In the Reina Sofía Museum there is an icon from the 21st century with the word Guernica in the title, but it is not the famous painting from 1937. That mural was an icon (from the 20th century) until the bulletproof glass was removed in the Prado Museum .
Today he is no more than a
Picasso
.
She has gone the opposite way of La
Gioconda
, who ceased to be a
leonardo
to be something worthy of being measured against Beyoncé when she returned from Japan in 1974, her last exit from the Louvre.
The great
millennial
icon of the Reina Sofía ―
Equal-Parallel: Guernica-Bengasi
, by Richard Serra― shares with the
Mona Lisa
one of the factors of its fame: its disappearance.
The theft of the Renaissance panel in 1911 and her three-year absence contributed to turning it into a myth.
The
evaporation
of minimalist sculpture from the Macarrón warehouses made it the best example of how our time works.
Juan Tallón tells it wonderfully in his recent
Masterpiece
(Anagram), a book that the publisher insists on calling a novel so much that it makes us doubt that it is.
It is much better than a novel: it is the choral x-ray of a religion so based on iconoclasm and the idea of the avant-garde that it has forgotten that it stands on two prehistoric pillars: faith and fetishism.
Fetishism made the Reina, against the advice of its first person in charge, decide to buy it in 1987. The museum, recently opened, needed space and Carmen Giménez preferred that it follow the usual course of many of Serra's works once exhibited: destruction.
She costs more to transport and store them than to remake them.
That's why she didn't mind “generating a duplicate exactly the same, but giving it the character of an original work, you know”.
It is the one that can be seen now on the ground floor of the Sabatini building.
What if the missing piece appears?
One is destroyed.
As gallery owner Larry Gagosian says in Tallón's book: “There should be no discussion: the true original of
Equal-Parallel
it is not the new work or the old, but the idea that is in the head of the artist, prior to both”.
That's where faith comes into play.
Taking Marcel Duchamp's conceptual lesson to the limit, Joseph Kosuth summed it up in a famous series: “Art as Idea as Idea”.
Galleries and museums are full of ideas.
Some dazzling.
The problem is that thought is difficult to collect, that is, to monetize.
The crypto art business is just another chapter in the attempt to preserve the privileges of what is solid in liquid times.
As Banco de Santander says on its educational website: "The value of a digital work of art lies in the same characteristics as a traditional work of art: authenticity, exclusivity and ownership."
Digital but exclusive?
Money no longer depends on the gold standard;
art still depends on the aura.
As the classic said, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
Next week Arco begins.
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