The debate on the future of contemporary art centres and museums is today a territory riddled with mines. In recent years, particularly in this country, we have witnessed a disorderly and repetitive proliferation of initiatives, local in most cases, to endow cities with a contemporary art centre or museum. No-one wants to be left out, but the initiatives do not always respond to a project but, in most cases, to an institutional and political decision. The procedure is almost always the same: municipal council initiative, search for institutional support, commissioning of the architectural project, inauguration of the space, and after all of this, and only after, drafting of the museographic project. In most cases, the initiatives overlook until the final phase (if they consider it at all), the debate over the meaning of the museum or centre, not only regarding its exhibition or production policy, but above all concerning its dimension of public service.

It is true that this phenomenon forms part of a general trend, much more complex and far-reaching, towards the reduction of culture to cultural industry (and therefore of the financial and economic connections of any initiative), to the touristification of patrimonial and productive culture, to the themeparkisation of cities and the need to visibly display a certain formal modernity. The phenomenon is familiar enough for us not to have to go into more detail. In this context, the new centres enter, fundamentally, into the two major options bequeathed to us by the 20th century: firstly, the Museum that seeks to write History and establishes a thread of continuity between the various trends and manifestations on the basis of institutionalised parameters; in this way, any local history is shown in its affiliation and specificity with regard to a discourse that is set in stone and is never questioned. Secondly, the Museum that emerged in the so-called post-modern period, based on spectacularisation and the alleged break with hegemonic criteria, but in accordance with a plural discourse underpinning the relativism of forms and meanings. To simplify, we can apply two names to these models: the MoMA in New York and the Guggenheim in Bilbao. But the important thing is the model, reproduced in both cases to the point of exhaustion, and with one important element in common: the dominion of the public as a legitimising criterion, orienting the initiatives and justifying the different (but minimal) variants of the model.

But there is still one debate that remains to be opened, and that some centres have recently been exploring with courage: the museum/city dialectic, or the public significance of the museum in the configuration of the citizenry and issues concerning it. These centres are aware that they do not live on the boundaries of their community but establish with it dynamics that go far beyond the simple exhibition of products to the ever-problematic quest for ‘visitors.’ They are, to give a few names and at the risk of simplifying the matter, initiatives that mark out a variety of routes, no doubt unrepeatable due to being unique and the result of a carefully-constructed project. I am thinking of the most recent stage of the MACBA (Barcelona), now internationally acknowledged, concentrated precisely on going into this debate in depth, in addition to proposing a historical reading of contemporary Catalan art up to the present day that sets itself aside from the hegemonic orientation of History, exploring, outside of the centre/periphery framework, neglected corners and a certain marginality whose critical nature always bars it from linear Histories. Or like that of Arteleku (Donosti), which, with very limited budgets, concentrates particularly on research and experimentation along with non-traditional forms of visibility. Or like Witte de With (Rotterdam), which gives priority to production over collection and explores new dimensions of the misnamed ‘political art’ multiplying the connections of artistic practices with the other productive forms of contemporary culture. Or like the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (Karlsruhe), which, in addition to offering exemplary work with art related with the new information technologies, has joined forces with the most innovative centres of artistic training.

These are just a few examples, but they may be sufficient to manifest the importance and possibility of the singularity that should be programmatically defined by any new initiative of creation of contemporary art centres or museums. They are also sufficient cases that illustrate the need to think of the ‘place’ of these centres in the city and the community that set them in motion: an issue, that of the ‘place,’ which in most cases is reduced exclusively to its physical dimension, and which leaves unasked an essential question, that of the ‘meaning’ we expect of these centres and that of their ‘public’ function in relation with the citizens.

Xavier Antich
Professor of Aesthetics and Co-Director of the Master’s Course in Communication and Art Criticism (University of Girona)