The first time I went to Bogotá, I was surprised to discover that the city had no less than 100 universities, 11 public and 89 private. There, any educational center could present itself as a university regardless of whether the degrees issued were official or not, whether the faculty had more or less academic merits, or whether the center had any line of research or not. It was not necessary to meet any specific condition and any academy could say it was a university.
In Barcelona, we have more than fifty museums, from the Museum of the History of the City or the Joan Miró Foundation to the Museum of Marijuana, the Chocolate Museum, the Bullfighting Museum, or the Erotic Museum. It is evident that at home, it is also not necessary to meet any specific condition to be able to put on the door that you are a museum. But there must be some difference between the Picasso Museum and the newly opened Moco Museum, separated by barely ten meters in the heart of the Born.
A true museum is something more than an exhibition hall, just as it is something more than a warehouse that guards a heritage. A true museum is a service that participates in the debates of the city and the country, and leads us to ask ourselves questions. Who are we, where are we going, what is happening. The collection of the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC) is the history of the country. Picasso is a tool to understand European debates. Miró is striking without hurting. It is false that they speak of the past, all museums question the present.
A true museum is something more than an exhibition hall, just as it is something more than a warehouse that guards a heritageA true museum is a space of knowledge, that explores and investigates, that explains and disseminates.The difference between the Moco Museum and the Picasso Museum is that while the former evaluates its success by box office revenue and the number of photos uploaded to Instagram by visitors, the Picasso Museum, in addition to organizing exhibitions, is recognized for the rigor of its publications or the promotion of an ambitious doctoral program that currently includes one Catalan and one French university.
But for our best museums to be serious spaces of research and knowledge will not be enough to deserve to be part of the debate of ideas that any society has. We must find ways to connect with people's lives and things, we must renew and update what defines them as a public utility service. We talk a lot about education and health, but the welfare state is not understood without good access to culture as well.
Last week, the MNAC convened a group of people to participate in its strategic reflection, convinced that thinking about the future of the museum is talking about the uses of Montjuïc mountain and therefore about the city model, it is talking about Catalan Romanesque but also about the comics and photography made here, it is inviting contemporary artists to read the country, it is confronting our history with our future. Thinking about a museum is thinking about the country, understanding our heritage is imagining what we want to be.
Certainly, the word museum resonates with something rigid, anachronistic, and boring, and it is good that alternatives aimed at entertaining us appear, but what we must achieve are spaces that can be drivers of debates and tools for the construction of thought, rooted in our whys and our idiosyncrasy. We reclaim our museums, and we demand an active role from them in our present and future debates.
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