Those who claim that the culture of Barcelona is decaying should have done the exercise of trying to attend to the multiple fronts open on Thursday evening: from the opening of the exhibition of the artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen at the Miró Foundation to the welcome party for the new Sónar at the Me Barcelona hotel, including the appearance of the founder of Forensic Architecture, Eyal Weizman, at the Elisava Masters’ Talks or the opening of Ania Solimana Àngels Barcelona. Among many other calls.
Meanwhile, on the same Thursday afternoon this newspaper published the news that the investment fund Stoneweg, with Carmen Cervera, is among the candidates to manage the old Comedia cinema, in this case, to exhibit the collection of Catalan art by Baroness Thyssen.
On nights like this it makes perfect sense to evoke the fear of not knowing how to choose the right party, now described with the acronym of . A phobia that is always more bearable than the boredom that at some point in the past led to the reality of a billboard that has gone down.
In recent times there have been plenty of interesting and creative calls. What happened this week was not exceptional: peaks of activity like this have been repeated for some time. For example, in the classical music programming of the Liceu, Palau de la Música and L’Auditori, which forces fans to make painful decisions when choosing a show.
There is also no shortage – and this is also relevant – of varied business projects with a very commercial vocation, which are likely to generate the usual debate about the cultural model of the city. They are controversies that can become exhausting, but which have a positive side: the community that disagrees and discusses thus shows that it is alive, and is located at the opposite end of that concept of lazy cities that urban planner Greg Clark uses to refer to cities that become complacent when they see themselves riding high on success. The most visceral cultural controversies emerge when a city is immersed in the process of redefining itself, as is the case with Barcelona.
In the coming weeks, if the Stoneweg-Tita Cervera project goes ahead or someone else who also chooses to manage the Comedia and who shares with it a commitment to the mainstream in the middle of Paseo de Gràcia, there will be those who will warn about a dangerous drift of the cultural model from barcelona It will probably be said that the city must encourage projects with a more critical discourse and with a smaller component of show culture, likely to attract tourists and gentrify.
For better or worse, however, large and complex cities are impossible to fit into exclusionary models and administrations have difficulty intervening in shaping the cultural pattern. Remember that it was during the government of Ada Colau that a museum, the Moco, was opened, which is the antithesis of the grassroots culture model defended by the mayoress’s party.
In global cities, cultural models are superimposed like templates that develop their own dynamics, although sometimes interesting meeting spaces can be created in which the most popular manifestations coexist happily with the most innovative ones.
At the Sónar Meet – a prologue to the festival a month before its inauguration – it was easy to see the coexistence of these diverse registers, from the expanded reality with a vocation to attract the large public like the one programmed at the Ideal- Center d’Arts Digitals de Barcelona or at Casa Batlló (pay attention to his collaboration in the coming weeks with the Chemicals Brothers and Sónar itself) to the most experimental artistic approaches.
There are too many Barcelona people to fit them into a single cultural model.
