Anyone working in contemporary art recognises, although they rarely state it aloud, that the living artist presents a problem for the institution, whereas the established artist offers convenience. This is not due to any lack of regard, but rather to something colder and more difficult to challenge: the logic by which an institution determines its expenditure, its exhibition programme, and its acquisitions.

I shall begin with what I cannot assert, as I have sought the data and it appears not to exist. There is no study in Spain that measures whether museums purchase more work by deceased artists than by living ones, nor by age or career trajectory. Furthermore, the popular notion that death increases the value of an artist's work does not hold as a rule: economic research into auctions is contradictory, with some findings suggesting a rise around the time of death and others a decline, depending on the reputation and networks of each artist. Therefore, anyone claiming, with figures, that the deceased are favoured here is asserting more than can be proven. I shall not do so.

What can be maintained, and with a solid foundation, is something more subtle and profound: the cultural institution functions as a machine for legitimation, and machines for legitimation naturally gravitate towards what is already legitimised. This is what the sociology of art has been describing for half a century, since Bourdieu: a museum does not merely display work, it produces value; it dictates what merits attention, and in doing so, it risks its own authority. Consequently, it prefers not to take such risks. An already established name—supported by bibliography, market presence, past exhibitions, and consensus—is a safe bet: the museum that exhibits or purchases such work cannot be mistaken, as the validation has already been provided by others. The museum merely ratifies.

The living artist, by contrast, is the antithesis of a safe bet. Consensus has yet to be reached; it may be achieved tomorrow or never at all. One must negotiate with the artist, pay fees, discuss the installation, and accept that critics may not provide their backing. They introduce uncertainty into an institution whose capital is, precisely, the avoidance of public error. Purchasing work from a seventy-year-old artist with a forty-year career is an act of ratification; purchasing from a thirty-year-old is an act of speculation. And speculation is precisely what an institution concerned with its prestige prefers to avoid.

This is the logic of risk, and it is not born of malice: it is the inertia of a system designed to preserve authority. Yet it carries a cost, and that cost is always borne by the same party. For if every institution ratifies and none speculates, who validates the living artist so that they may one day become the secure name that all will desire? The consecration that the museum expects to find already complete must be performed by someone. If no one assumes the risk at the beginning, there is no conclusion. The system feeds upon the consecrated and produces none; it inherits them from a market and a critical sphere that operate independently, arriving late to ratify what no longer requires ratification.

And it is here that one observes how the logic of risk, while understandable, constitutes a renunciation. A public institution does not exist to be infallible. It exists to perform what the market neglects: to sustain that which lacks a price, to venture where the private sector will not, and to be the first to demonstrate belief. When an institution abandons this mandate for fear of error, it becomes redundant; it merely replicates the actions of a prudent collector by purchasing certainty, thereby failing to fulfil the sole function that justifies its public funding.

The contrary model exists, and it is effective. In France, the FRAC were established in 1982 with the explicit mandate to be, in many instances, the first to acquire the work of a young artist. They do not await consecration; they produce it, initiating the process with the first institutional acquisition. They have assembled tens of thousands of works by thousands of artists through this method, transforming risk into cultural policy rather than fleeing from it. We possess elements of this here—the Reina Sofía purchases works by living artists at ARCO, and there are regional programmes for emerging talent—but these are specific, limited instances set against a vast apparatus that remains oriented towards heritage. They are the exception, not the norm.

I do not suggest that institutions should cease the acquisition and exhibition of established figures; that is, of course, part of their remit. I ask only that they remember that every established artist was once a living practitioner in whom someone dared to believe before it was a certainty. The security of the names they exhibit today was constructed by those who, at the time, were willing to take a risk. If no one takes such risks now, in thirty years there will be no secure names to purchase; there will only be museums filled with the same figures as always, waiting for others to perform the discovery work they no longer undertake. The comfort of the validated is, in the long term, a guarantee of irrelevance.

On open conversation

This text concludes, for the present, a series regarding the distance between recognising and supporting creators: first at the national level of the statute, then within the fabric of my city, and here in the underlying logic that permeates them, which leads institutions to prefer the security of the already validated name. I do not assert a statistical bias that lacks documentation; I maintain, in line with the sociology of art, that a machine of legitimation tends towards the already legitimate, and that renouncing risk carries a price. Should anyone wish to intervene from the perspective of museum directorship, acquisition policies, the market, or artistic practice itself, this notebook remains open.

Sources

Ministry of Culture. Acquisitions of cultural assets for public collections: €14.59m in 2024 and €13.24m in 2025; purchases at ARCO 2024, 2025 and 2026 for the Museo Reina Sofía.

Bourdieu, Pierre, and Alain Darbel. L’amour de l’art (The Love of Art). Langfeld, Gregor. “The Canon in Art History: Concepts and Approaches”, Journal of Art Historiography, 2018. Prior, Nick. The British Journal of Sociology, 2005.

Regarding the effect of death on prices (non-unanimous literature): Ekelund, Ressler and Watson, Journal of Cultural Economics, 2000; De Silva, Kosmopoulou, Pownall and Press, Oxford Economic Papers, 2021/2022; Sahli and Cuntz, Journal of Cultural Economics, 2025.

Fonds régionaux d’art contemporain (FRAC), France: mission to support creation and the first acquisition of young artists (Ministère de la Culture). Iniciarte (Junta de Andalucía) and C3A residencies as programmes for supporting living creation.

Sectoral reports: MAV (Women in the Visual Arts), analysis of exhibitions and acquisitions 2020-2024; Unión_AC, best practices and professional recognition of the visual artist.