A museum is not a church or a cemetery, nor is it a franchise of a luxury establishment or one duty free Like an airport, it's the place where the collection meets the visitor, and the visitor meets legacies and memory. Thus, the newly arrived visitor leaving the museum can return to the present in a less fragmented, less lifeless and automated way—much more vibrant, more knowledgeable, more indebted, and more collective. When cultural manager András Szántó came to the MNAC last January to talk about the future of museums, he said that they had changed more in two decades than in the previous hundred years. Surely the same has happened with all cultural institutions. His focus was on the shift from museums oriented toward objects to museums directed toward people, with all that this implies: thinking of them as living, social spaces, buildings and stories that explain themselves and become transparent, understandable, and rewarding by using technology, design, and education. In other words, the move from cultural institutions based on exhibition (large exhibitions, festivals, etc.) to institutions based on relationships, knowledge, and experience.

Pompeii, whose excavation began in the 18th century, is like a vast encyclopedia to which new pages are added every day thanks to the work of archaeologists. There is a great deal of research surrounding the city that disappeared in October of 79 AD, when Mount Vesuvius violently spewed a deadly cloud of tephra and superheated gases. The exhibition The Last Days of Pompeii, which opens on March 20 at the Victoria Eugenia Palace.temporary headquarters of Ideal while the works are carried out in the Poblenou space— It explains part of the archaeological research, but above all, it's a truly immersive adventure.

Historian and archaeologist Jordi Principal has been the director of the Museum of the History of Catalonia since June 2023. The institution, which opened in 1996 with the aim of disseminating the history of the country, received 118,038 visitors last year. With a budget of €2.74 million, extended from 2023, Principal wants to implement changes: to increase research and ensure that communities that have not previously had a voice participate and express themselves freely.

It was May 1991, and the National Palace, located at the foot of Montjuïc, was being remodeled to become the permanent home of the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC). It was a time of transition and chaos. In a storage room, there was a metal cabinet containing a jewel: the Sijena peace-bearer, a unique piece of Gothic goldsmithing dating back to 1400. It was a small piece, about ten centimeters, made of precious materials, which, without anyone noticing, disappeared.

A work of art that will never be realized, intended to denounce the perversions of global CO₂ emissions trading markets. This is the premise that led artist Josep Piñol to sign before a notary this Saturday the formal renunciation of ever building his sculptural work, which was designed to be installed in Belém, the region of the Brazilian Amazon where the UN COP30 climate summit is being held this November. Had it been built, this work would have emitted 57,765 tons of CO₂, which have now been converted into carbon credits worth €1.6 million.

Something makes clear Fabulous landscapesBarcelona now needs a living art center. It's a sustained demand from artists, curators, cultural professionals, and their audiences for three decades: a stable, public, and flexible space to create and exhibit the present. We're not talking about just another tourist showcase, but rather an infrastructure that places the production and access to artistic production at the center. In all this time, despite the early warning from the Association of Visual Artists of Catalonia (AAVC), the city has had a series of failed attempts: the brief period of the Santa Mònica as a programming center in the style of Kunsthalle, the attempt at the Canódromo, biennials and fairs that fade away. The balance is clear: structural precariousness, discontinuous programs, and brilliant seasons followed by long silences.

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.

Comparing the art of Sijena with that of Taüll helps us understand what a nation is. In both situations, mural paintings that adorned the walls of Pyrenean churches at the beginning of the 20th century were removed using the technique ofstrappo and taken to a museum for safekeeping. Unlike the treasures of the British Museum or the Louvre, which come from former plundered colonies, everything here would have been lost were it not for the Catalan institutions. But now Aragon is demanding the paintings be returned despite the risk of irreparable damage, while the inhabitants of the Taüll Valley are perfectly content with the interplay established between the replicas they have in their churches and the exhibition in the Romanesque galleries of the MNAC (where, incidentally, they have free admission). Why is no one from Taüll asking for the return of the originals?

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.

Singer George Michael started collecting contemporary art when he met some of the controversial Young British Artists, such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. The experts who auctioned his collection at Christie's for charity after his death explained that it was common for visual artists and creators from the world of fashion and music to coincide at the same parties.