Santa Mónica is a hotbed of creativity. In the cloister, Claudia del Barrio, from the production company Merci Xula, is preparing Ouineta's new music video. Two floors up, choreographer and dancer Mónica Valenciano improvises, sharing the space with members of the Valencian collective Las Mediocre, who are working at their computers on the development of a conflict resolution office. They'll have to move very soon, because Ouineta's video will be filmed here in a matter of days. Back in the cloister, the stage designed by artist Víctor Ruiz Colomer is now empty, awaiting new artists. And suddenly, a cloud of smoke, conceived by stage designer Leticia Skrycky, begins to form.

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.