Those who maintain that Barcelona’s culture is declining should have done the exercise of trying to attend to the multiple fronts opened on Thursday evening: from the opening of the exhibition by the artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen at the Fundació Miró to the welcome party at the new Sónar at the Me Barcelona hotel, including the appearance of the founder of Forensic Architecture, Eyal Weizman, at the Elisava Masters’s Talks or the opening of Ania Soliman at Àngels Barcelona. Among many other calls.
Meanwhile, on the same Thursday afternoon this newspaper published the news that the Stoneweg investment fund, led by Carmen Cervera, is among the candidates to manage the old Comèdia cinema, in its case to exhibit the Catalan art collection there. that Baroness Thyssen treasures.
On nights like this it makes sense to evoke the fear of not having known how to choose the right party, now described with the acronym FOMO. A phobia that is always more bearable than the boredom that at some point in the past caused the reality of a billboard that had gone down.
In recent times, interesting and creative calls have abounded. This week has not been exceptional: peaks in activity like this have been recurring for a long time. For example, in the classical music programming of Liceu, Palau de la Música and Auditori, which forces fans to make painful decisions when choosing a show.
There is also no shortage – and this is also relevant – of diverse business projects with a very commercial vocation, which are likely to generate the well-known debate about the cultural model of the city.
They are controversies that can be exhausting, but they have their positive side: the community that disagrees and argues is alive, standing at the opposite extreme of that concept of lazy cities that urban planner Greg Clark uses to refer to cities that are They become complacent when they see themselves exalted in success. The most visceral cultural controversies arise when a city is immersed in the process of redefining itself, as is the case of Barcelona.
In the coming weeks, if the Stoneweg-Tita Cervera project or someone else who also chooses to manage the Comèdia and who shares with it a commitment to the mainstream in the middle of Passeig de Gràcia goes ahead, there will be those who warn about a dangerous drift of the model Barcelona culture.
It will probably be said that the city should promote projects with a more critical discourse and with a lesser component of culture-spectacle, likely to attract tourists and gentrify.
For better or worse, however, large and complex cities are impossible to constrict into exclusive models and administrations have difficulties intervening in the configuration of the cultural pattern. Remember that it was during Ada Colau’s government that a museum was opened, the Moco, which is the opposite of the grassroots culture model defended by the mayor’s party.
In global cities, cultural models overlap like templates that develop their own dynamics, although sometimes interesting meeting spaces emerge in which the popular coexists happily with the innovative.
At the Sónar Meet – a prologue to the festival a month after its inauguration – it was easy to see the coexistence of these diverse registers, from the expanded reality with the aim of attracting the general public such as the one programmed at the Ideal-Centre d’Arts Digitals in Barcelona or at Casa Batlló (attention to his collaboration in the coming weeks with the Chemicals Brothers and Sónar itself) to the more experimental artistic approaches in the same area.
There are too many Barcelonas to fit into a single cultural model.