Press Release
Alicia Herrero’s Museo de la Economía Política del Arte [Museum of the Political Economy of Art]:
On/scenities del capital
From an aseptic display in the white cube, the Museum of the Political Economy of Art organizes takes viewers on a tour through certain practices in her Arte & Capital series. Projects, whose artistic corpus – documents, graphic charts, and inferences – map capital as a commodity, constructing a scenario of pieces of evidence. Through acts of legal performativity or enactments, the artist inscribes the institution, defining the formal bonds of power and exchange of a non-emancipated system. At the same time, it shows us the pornographic on/scenities between art and capital.
In this paradigm, the Museum is intended, on the one hand, to show in the art system the global relations and influences of the market and of a group of multi-millionaire collectors: public museums, non-profit cultural institutions, canon and legitimation. And it is intended, on the other hand, to show the possible strategies of reappropriation of symbolic capital and surplus value through the creation of new rules, documents, graphic charts, objects, video, and performativity.
Thus the critical scenario that the Museum of the Political Economy of Art unfolds is not exhausted in an obscene staging of flows of capital and the artist’s corpus, but rather is established as enactment, a performance that takes off from tactics of creative lawfulness. These acts, which give evidence of the status of the Museum, present, in this instance, the tension between its legal precedent-setting and certain postulates of Marx and Engels concerning their concepts of surplus value and private property.
Teresa Riccardi