Rayo Verde publishing house must be thanked for its commitment to publishing quality essays and, in a country where everyone speaks in hushed tones, also for perpetrating it through a catalog that does not hide its progressive and anti-capitalist militancy. The good work of Laura Huerga and her team has resulted in necessary (and useful!) books like this Arte (in)útil (Useless Art), by artist and writer Daniel Gasol, awarded the 2021 art criticism prize by the Associació Catalana de Crítics d'Art, a text that puts our accommodating approach to the artistic world in parentheses and strips bare the discourse of power hidden in most of the country's museum institutions. In a present where, I insist, playing the offended is the national sport and where criticism is no longer evaluative for fear of not hurting candid spirits or reopening wounds, we must unreservedly thank a book that speaks clearly and fires painful questions.
The basis of this (useless) art is well-known, stemming from the Frankfurt School and Foucault's analysis of power structures. Gasol uses them to attack the pretense of neutrality of artistic consumption spaces; first, he questions the figure of the museum as a "white cube," also calling into question the figure of the art recipient himself as a deliberative subject ("the spectator-user as a consumer who assumes that the cultural institution contains art"). Then he delves into the forced labor of an artist who must pass the institutional filter to enter a circuit embezzled by consumption relationships: "the cultural worker or creator who uses institutional tools – public or private – needs professional validation for their work to be recognized, because it is the public responsibility of the father State." The critic's imperative begins, then, by unveiling the chains of a relationship that has become putrid.
The theoretical basis of the book, not surprisingly, also problematizes an art world enslaved by the mass media and by museums that, consequently, measure their achievements in terms of pure audience and adjust to the demands of competitiveness of a sector, television, which by nature targets the masses. Indeed, the televisualization of the art world does not only arise from the fact that postmodern aesthetics (or anti-aesthetics) assert themselves in the image reproduction techniques we can find on screens, from traditional TV to Instagram, but in the prior requirement that art must pass through the filter of compulsive visualization: "artistic creation, says the author, is phagocytosed by a system of unofficial visibility and legitimation to become art: a production centralized from a parameter of institutional power employed in variable spaces both in form and in space of cultural pilgrimage."
Gasol's text shines above all because it does not dwell on metaphysics (already known, I insist) and delves into the commercial mechanisms of the art world. The critical vision of the figure of the exhibition curator, the new divinity of the artistic-institutional narrative, is penetrating; "the curator's work transforms into that of the narrator who articulates official narratives from institutions, becoming an accomplice worker of the power structure that filters narratives and mediates art as officialdom, nation, and State." I also find Gasol's task of thoroughly (and aggressively) ironizing the figure of the emerging artist, a slave to artistic novelties who conforms to the institutionalization of art through the formats required in most grants (with the corresponding impact dossiers and photographic books typical of banal and changing industries like fashion), very opportune.
It has a certain grace (and a good dose of irony) that a text presented with the editorial wrapping of revolution follows quite enlightened paradigms of thought. The author's pretension, and it is not small, implies revitalizing criticism as a space of struggle against a system, that of art and capital, which devours any discourse of singularity in a machine that goes from the artist's own personality to the mass of unthinking visitors who populate Western museums. It is not strange that, in parallel, the author uses Adorno's crutch to frame his path in an art world in which aesthetics has been subsumed into the everyday, into objects without aura and, therefore, into a much more marketable universe. Like any spokesperson for critical theory, Gasol raises many more questions than answers and his analysis also provokes a spiral where everything is used to reaffirm the theory itself.
It is at this point, and in that Arte (in) útil has its origin in a much more voluminous doctoral text, that the essay can generate some discomfort. The systemic temptation has the danger of evaluating any artistic institution equally and of treating the diverse spectator, including the most critical, as just another part of the flock. Betting on criticism, as the author asks, I would say that as a reader I would have liked the writer's brush to be more precise in his dissection and for the style of the book to be more suited to the essay than to the presentation of a thesis. That said, this is, who knows if despite the author, a useful book, which questions the habits we have acquired as consumers-spectators of art and that everyone should read before entering again into the apparent white cube that a museum represents. We should read it especially those of us who believe, against the author, that art is perhaps one of capitalism's greatest inventions.