The world is in uproar but the art business continues its march. Despite Israel’s relentless bombing of Palestine, Russia’s war against Ukraine, the worsening of ecological crises around the world or the threat of the extreme right, Arco, the contemporary art fair in Madrid that this Wednesday opened its doors to professionals and collectors (starting Friday it will be open to the general public), it seems like a safe and predictable bubble, immune to what is happening outside.
The defeated tennis player on the grass court of the Elmgreen duo
It is difficult to find artists who get into the mud of the massacre in Palestine. Eugenio Merino, whose voice reaches Carabanchel this year with his moving installation of a García Lorca inside a grave, exposes in DNA two shoe soles on which he has engraved the map of Gaza. It’s called Trampling Rights. And Francesc Torres, in T20, titles a collage Israel and Palestine without talking about Israel and Palestine. Playing with letters and burnt glasses, he reads: “3 of the others, 2 of ours.” The ghost of Ukraine also seems to have disappeared, whose war broke out precisely in the middle of Arco’s celebration. Today it barely finds an echo beyond the Voloshyn gallery, where the artist Danylo Halkin has recovered three stained glass windows that were placed in public buildings during the Soviet occupation and contrasts them with a painting showing their current state, lifeless, fatally blackened. .
But there is much more to see in an overwhelming fair in which 205 galleries from 36 countries participate. The VIP day is full of wealthy collectors. More than 350 collectors run through the halls at the invitation of Ifema, with the advantage that, as the director of the fair, Maribel López, recognized, many of them, especially the Latin Americans, no longer have to pay for their stay because they are almost Madrid residents, residents of the Salamanca neighborhood. Letting yourself go with the flow, you can reach the Caribbean, which this year is the protagonist of Arco in a section curated by Sara Hermann and Carla Acevedo-Yates in which it has nothing to do with the postcard-perfect turquoise waters. “There is not one Caribbean, but many, and they are spaces of exchange and constant instability and turbulence,” they say.
To start sailing, the Cuban Quisqueya Henríquez living in the Dominican Republic invites us to an ice cream made with water from the Caribbean Sea, salty and an intense blue, like that of Caletas Beach, the last place that immigrants see when they leave in plane. Next to her, Noe Martínez records a performance in which she relives the trauma of the trafficking of indigenous people, not only by European colonizers but also between Mexico and the Caribbean. Painful stories that, since Helga de Alvear, Santiago Sierra remembers in small prints where the Spanish shield is drawn with the blood of former overseas settlers (600 euros each).
Everything here is for sale and there are eye-watering prices. Joan Miró is once again at the top of the most sought-after works with Peinture, one of the 27 works on Masonite that he created after the Civil War broke out as an exorcism, of which only two remain in Spain, at the Fundació Miró and in the Thyssen. It is sold in Leandro Navarro’s gallery for 3.3 million euros. There is a Picasso in the Guillermo de Osma gallery for 2.5 million and in Mayoral, you can buy Iron in the Tremor for 1.2 million, Chillida’s sculpture that won an award at the 1958 Venice Biennale. And of course magnificent Tàpies, such as the last table he painted that has not been on the market before, Gran taula (2008), in the new gallery resulting from the alliance between Prats and Nogueras Blanchard (950,000), or the one from the late 80s that is exhibited in Lelong for the same price.
After they fell out of favor, NFTs have passed away and AI is becoming more of an element of reflection than an end in itself through artists such as Daniel G Andújar and Joan Fontcuberta (the first recovers extinct botanical species, the second invents other non-existent ones, both in Àngels Barcelona). They will meet again in T20, where Andújar draws up lists of prohibited words (he has compiled about 300) that generative artificial intelligence applications classify as inappropriate, preventing the creation of visual representations with elements of extreme violence, graphic injuries or disturbing scenes. “Would Goya have been able to conceive works like The Disasters of War or The Follies under those premises?” he leaves the question in the air.
