Nothing is as it seems

The highest expression of power is wealth, in other words economic, ostentation. It is in luxury, in inequality, where power takes shape. For example, in the decoration of palaces and churches. Apart from that, economic excess is not easy to find in art history, especially in the contemporary era.

In contrast, there are many images that represent the other side of wealth: poverty, fulfilling Samuel Beckett’s phrase “To him who has nothing it is forbidden not to relish filth”. Another thematic expression of wealth is charity. Charity can only be understood based on societal inequality: those who have sloughed off some of their excess.

Art has often resorted to poverty (and to charity), but rarely have the poor been the ones to represent themselves.

Prison is a coercive instrument that all powers have utilised. And still use today. It is a punitive device where an individual is deprived of their liberty.

In its visual representation, however, there are certain, often romantic, readings of the tragedy that imprisonment entails: we can recall Piranesi’s engravings (or the Prisoners Round by Van Gogh which reinterpreted a previous engraving by Gustave Doré). Marià Fortuny and Enric C. Ricart also gave a sugar-coated vision of the life of a prisoner. Art has often aestheticized repression, the punishment inflicted by power, as in the “executed” by Josep Sancho.

However, the existence of prisoners (especially, political prisoners) has been seen from apparently committed positions, as demonstrated by Camil Fàbregas’s homage to an unknown political prisoner, most likely crafted to take part in the international Unknown Political Prisoner contest held by the Tate in London, or the triptych The Hope of a Condemned Man by Joan Miró, which pays homage to the anarchist Salvador Puig Antich.

Marxist theory has already made it clear that religion, philosophy and art were the ideological superstructures that supported class society, i.e. the dominion of some over others. Put another way: the economic structure generates inequality.

Power has always utilised art to justify its own power: those supposedly majestic depictions (equestrian portraits are the utmost expression of the powerful’s self-complacency and how they use servile artists), religious scenes that seek to spread fear among parishioners, the supposed glamour of everything that has to do with art and so on.

This paradigm started to come under questioning in the 19th century. However, the capitalist system has devoured it all. In their halls, museums house both the art created to exalt the glory of the powerful, as well as works that have been created to oppose them.

Those who have held power throughout history have not given licence to show opposition to their reign: if dissident visual culture does exist it is because, at a specific moment, a critical gaze was permissible. Or perhaps it had lived in clandestine spaces and was later co-opted by institutions, including museums.

Art is ideology. Or put another way, museums are not neutral. Once again, everything ends up depending on the observer’s gaze, which is necessarily suspicious, attentive to all kinds of manipulations that are carried out by means of representations.

Catalan art museums are full of works that need to be interpreted to know which side of democracy they are on. Shall we give it a go?