“Art history hasn’t shown much interest in the social and economic conditions of art and its relation to the history of the art market.”

In his latest book From Roman Feria to Global Art Fair, From Olympia Festival to Neo-liberal Biennial: On the “Biennialization” of Art Fairs and the “Fairization” of Biennials, curator and writer Paco [...]

By Paco Barragán
I accuse American and British academia and its members of purposely spreading a fake history of the origins of the modern museum. Still today, academics and other art professionals carry the wrong idea of the modern museum and wrongly think of the “white cube” as an American invention authored by MoMA and Alfred Barr, [...]

“The art museum cannot free itself from its boredom through the works alone; it needs more and different commitment and courage.”
Published in 2014 in Germany, Müde Museen, or Tired Museums, was a book with a catchy title that was able to capture the zeitgeist of the time in regard to the malaise that had settled upon [...]

Osage Art Foundation - Hong Kong
Curated by Patrick D. Flores and Natasha Becker

By Paco Barragán
As is common, Art Basel generates many parallel exhibitions in museums, galleries and alternative spaces during the celebration of the fair. One such exhibition during Art Basel Hong Kong (ABHK) was “Present Passing: South by Southeast” at [...]

By Paco Barragán

Like Charles Dickens’ famous novel A Tale of Two Cities, the history of the contemporary art fair of the 1970s and 1980s can be explained by the extraordinary rivalry between Cologne and Basel. I will try to formulate here why ART COLOGNE, though being the first contemporary art fair, [...]

“The transformation from the established model of the Academy to an increasingly free-market system was slow and piecemeal.”
Published in 1996, Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth-Century Art is still one of the basic books for understanding the making of the art market. Written by Picasso scholar Michael [...]

“I think of simple forms, formal economic solutions, but using elements that already carry a very important social and symbolic burden.”
Chilean artist Patrick Hamilton has been living in Madrid since 2014. His prolific artistic trajectory started in the mid-1990s in Santiago de Chile, where he also oversaw a successful artist-run gallery called González [...]

By Paco Barragán
The 20th century knows basically three typologies of art fairs: modern, contemporary and global. The Armory Show represents the modern, or “artist-frame-to-frame,” art fair: organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors in 1913 in New York, it represented 1,300 works hanged frame-to-frame on the walls in 18 partitioned spaces, [...]

By Paco Barragán

There was a time when ‘modern’ (without the superfluous article) was more contemporary than ‘contemporary’. Think of Alfred Barr, Jr.’s indefatigable crusade for the modern in his essay “Modern Art Makes History, Too” published in 1941 in the College Art Journal. Now it seems that ‘the contemporary’ is the new [...]

“The experimental Marxist exhibition was a complex, multilevel, conceptual installation that even for a trained spectator of the time was something like a UFO coming down from heaven.”

Arseny Zhilyaev is a Russian artist based in Moscow and Venice. He is also the editor of Avant-Garde Museology (2015), published by e-flux in collaboration [...]