A few years ago I was able to visit the Proa Foundation in Buenos Aires. Ai Weiwei was exhibiting. The exhibit was called “Inoculación” and consisted of a large number of political works presented as a project of public and social intervention, as dissident art.
I’m in the grip of a simian rage, and I hope this is obvious from the tone in which this article is written.
Most of these last four decades of democracy have been spent creating a fake culture, using as a marketing ploy a country which urgently needed to demonstrate that it could hit the spot in terms of European culture.
Many of the old paintings hanging in city apartments have a small gold titleplates with the name of the painter – usually one of the Grand Masters: Murillo, Ribera, Velázquez, Zurbarán.
To the now classic dilemma of “who do you like best, Mummy or Daddy?” the people of Barcelona have added “which do you prefer, culture or health?”.
The artistic and hereditary fabric of Catalonia is extensive…and thinly spread, too thinly spread. Are the recent staff dismissals at the Joan Miró Foundation and the “strategic change” at the Antoni Tàpies Foundation, warnings of future suspensions?
All antiquarians who dedicate out noble profession to antique paintings have dreamed of finding a Caravaggio.
I receive a strange telephone call from a woman who, by the sound of her soft voice, seems young. She tells me that her father has an important collection of drawings and invites me to see them Argentona.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer has launched in Barcelona, “Megalodemocrat”, the documentary following the last decade of his extraordinary career.
The ghost of the butter scene haunts Bertolucci even in death.
An analysis of the convulsive events which have changed the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Sant Jordi.
If there was ever a Christmas tradition that attracted more followers than the others, at least in the city of Barcelona, it would be to criticise the nativity scene in the Plaça Sant Jaume.
That a hunter would wish to hunt another is an impossible mission. Second installment of the series “Stories of Antiquarians and Fame”.
The first characteristic to define Stanley Kubrick and his movies is his extremely high and exceptional ambition.
“An antiquarian is a hunter of art works, somebody who seeks or chases pieces obsessively until they are bagged.” In this space, every month antiquarian Artur Ramon will give us a taste of his most impassioned professional experiences. #nofilters.