The Spanish government, previously with the PSOE and now with the PP, has been messing around for a while now with a new law for cultural patronage. With everyone waiting to see, if once and for all, they grant all the possible fiscal incentives to the most powerful, so that they can finally lend support to culture. Once the law is in place, the rich will emerge from behind the woodwork, who have been sitting waiting in the hope of helping more independent proposals, production centres, structures designed for the professionalization of young artists and platforms for critical thought and it will all be lovely, loads of fun and in 3D.
It’s not that the large institutions are going to be left once again with the whole cake, or that the people with money will increasingly gain power on the boards and enjoy grand parties when the museums are closed. No, with the new law everything will function well and the sector will be covered, and each of us will have a clothes sponsor: we’ll simply have to choose the brand and they will be delighted to support culture.
So we can now eliminate all public support, as with these patrons everything will be under control. If later it turns out that the money originates who knows where, that there is some form of fiscal fraud … we’ll turn a blind eye and won’t be critical, thanks to the law of patronage they will be our protectors, and as Samuel Eto’o already said, there’s no biting the hand that feeds you.
In this edition of A*Magazine we present an interview by Saioa Olmo with Roger Bernat, Xavier Acarín writes about the Whitney Biennial in New York and José Raúl Camacho about Navid Nuur at Matadero in Madrid.
Roger Bernat and his team have opened “Pendiente de voto” (Vote pending) at the Centro Nacional de Teatro in Madrid. For the duration of the function, the theatre is converted into a parliament, where the spectators become the political agents in a false current parliamentary debate. The voting directs the whole procedure. Roger Bernat is one of the most significant examples of how theatre can become a platform for investigation and experimentation, while not forgetting critique and emotion.
The American museum celebrates its seventy-sixth edition of the Biennial since 1932, (it was initially annual) with its eyes focused on artists that redefine or revise their practice by linking it to the narratives of other artists, cultures and technologies: an intellectual struggle that is not always happily resolved. But one thing’s for sure, in this edition there are fewer artists than usual, only fifty-one and not all are American.
The real and the apparent, perception and light. Navid Nuur presents in Matadero an exhibition where the physical experience makes it possible to travel to the origins of art, to some of the primordial questions about the meaning of work and the function of art.
