As must have happened to many Barcelona residents, the last time I slipped into the MACBA, the first thing that came to my mind was the centuries I had spent without setting foot in the museum. I share this intermittent relationship with our center of contemporary pictorial art with some colleagues from the artistic sect, which is why it does not seem daring to me to say that the MACBA has not finished honoring its foundational principle: namely, and all based on the example of the MoMA that critics Cirici Pellicer and Rodríguez-Aguilera intended to import to Barcelona, to possess an entity that would serve as a patrimonial receptacle and for experimentation on art made in the city, connected in turn with planetary contemporaneity. Now that the museum has turned thirty years old, with a commemorative exhibition included (important fact; half of the pieces had not yet been exhibited) we can say that the task of establishing an aesthetic narrative and a coherent patrimonial sense of Barcelona art still awaits someone who takes it with a certain responsibility.
To think of an artistic institution as a shoebox (the famous white cube theory, aesthetes would say) is worthy of true dimwits but, as I wandered up its famous ramp, I was immediately surprised by the fact that the commemorative exhibition of the three decades (Like a dance of starlings) occupied a space practically identical to that of Projecting a black planet, an exhibition curated by the museum's director, Elvira Dyangani Ose, and primarily focused on her own doctoral studies on Pan-Africanism. Although at home we always love the art of suffering certain attacks of egolatry, I would say that the look at thirty years of museum work required a greater spatial deployment (and a bit more exhibition reflection) than an interesting expo by its current foreman which, despite many argumentative abracadabras and the presence of a sadly caged Moreneta, has little relation to the art of Barcelona. At home we are in favor of looking nord enllà, of course, but now perhaps it was time to shift the focus towards the interior of the cube.
By chance, I returned to MACBA just as we learned the news that Dyangani will leave the center next April, because the museum's council has not allowed him to continue his decolonial work in Barcelona and simultaneously work in a place as progressive as the Abu Dhabi Public Art Biennial. According to some spies close to the plot, tensions between a director who wanted to exercise freely (in other words, with artistic but also management functions) and a board eager to snoop into the museum's daily life were not new. But be that as it may, Dyangani will have spent six years at MACBA without leaving much of a mark on the institution. Despite the presence of venerable authors such as Basquiat, Tàpies, Kentridge, Miró, and so on, our most presentist museum still cannot exhibit unique pieces and, above all, I would dare to insist, has not been able to establish a clear philosophy on the forms and guidelines through which the contemporary has woven the sum of discourses that crystallize into an idea of the city.
"The city's museums - and particularly MACBA - should rethink themselves in the most contemporary way possible"All this nuisance leads us to the everlasting theme of the role of museums in our present. As for MACBA, now that a new director will be sought, I would simply fish for someone who has enough knowledge and affection for Barcelona art to organize it and explain it to citizens in a new and enriching way (I am pessimistic, because I understand that the main requirement that will be demanded of candidates, as has happened in the TNC, is that they have a friend or acquaintance in the PSC). This comes to mind to talk about another topic of current citizen-artistic interest, such as the role that Manuel Borja-Villel has played in recent times in Barcelona. As the reader will recall, the former director of the Queen was signed by the Gene three years ago (with exemplary contracting opacity and a still unknown salary) to become a kind of remodeler of urban museum policy, functions vague enough for him to be called "the czar of museums." Once the work was finished, no one has found out what his contribution has been.
As journalist Maria Palau highlighted in an excellent article, one of those so missed in our moribund cultural press (El museu deshabitat de Borja-Villel; Diari Avui, 17-02-2026), the tsar's work has basically consisted of curating an exhibition embedded in the Victoria Eugenia pavilion and the Palau Moja, Fabular paisatges, which aspired to be the boom of the decade but was ultimately seen by only 20,188 spectators. In turn, after spending all these years reflecting, Borja-Villel delivered to the Department of Culture the report Museu habitat, a forty-five-page summary of what this nostrat historian has already been explaining recently in his lectures on the need to apply decolonial theories to the museum of the future (which, if you'll allow me, after directing an institution as centripetal as the one mentioned in Madrid, is quite ironic), a paper that would barely pass in any university in the world, but which might also serve the author himself to achieve his biennial.
Thus, apart from being places to promote oneself financially and to apply personal obsessions in the exhibition of the moment, I would say that the city's museums - and particularly MACBA - should be rethought in the most contemporary way possible; that is, looking back and remembering why the hell they were founded. All this, of course, will not happen, because for a long time now - in our city - interesting things usually happen on the margins. And it's a shame, because at home we like to think big and about big things.