TOP (Spanish Workers' Party). I didn't have to cross the Pyrenees in the winter of 1939 with Franco's troops on my heels, far from it. I left by plane, but with only the clothes on my back and no intention of returning. And then a lifetime passed.

We have just entered a five-year period at the end of which we will have two expanded museums, MNAC and MACBA, and a new one in Barcelona. I would like to elaborate on the established fact that the museum of modern or contemporary art has ceased to be only a receiving box for historical sediment that studies, preserves, explains and displays art at the end of the journey – traditionally you arrived at the museum when you had already gone through all the previous filters, not the other way around – to gradually transform itself from the middle to the fact that artists, not all of them, but a very significant part, come first and foremost to the museum to work, to “manufacture” what they exhibit. This implies in some way that the museum space is, de facto, the study of these artists before being transformed into their exhibition space. This is what characterizes production-based art as it has always been understood in the performing arts, in cinema, or even in the musical arts. How all this happened almost half a century ago is a fascinating story that is still incredibly unwritten and represents the most radical change that has occurred within the art museum since its modern version emerged in the 18th century. What I am going to comment on in this article are the consequences and shortcomings that this now implicitly accepted situation has generated, but without being addressed or debated, surprisingly, in a technically serious way.

We have just entered a five-year period at the end of which we will have two expanded museums and a new one in Barcelona. I would like to elaborate on the established fact that the museum of modern or contemporary art has ceased to be only a receiving box for historical sediment that studies, preserves, explains and displays art at the end of the journey – traditionally you arrived at the museum when you had already gone through all the previous filters, not the other way around – to gradually transform itself from the middle to the fact that artists, not all of them, but a very significant part, come to the museum first and foremost to work, to "manufacture" what they exhibit. This implies in some way that the museum space is, de facto, the study of these artists before being transformed into their exhibition space. This is what characterizes production-based art as it has always been understood in the performing arts, in cinema, or even in the musical arts. How all this happened almost half a century ago is a fascinating story that is still incredibly unwritten and represents the most radical change that has occurred within the art museum since its modern version emerged in the 18th century. What I am going to comment on in this article are the consequences and shortcomings that this now implicitly accepted situation has generated, but without being addressed or debated, surprisingly, in a technically serious way.

Homi Bhabha talks about a concept that has always interested me a lot: cultural authority; that which makes the cultural production of a certain country, city or social group relevant as a matter of principle and without discussion. If we use cities as an example, New York immediately comes to mind after the end of World War II, or Paris between the wars, in the twentieth century, to go no further back in time, places in which a series of historical, political and economic circumstances make everything that happens there not only unquestionably interesting, but essential to delimit, identify and define the Zeitgeist, the spirit of an era to the point that the rest of cities cannot do anything but adopt a secondary role, voluntarily accepting a relative degree of cultural colonisation to the detriment of their own culture. This cultural authority of which Bhabha speaks does not exist without a political and economic equivalent. To put it in a brutally compacted way and referring to the United States, Pollock's abstract expressionism, Frank O'Hara's poetry, Elvis' pelvis, Marilyn Monroe's thighs, and Levi's jeans cannot be separated from the atomic bomb, nor from having won the greatest war in the history of mankind, coming out of it as the producer of 45% of the world's GDP. This conjunction of factors is the geopolitical sketch of the last seventy-six years that has allowed, among other things, the United States flag painted in encaustic by Jasper Jones to be a landmark of avant-garde art in the second half of the last century. Can you imagine the same with the Spanish flag?