A critical and sarcastic look at the world of modern art based on the management of a museum is the proposal of Bellas Artes, the new miniseries of six 30-minute episodes that Movistar Plus will premiere this Thursday the 11th. The fiction is created by Argentines Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn, winners of a Goya for The Illustrious Citizen (2016) and also responsible for two of the best recent series on the Argentine scene: The Manager and Nada (both on Disney).
In the series, Antonio Dumas (Oscar Martínez, also the protagonist of The Illustrious Citizen and whom we have recently seen in the series Galgos) is a prestigious art historian and cultural manager, quite cynical and conceited, who is appointed director of an important Ibero-American museum. of contemporary art located in Madrid. Once he assumes his new position, he must face a varied range of disparate circumstances and conflicts.
In conversation with La Vanguardia, the creators of the series, Duprat and Cohn, are proud that the series touches on a unique topic that no other fiction has addressed: directly addressing the big questions about artistic creation and works of art. contemporary. “When we go to a museum like the Reina Sofía, the Pompidou or the Guggenheim, we often inhibit ourselves from giving our opinion for fear of disqualifying a masterpiece that we do not understand,” says Duprat.
“Why is that drawing that looks like it was made by a child worth millions? These questions and others that everyone has when visiting a museum are in some way part of the reflection of the series”, which tries to be an open window to understand, “without euphemisms and directly”, some of these questions. “The answer is complex and sophisticated and, in that sense, the series brings positions closer to that understanding.”
The art world is a closed world of artists and experts, and yet everyone, Duprat continues, when visiting a city, goes to its museums. “This series allows you to see what’s behind those white walls, what the kitchen is like.” That trip to the kitchen of a museum will be made through the newly appointed director of an artistic center, Antonio Dumas.
Fine Arts poses a new situation for the protagonist, which is to enter a competition to be the director of a museum. “It is assumed that he was an intellectual, a professor with a degree in History, but that from one day to the next – and that is the beauty of the series – he will find himself involved in management, where they begin to find problems that intellectuals Normally they do not have, such as political pressures, infrastructure problems of a building that is degrading, dealing with artists who are sometimes exotic (José Sacristán plays one of them), with employees who defend their labor rights and put them against the wall… ”says Cohn.
The character played by Oscar Martínez is going to be dynamic because “he imagines one thing at the beginning, and once he assumes the new position he realizes that things are not as one sees them from the outside. And on top of that, his relationship with his family and with his past is becoming more complicated, which he believed buried, but which, with this new position, will echo back to him,” Cohn advances.
