This artwork is part of the project: "The naked king".
About “The naked king: notes
for an ethnography of the art world” project:
The project "The naked king", inspired by the homonymous tale,
raises the problem of the crisis of legitimacy of art, the different roles of
the agents of the artistic field and the distance that separates art from
society. In addition, this fable serves as a pretext to build a metaphor for
what happens in the art world, highlighting its complexity and referring to the
big difficulties in accessing -or adapting- to a complex system; as the art
historian Juan Antonio Ramírez said the art system is an "extremely
fragile ecosystem" in which the survival of some species depend on the
others, and since the 1980s the mediators have been the agents that assume a
preponderant role. Currently, the relationships between the different agents
and their profiles and competences are mutating.
For this reason, from the artistic practice itself as a platform for questioning, I intend to continue an artistic research started three years ago about the dynamics of the contemporary art world and the competences of its different actors, from the reflexivity and the perspective of the artist. This project reconstructs, through drawing and painting, an ethnography of the art world, continuing a previous project entitled "Genius loci. Notes for an ethnography of the art world " (exhibited last year in Spain). That title referred, on the one hand, to the role of mediators as protective geniuses of artists and gatekeepers of the art system and, on the other hand, to the singular characteristics of a place... in our case, the artistic scene and its idiosyncrasy. The use of disguise and masquerade evokes, on the one hand, the idea of art as a spectacle and, on the other hand, emphasizes the artist's need to develop survival tactics in a hostile environment, such as camouflage. Artists reduced to merchandise are transported in boxes of packaging for works of art by the artistic mediators, disguised as pandas: as the caretakers of these animals in danger of extinction are disguised to facilitate their reinsertion into the wild natural environment, the career of the "fragile artist" is managed by intermediaries (curators, directors of museums, gallerists), who implement marketing strategies, relegating the artist in many cases to the category of product-work of art, to ready-made. The main objective of this artistic research project is to present a visual ethnography of the art world through different notes that register and question the polyhedral reality of the artistic field, its most influential actors, the social relations that cross it and their various problems.
