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October 10th and 11th, 2013
Master lecture
From world art to global art
October 10th, 2013 - 7 p.m.The plurality of art worlds and the new museum
October 11th, 2013 - 7 p.m.Global production has changed contemporary art as radically as the so-called new media had done a decade earlier. It was in the year 1989 that the idea of a global exhibition of contemporary art came up for the first time. This shift coincided with the end of the Cold War and the rise of the era of the New Economy with its multinational corporations. At the same time, the spread of worldwide biennials changed contemporary art’s geography forever. A new generation of internationally recognized artists proclaimed “coevalness” in a worldwide koine of art. Co-presence with the Western art scene replaced their non-presence, which had been a result of exclusion. Today’s art presents itself not only as new art but also as a new kind of art, an art that is expanding all over the globe. Art no longer claims for itself the avant-garde position of modern art, but presents itself as contemporary, in a chronological, symbolical and even ideological sense. Thus, 21st century art testifies to worldwide contemporaneity without limits of the kinds imposed by the Western privilege of history.
Held on 10, 11 Oct 2013
This event is part of the Museo Reina Sofía master lectures series, a public program that began in 2010 as an attempt to better understand the methodological tensions that have transformed art history in recent years. At the same time, the annual master lecture serves as the inauguration to the Museum's academic year, which consists of numerous activities related to its multiple University master's programs, independent study programs, debate forums and research residencies. In addition to these initiatives, this public activity introduces a new facet of the contemporary museum: a place for training and research.
After the master lectures given by Linda Nochlin (2010), about realism as the first language to be used by the avant-garde in its political engagement with 19th century working class struggles, by T.J. Clark (2011), about Guernica studied from the perspective of a new social history of art, and Simón Marchán Fiz (2012), which looked at the reactivation of a text as essential as his “From object art to concept art” on the 20th anniversary of its publication, this year's event has invited Hans Belting (Andernach, 1935).
This German historian is the author of a vast and highly relevant body of works that explores art history as an anthropology of images, rethinking the historiographical foundations of today's art and examining the effects of globalisation on the discourses, institutions and audiences of contemporary art practices.
Thus, publications such as Bild und Kult: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst (published in English in 2004 by the University of Chicago Press, as Presence and Likeness: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art) and Bild-Anthropologie (published in English in 2011 by the Princeton University Press, as An Anthropology of Images) make an inquiry into how the image is being redefined following the critique of representation. The image, claims Belting, is not really an end in itself but rather a social activity, that is, it is not determined so much by the why as by the how, by its role in public life and its function in collective identity. After this series of essays, which had an enormous influence on historians such as Georges Didi-Huberman and Dario Gamboni, Belting tackles other vectors with which to narrate contemporary art, which he differentiates epistemologically from modern art. In this way, The End of the History of Art? (published in English by the University of Chicago Press, 1987) and Art History after Modernism (University of Chicago Press, 2003) deal with the dialectics between art criticism and art history, the role of the museum institution, art's new performative temporality and the fragmentation between audiences and counter-audiences, putting forward many of the concerns regarding contemporeneity not as a time but as a theoretical model.
Hans Belting's current interests include globalisation and its relationship with the new geopolitical system of contemporary art, as shown by his recent publications, such as The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds (coedited, with Andrea Buddensieg and Peter Weibel, MIT Press, 2013), and by his role as director of important research groups in this field.
Sponsorship
Más actividades
Dear Americas
Friday 29 May and 5 June, 2026
In these films, Marilú Mallet travels to Solentiname, in Nicaragua, and Andahuaylillas, in Peru, to paint a portrait of communities which resist the severity of forced industrialisation. In Solentiname, the focus is on the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal’s founding of a Christian, poetic and revolutionary utopia, while in Andahuaylillas, a town close to Cuzco, Mallet explores the multiple layers of Andean culture.
A Poetics of the Subject
Thursday 28 May and 4 June, 2026
In the tension between documentary and fiction, between the rawness of a tragic political present and narrative escape, lies the truth of the exile’s condition. In Journal inachevé (Unfinished Diary, 1982) Marilú Mallet experiments with her own subjectivity, moving from affirmation to doubt. In Double Portrait (2000), María Luisa Señoret paints her daughter Marilú, who records the process. In this circular relationship, the film-maker constructs a poetics of the portrait as something perpetually unfinished, a process of exploration in which memory, identity and political history merge to become blurred.
Institutional Decentralisation
28 MAY 2026
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities
Tuesday, 26, and Wednesday, 27 May 2026 – Check programme
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities is the title of the fourteenth encounter run by Sociología Ordinaria, a transdisciplinary research group that explores daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint.
This latest edition seeks to approach and map connections between concepts of the commons and the public realm — remembering that the ordinary is also the commons — and to ensure affects and moods of discontent are mobilised towards hope.
By way of its multiple declinations — community, community-based practices, the commons, the communal — the encounter seeks to reflect on different ways of creating, (re)configuring, maintaining, fixing, arranging, caring for and defending the public realm and the commons. Furthermore, it explores forms of invocation and experimentation as tools opposite the helplessness of an uncertain present, in addition to resistance against attempts of expropriation, distortion, privatisation and touristification.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge
26 MAY 2026
Nancy Spector and Alejandro Cesarco, curators of the exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge, will speak with Manuel Segade, director of the Museo Reina Sofía, in a session dedicated to exploring the interpretive frameworks of this first large-scalepresentation in Madrid of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996), whose practice continues to resonate in the present.
The conversation begins with the exhibition’s title itself, Sweet Revenge, understood as a paradoxical notion that articulates much of the artist’s thinking. From there, the tensions running through his work are explored: the coexistence of opposing registers, ambiguity as a method, and the simultaneously affective and political charge of his works.
The dialogue also touches on some of the themes that run through his body of work, such as thenotions of identity, citizenship, and authority, alongside experiences linked to the AIDS crisis, and emotions such as love, loss, grief, and optimism. Special attention is given to the way in which Gonzalez-Torres shifts languages associated with Arte Povera, conceptualism, and minimalism towards open, participatory, and deeply personal structures.
The session also includes a reflection on the research process that shaped the exhibition, providing context for the curatorial decisions and criteria that structure it. In this context, Gonzalez-Torres’s work emerges as a device that actively engages those who activate orinterpret it, distributing responsibility for the production of meaning—a process that is alwaysunstable and constantly under negotiation.
These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the shows organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.