Anyone working in contemporary art acknowledges, however rarely they may voice it, that the living artist presents a challenge to 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 contest: the logic by which an institution determines its expenditure, its exhibition programming, and its acquisitions.
I shall begin with what I cannot assert, for I have sought the data and it appears not to exist. There is no study in Spain that measures whether museums acquire more work by deceased artists than by living ones, nor by age or career trajectory. The popular notion that death enhances the value of an artist's work does not hold as a rule: economic research into auctions is contradictory; some studies indicate a rise following death, others a decline, depending on the reputation and networks of each individual artist. Anyone who claims, with figures, that the deceased are favoured here asserts more than can be proven. I shall not do so.
What can be maintained, with a solid foundation, is something more subtle and profound: the cultural institution functions as a machine of legitimation, and machines of legitimation naturally gravitate towards that which is already legitimated. The sociology of art has been describing this for half a century, since Bourdieu: a museum does not merely display work; it produces value, it declares what is worthy of being viewed, and in doing so, it stakes its own authority. For this reason, it prefers not to risk it. A name already established—with bibliography, market presence, prior exhibitions, and consensus—is a safe bet: the museum that exhibits or acquires such work cannot be mistaken because the validation was performed by others beforehand. The museum merely ratifies.
The living artist, by contrast, is the very antithesis of a safe bet. They do not yet possess consensus; they may acquire it tomorrow or never. One must negotiate with them, pay their fees, discuss the installation, and accept that critics may not support them. They introduce uncertainty into an institution whose capital is the avoidance of public error. Purchasing work from an artist of seventy with a forty-year career is to ratify; purchasing from one of thirty is to wager. And wagering is precisely what an institution that stakes its prestige prefers not to do.
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. If all institutions ratify and none wager, who validates the living artist so that they may one day become that safe name that everyone desires? 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 end. The system feeds upon the established and produces none; it inherits them from a market and a critical sphere that operate independently, and it arrives late, to ratify that which no longer requires ratification.
It is here that one perceives that the logic of risk, while understandable, is a renunciation. A public institution does not exist to be correct at all times. It exists to perform what the market does not: to sustain that which does not yet have a price, to take risks where the private sector will not, to be the first to believe. When it renounces this out of a fear of error, it becomes redundant: it does the same as a prudent collector, it buys safely, and it ceases to fulfil the sole function that justifies its funding by the public.
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 the 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.