El museo y la vanguardia: pequeña historia de una rebelión en tres episodios

Abstract

Since the museum's invention, at the end of the 18th century, the artist has maintained a changing, ambiguous and complex relationship with this institution, but decisive for both. It is not only that, with the disappearance of the old forms of patronage of the Old Regime, the museum becomes the only sphere that guarantees the independence of the artist, but the fact acquires an ontological dimension: the foundation of modernity in art stands in the same point in which the museum is constituted. Its appearance means that the artist cannot continue working as before. Since Géricault painted his Raft of the Medusa in 1818, with the secret hope of seeing his painting hanging next to the great masters of the Louvre, until Marcel Broodthaers, in 1968, launched his Museum of Modern Arts, Department of eagles imitating everything that is expected of that institution, to present it as "a lot of nothing", these two pillars of our modern tradition -the avant-garde and the museum- have not stopped looking at each other and have constructed their respective discourses without forgetting the existence of the other