Author: Juan A. Esteban
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Culture in Málaga and the distribution of duration
Propiedad, decisión y trabajo cultural en Málaga. De la serie iniciada en «Contra la vida optimizada». Este texto se centra en Málaga, pero no parte de que Málaga sea una anomalía. Durante las últimas décadas muchas ciudades han integrado la cultura en estrategias de regeneración urbana, competencia territorial, atracción turística y construcción de marca. La…
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Faster than the courts
En febrero de 2025 más de seis mil personas, la mayoría artistas, firmaron una carta pidiendo a Christie’s que cancelara una subasta. La casa iba a vender, por primera vez en una venta entera dedicada a ello, obra hecha con inteligencia artificial, y la carta denunciaba que muchas de esas piezas se habían creado con…
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Against the optimised life: which forms of culture resist incorporation
En The Death of Shame Is Tearing Us Apart, Jay Caspian Kang parte de una anomalía deportiva para describir una transformación moral más amplia. En la NBA, algunos equipos pierden a propósito porque el sistema de incentivos convierte la derrota presente en ventaja futura. La práctica no es nueva; lo decisivo es que ya no…
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The system or willpower
Si un adolescente pasa seis horas al día en el teléfono, la conversación pública sabe de quién es la culpa. Suya, por no tener disciplina. O de sus padres, por no ponerle límites. La solución que se propone es siempre del mismo tamaño que el culpable señalado: más fuerza de voluntad, más control parental, una…
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To whom it is returned
In July 2026, the University of Oxford approved the return of thirty-nine skulls. They had spent nearly a century in the Pitt Rivers Museum, one of the world's great ethnographic museums, catalogued as a museum does: human remains, provenance, inventory number. It was announced in September. At the time of writing this, they had not…
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Almost always, one loses
My friend and artist Juan Carlos Rica sends me a quote without telling me who it is by. I read it twice: it comes from an interview with Tim Hunt in XL Semanal, and it says, more or less, that in science you spend most of your time being wrong and suffering, and that what hooks you is the game in…
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A work without papers
In 2005, the Tate purchased This is propaganda, by Tino Sehgal. The work does not exist as an object: it cannot be photographed, and its instructions are not written down. In a room at the museum, there is a woman dressed like the rest of the security staff. When a visitor enters, she turns towards the wall and sings a…
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He lives in the machine
Rebecca Nolan was fourteen years old when her father died, a doctor who left behind hours of recorded stories for her, her mother, and her sisters. Years later, Nolan, who works in sound production, did what her profession and the era made available to her: she used those recordings to build a conversational simulation with ChatGPT inspired by…
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Perceptibly different
In April 2026, the Court of Justice of the European Union responded to a question that appears aesthetic but arrived dressed as a lawsuit: when is taking something from another's work and using it in one's own legitimate creation, and when is it illicit copying? The case had a long history, involving a two-second sample…
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A novel without an e
In 1969, Georges Perec published a three-hundred-and-nineteen-page novel in Paris written entirely without the letter e, which is the most frequent letter in French. It is titled La Disparition, and the plot accompanies the restriction: the characters search for something that is missing and cannot manage to name it. Perec belonged to Oulipo, the group that explored…