Allan Sekula was an American photographer, writer, critic and filmmaker. Born in Erie, Pennsylvania in 1951, he lived most of his life in Los Angeles and the surrounding regions of southern California.
Today’s world of culture is shaped, on the one hand, by the prominent figures in the culture and communications industry and, on the other, by the diffuse magma of culture producers whose actions are governed by the subordination of their creative singularity. This subordination is manifested in artists having to sell their creative capacity or in their being expropriated of it. In addition, we are in the midst of a systemic crisis to which the museum is not immune. If the economic paradigm based on speculation and easy money has proven unsustainable, it should also be clear that the primacy of the building and of art as spectacle over the museum’s artistic program has ceased to be valid. There is therefore a pressing need to invent other models.
Museo Reina Sofía is working to develop various approaches aimed precisely at transforming the museum from a public institution into one that belongs to the common sphere, through the collection, the creation of an archive of communality, and organizing a heterogeneous network of partnerships with groups, social movements, universities, and other bodies that question the museum and generate spaces for negotiation rather than mere representation.
Allan Sekula was an American photographer, writer, critic and filmmaker. Born in Erie, Pennsylvania in 1951, he lived most of his life in Los Angeles and the surrounding regions of southern California.
Whether creating an acid portrait of Sweden, representing the nightmarish world of business offices, tapping into the desolate uniformity of petrified, petit-bourgeois neighborhoods, Lars Tunbjörk has totally forgotten his black and white beginnings.
“The real value of this expansion is not more space, but space that allows us to rethink the experience of art in the Museum.” –Glenn D. Lowry, The David Rockefeller Director (more…)
If Ryuichi Sakamoto had been born in 16th century Italy, we’d know what to call him: a Renaissance Man. But since he was born in Japan in the mid-20th century, we have to string together words like composer, musician, producer, actor, and environmental activist. (more…)
Sinziana Velicescu’s work is a minimalist and abstract approach, a modern chronicling of a quiet land surveyor, completely separated of sentimentality. The publication of her series is a documentation of time, bracketed in images of framed surfaces of space.
Flavio-Shiró is a cult artist, a painter’s painter. His work defies categorization or association with any artistic group or movement. For more than six decades, his work has simply been modern.
Anonymous, this is not about any one person or a particular artist. This project is akin to finding fading pages from an anonymous diary and placing them in a time capsule for future generations.
This would be the world we would inhabit for the time. And so holiday celebrations would toast on a different tenor. The time of reflection would be imposed, a kind of reset from an external force. (more…)