The Museum Trend

The five essays that compose this volume are, in general, conferences held at museum-related events. Although many passages from these oral presentations have been included in other publications or interviews, the idea that by bringing the original texts together in a small thematic volume we would facilitate the access of a future generation of researchers to that decisive chapter of capitalism in times of productive restructuring was more important. The first essay is a speech given at the exhibition “New Museum Buildings in the Federal Republic of Germany”, in 1991, and addresses the spectator-artwork relationship in those museums as opposed to modern museums. Starting from Adorno's meditation, motivated by the confrontation between Valéry’s and Proust’s views on the neutralization of artworks in those spaces, the essay concludes that, in any case, and precisely because of their neutrality, they still allowed the solitary visitor the pleasure of concentrating on selected works. Fifty years later, the new museums would be far from providing any kind of retreat, demanding from the public, at most, a distracted attention. From the multiple activities they offer to their architectural extravagance, these museums mobilize countless resources to satisfy a new contingent of visitor-consumers while housing an artistic production increasingly conceived on a mass scale, that is, in the exact extent of consumption in an affluent society. The text entitled, not by chance, “Contaminations” summarizes the road map followed by those transformations, when different branches of activities seem to work in an immense network of equally “entrepreneurial” connections, having the permanent circulation of people as one of the main ingredients: museum/cultural-center/shopping/theme-park, from Beaubourg to the latest Guggenheim museums, where the muses have progressively given way to the masses, and the museums have given way to other spaces, such as large designer stores—which is the subject of “From Haute Culture to Haute Couture”. All these issues are also addressed in the final conference, from 2005, which analyzes the effects of this cultural turn in the “arts system” and its circuits, from mass production to large installations.

Keywords: Adorno, Cultural Animation, Art Autonomy, Art and Politics, Beaubourg, Benjamin, Brecht, Boltanski and Chiapello, Christa Bürger, Contaminations, Curator, Age of Culture, Age of Museums, Aesthetic Experience, Gehry, Guggenheim, Guy Debord, Herzog & de Meuron, Hollein, Interdisciplinarity, J. Rifkin, J.I. Pei, J.P. Jeudy, Jameson, Lévi-Strauss, Lipovetsky, M. Botta, Fashion, Lasar Segall Museum, New Museums, OMA – Koolhaas, P. Valéry, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Proust, R. Meyer, Rosalind Krauss, Arts System, Stirling, Thomas Krens, Transculturalism, G. Vattimo.