By Paco Barragán
For more than two centuries since the Louvre went public, the museum has hardly changed.
I am shockingly aware that such a statement may sound like a provocation, as many respected professionals from the museum world and academia alike-Kenneth Hudson and Eilean Hooper-Greenhill among them-think just the opposite: that “museums refuse [...]
“The autonomy of kitsch comes from the disobedience of the Western canon, especially in areas like Latin America where it matters a damn.”
By Paco Barragán
Chilean artist Arturo Duclos was one of the youngest members of the so-called Escena de Avanzada, the political and conceptual movement in the mid-1970s and early [...]
(Or Why Dana Schutz’s Painting of Emmett Till Goes Far Beyond Freedom of Expression)
By Paco Barragán
The recent controversy about Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket (2016) at the Whitney Biennial is reminiscent of similar incidents in the United States that keep popping up with frenzied fury.
In this case, the attack came from [...]
“The installation design functions to reframe in a very powerful way the meaning of the experience and the meaning of the work of art.”
Published in 1998, The Power of Display is still one of the most fascinating and essential books if we want to understand the history and practices of Modernist museum exhibitions. [...]
By Paco Barragán
Having been asked to narrate my recent visit to New York to some of its seminal museums, my remarks on it must be taken as biased-in the nature of a reprobation-rather than as the expression of entirely independent criticism.
I freely admit that I gently borrowed the title from French professor Serge [...]
“Our first modernity in Latin America is indigenous, not a discovery in Paris in the 1870s, something happens there that resists academic, scientific and rational thought.”
By Paco Barragán
On the ocassion of his recent solo show “Juan Dávila: Imagen Residual/After Image” at Matucana 100 in Santiago de Chile, we spoke to Juan [...]
Galería Cidreña - Cidra, Puerto Rico
By Abdías Méndez Robles
“Art is a reflection of the world. If the world is horrible, the reflection in the mirror is horrible.”
Paul Verhoeven (1938)
Antonio Cortés Rolón lived like an emigrant during his stay in New York from 1983 to 1985, when he studied for a master’s degree [...]
“We as artists have to find the way how to confront the state and capitalism.”
Santiago Sierra is Spain’s most well-known international artist. To some, his work is polemic; to others, it is pertinent, but it does not leave anyone indifferent. It reflects on the contradictions and paradoxes of the capitalist system, of which [...]
By Paco Barragán
Many believe Picasso’s Guernica is the most important artwork in the history of art. Why? To put it in Alfred H. Barr Jr.’s words: “What makes a great art work really great is always a mystery.”
Guernica was exhibited for 11 years at the Casón del Buen Retiro, an annex of the [...]
“Conservation is about the way the artwork can be perceived and not only about how it is presented.”
Dutch Sanneke Stigter holds a Ph.D. in the humanities from the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Between 2004 and 2011 she was head of conservation of contemporary art and modern sculpture at the Kröller-Müller Museum. The [...]
