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 laughter that opens and the laughter that closes
On humour, art, and the temptation to always believe it to be on the side of good. In times of tension, a reasonable hope is repeated: that we require more humour. That in the face of dogma, the trench, and angry solemnity, laughter might return to us some air, some distance, some shared humanity. I share the impulse. But I have learned…
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The empty chair
On 7 July, The New York Times published a report with a headline that sounds like retribution: the revenge of the philosophy graduates. Artificial intelligence laboratories are hiring philosophers. Not as an ornamental gesture: Google DeepMind and Anthropic each have at least half a dozen, there is a constitution of twenty-three thousand…
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The impact we claim to have
Regarding a phrase that the world of culture repeats about itself with a conviction that is rarely examined: art transforms lives, culture is a driver of social change, mediation includes, coheres, repairs. I have said it myself. It is, in other words, in the mission of the foundation I preside over. And precisely...
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Cooling the room, warming the world
On the paradox of preserving art on a warming planet, and who can afford it. Imagine the perfect room. Twenty-one degrees, fifty per cent relative humidity, without a single fluctuation. The work hangs in ideal conditions, protected from light, from dust, from time. For decades, that stability was the unquestionable ideal of the…
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The festival that does not fit in the frame
On experience converted into content, and the rest that escapes it. There is a question that the cultural industry has already answered without formulating it: the contemporary festival is not designed solely to be experienced, but to circulate. Recent research states this bluntly. The consumer of experiences seeks, beyond the moment, shareable narrative material…
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The author that the law requires
Second movement on origin: what the law truly seeks when it seeks an author. In a previous text, I maintained that we have a cultural obsession with origin: we want to know where a work comes from, through whose hand it passed, what process produced it, as if its value depended on the purity of its provenance. That text…
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The hand signing the file
When authenticity ceases to be a judgement and becomes signed metadata. In a previous text, I maintained that in the age of AI-driven suspicion, the value of the handmade shifts from the surface of the image to its provenance: it is not the hand that holds more value, but the hand that...
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Declaring to avoid debate
On the declaration of 'Bien de Interés Cultural' as a device, regarding Extremadura. There is a silent way to win an argument: to make it impossible to discuss. Not through prohibition or censorship, but through a more elegant gesture: elevating the object in dispute to a category that places it above debate. In…
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The Credible Hand
What happens to the value of the handmade when the first thing we ask before an image is where it came from. For centuries, the value of a work was discussed by looking at it. One could disagree on the result, but the question operated on something present: this is what there is, let us judge it. The era of…
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The obsession with origin
What the Thaler case fails to perceive, and what Europe is beginning to examine. In March 2025, a United States court of appeals—the D.C. Circuit—established that United States copyright requires human authorship: a work generated without a human author is not registrable. In March 2026, the Supreme Court declined to review...