[Bonart, November 2019]
It’s hard to accept but art is not made by the artist alone. Their action — subversive, political or
poetic — needs a system without which the work languishes in is marginality. Critics, gallery
owners, publishers, teachers, directors, collectors. All artistic capital, or anything that aspires to
be so, lives and reproduces itself within the framework of a machine. Identifying where a
lubricant is needed and realising where the faults and strengths lie, is essential for living the cause
of art to the full.
We are undoubtedly unique because of the tenacity and ambition of our artists, for at least the last
five generations. There are very few ecosystems that have distinguished artists and movements in
different spaces of modernity, including our time, full of artists with the same vibrant vision of
the world. Artists are our vitality and bedrock and we have neglected them. There are several
reasons: the lack of a factual application of the statute of the artist or the derisory collecting in the
city, both private and public. And also sectoral imbalances: the neglect of mid-career artists, an
excess of enthusiasm for emerging art and a lack of interest on the part of institutional museums
in making our artists the protagonists of their programmes.
Let’s face it, in terms of museums, we live in one of the most critical moments in recent history.
The uniqueness of art spaces does not translate into budgets to hold exhibitions we deserve at the
city’s level and the irruption of a new generation of directors — educated, dynamic and
imaginative — who have to surf among the political turmoil, is heroically saving the day. We also
have the best-trained generation of art historians and critics in history but they are under-used and
under-paid. One of the main culprits is the university, which, through undignified salaries, is
preventing the proper generational changeover, when it should be the basis of operations for
professionals.
Is it the economy that’s stupid? Yes, obviously: it is unacceptable that the Catalan Government
allocates only 0.8 % to culture or that it applies cuts, such as those announced for the MNAC. But
it’s not only this: we need to identify the structural, urgent, unacceptable shortcomings and invest
ideas, as well as resources, to unblock a rusty machine. Let’s dignify universities and we will
improve museum and publishing contents. Let’s give museums adequate budgets and we’ll see
queues once more. Let’s demand the enforcement of the statute of the artist, create a great public
art collection and encourage grassroots collecting, then the system will flow like never before.
With structural actions at a macro level, functional results are achieved at a micro level. But
without a proper systemic analysis, we will always be firing blanks.
La traducció d’aquest text ha disposat d’un ajut de l’Institut Ramon Llull
albert mercadé 