On Jorge Juan Street, every ten steps we come across a restaurant that looks more like a theme park than a place to eat, like something out of Mad Men<\/em>. In one place you\u2019re on a beach in Comporta and in another one you\u2019re in a James Bond movie. Each one imperiously (from Latin: \u201cone who commands a lot\u201d) different from the one next door. The menu is the least important. What matters is the dramatic, operatic, fleeting experience of being in different series every night. HBO in the Salamanca neighborhood, and Netflix is best left for the Gran V\u00eda<\/em>. Each venue offers you a different background for your Instagram pic, a guaranteed variety of different scenery, a set for each state of mind and for the next round of consumption. Each place is unique, special, unmistakable. Difference is a value in and of itself because that is what experience has wound up being: a distinctive event. After all, when we go to a hospital, a post office, a ministry or a school, they all look alike: ugly, anonymous, without a touch of class. They are places where the only thing that is consumed is the little patience we have left, our bad mood, our anxiety. Blood, sweat and tears. We ask only of them to be functional, that is, identical, recognizable, useful, even if they are not at all. But if they are not, at least they should appear to be. In fact, though, when in an institution or in an official space we come across Murano chandeliers, wooden shutters or the ocher of chipped frescoes, that is when we should start to worry: oh, those Neapolitan town halls, those Central European courthouses, Kafkaesque labyrinths, all absolutely useless.<\/p>\n But what about museums? What about the National Gallery, the Tate, the Louvre? When did El Prado and the other solemn institutions become amusement parks, the Tivoli, another Kinder Egg? When did the museum go from being considered high to low brow? Let\u2019s remember Godard\u2019s Bande \u00e0 part<\/em>, shot in 1969. Let\u2019s look again at the famous scene in which three friends, Odile, Franz and Arthur, decide to run through the Louvre in nine minutes and forty-three seconds. The scene was filmed without permission, crazy, natural, and one of the most surprising things now is to see how there are hardly any visitors in the rooms and corridors of the museum. In the Louvre! No one anywhere! These days, however, there are lines of up to half an hour! Endless lines of visitors that stretch through the museum in just over those nine minutes, herds like those in the Four Seasons or in Primark, not contemplating the artwork but taking selfies and going through corridors that always lead at the end of the tour, like a magnet, to the increasingly large Gift Shop. Tourists buying a Monet flowered handkerchief, yet another T-shirt with Van Gogh\u2019s face, a replica ring of that Renaissance portrait they didn\u2019t even see. Let no one leave empty-handed, buy whatever you must. You are no longer a museum visitor, dear tourist, you are now a customer. A collector of the elusive yet obvious aesthetic experience. Because, after all, beauty is what something suggests to you, what provokes your imagination, what makes you imagine other places. Ugliness, like the corridor of a ministry, the counter of a bank, the waiting room of a hospital, the functional, always ends in itself, it does not suggest anything. They don\u2019t need to. Beautiful places always tell you a story, they speak to you, lead you on, and take you by the hand. To go shopping.<\/p>\n A rhino, three ostriches and an octopus, not in a garage but in the catacombs of the recently inaugurated Four Seasons in Madrid, the penultimate five-star hotel. It\u2019s best not…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2804,"featured_media":40789,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6267],"tags":[],"coauthors":[6683],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/a-desk.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/Ester-Garcia-Llovet-2.jpg\")
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