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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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…
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Measurement as an end
I endeavour not to look at the likes or statistics of what I publish. It is not a solemn rule or a penance; it is a habit I impose upon myself because the temptation to look arises several times a day. And for a time, I told myself that I do it so as not to end up writing what we…
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Reinvent, do not reconstruct
On 4 October 1959, in a New York gallery, Allan Kaprow presented 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, the work that established the word 'happening' in the vocabulary of art. It was repeated six times that month. And contrary to what the name suggests, it had nothing improvised about it. Kaprow divided the gallery into…
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Chemistry also paints
When you stand before a Van Gogh painting in a museum, you take for granted that you are seeing what he painted. It is a reasonable assumption and, in part, false. A good portion of what you are looking at is his: the composition, the thick texture of the paint, the direction of each brushstroke, the impasto. But some…
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The doubt will vanish in flight
In October 2022, the National Gallery of Art in Washington announced that one of its Vermeers was not a Vermeer. The painting, Girl with a Flute, a small panel of a young woman with an extravagant hat, had been catalogued for decades, with caution, as a work by the master of Delft. After years of technical analysis, the museum…
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A thumbs-up
In March 2021, a grain buyer from Saskatchewan telephoned a farmer with whom he had been conducting business for nine years. They agreed upon the sale of eighty-seven tonnes of flaxseed at seventeen dollars per bushel, for delivery in November. The buyer completed his company's contract, signed it...