An independent research space concerning contemporary issues. This is neither a formal academic publication nor an opinion column: it is analytical work supported by data on topics I consider relevant and worthy of rigorous examination, even when they fall outside specialised academic circuits. Open to co-authorship. Proposals to: hola@juanesteban.art
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Entries: 137
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The access promised by the screen
When a cultural institution uploads its collection to the internet, it makes a gesture that seems like justice: what previously required travelling, paying, knowing that it existed, is now a click away for anyone. I work with the digital and I believe in a large part of that promise. But the data tell a less rounded story than…
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How a reputation is manufactured
We tend to think of recognition as a natural consequence: talent exists, sooner or later it is noticed, and recognition arrives behind it like someone picking up something that was already there. It is a comforting story and almost always false. Recognition is not picked up: it is manufactured through concrete devices that one must know, especially if…
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The hand that funds
There is a question that cultural organisations avoid asking ourselves aloud, perhaps because the answer is uncomfortable: to what extent is what we can say and do conditioned by those who fund us? I pose this from within, not as an accusation. I direct a foundation with a constrained budget, dependent on grants and support, and I know that this matter...
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Who feels invited
The entire conversation regarding art and society occupies the foundation I direct, yet it tends to look in only one direction: who produces, who finances, who consecrates, who mediates. The other side is missing, and it is the most uncomfortable: who receives, who feels invited, and above all, who does not. The audience of the...
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Art that raises the rent
The scene repeats in many cities and is almost invariably recounted in the same manner, as a positive development. A neglected neighbourhood, characterised by vacant premises and low rents, begins to attract artists' studios, small galleries, a festival, and a café with character. The neighbourhood 'revives'. Cultural supplements celebrate the transformation. And a few years later, the...
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What we cannot know about the price
On the invisible boundary between building reputation, manipulating the market, and defrauding. Every so often, a scandal of forgery or fraud traverses the art press and reactivates a comfortable suspicion: that the entire market is a fabrication, that prices are smoke, that behind every figure there is a hand pulling the strings.…
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Working for the love of art
The expression is so common that we no longer hear it: working for the love of art. It literally means working for free. It describes with uncomfortable precision how a significant portion of the cultural sector is sustained, including the work of many foundations. I say this from an organisation with a constrained budget, which knows at close quarters the temptation of paying in...
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What we choose to remember
We tend to speak of heritage as if it were a natural category: there are things that, quite simply, deserve to be preserved. An ancient building, a masterpiece, an archaeological site. As if the value resided in the object, waiting to be recognised, and conservation consisted only of not allowing that which is already valuable in itself to be lost. The discipline...
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Politics is not in the painting
On why the critique of contemporary art is played out in infrastructure and not in the message. There is a very widespread, and very comfortable, idea regarding what renders art political: that it is so by virtue of its subject. A work would be political if it denounces, if it represents a conflict, if it takes a side, if it carries…
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Art and Good Conscience
Participatory projects currently occupy a large part of cultural programming and certainly a large part of what a foundation like the one I direct does: workshops with communities, collaborative works, processes that include those who are usually left out. They are applauded, almost by default, with a vocabulary we already know—inclusive, collaborative, transformative, committed. In...