To take the leap from culture to cultural industry presupposes forgetting too many issues. A cultural industry implies profitability based on an industrial structure. That is to say one defined by profit and economics. To forget the existence of a series of parameters that are hard to evaluate instantaneously signifies the loss of options for the future, as well as for the past.
The future, that seems ever more distant. Something that appears increasingly more difficult to attain. The supposed lack of options and ongoing emergency that make it impossible to think beyond today, the general uncertainty and the fact that the results don’t offer, for the time being, too many avenues for the imagination or possible escape routes. Or perhaps they will all be provided at the end of the fall.
The past, that serves as a way of resituating our time and place. Without the option of rethinking the past it would be hard to understand our present. Speed and imperial desires also devour the option of a critical and thoughtful dialogue about multiple origins, as if it were taboo to touch upon certain things at this point in history, as if we hadn’t learnt to value critical positions as also being definitive of a mature society.
And art. What about art? Well in this edition of A*Magazine we present three approaches, three options, three fields in which to discuss, debate and reconsider through art. Paloma Checa takes a look at "Pacific Standard Time", a project born with the aim of modifying history. Verónica Escobar analyzes "Estilo Indirecto", an exhibition that talks of utopias and dismissed projects. And Sonia Fernández Pan considers the relation between art and politics and the constant paradoxes.
Taking a step back so that a place can be significant today. Los Angeles is fighting its own constructed image, with the industries that have marked the evolution of the city, to try to incorporate itself into the critical, artistic and cultural discourse about the North American reality and as such globally. A budget of ten million dollars for a project, that aims to redefine a brand, re-appropriating the idea of a city.
An exhibition, that proposes a journey into possible past futures. At a time in need of ideas, projects, plans and desires, the exhibition "Estilo Indirecto" (Indirect Speech) offers examples that didn’t occur but still remain valid as a possibility, as an option and as a point of departure to discuss the unidirectionality of our present.
Politics, art, reality, discord and fiction. In a social and global context dominated by day-to-day economic and political uncertainty it is pertinent to question the role of art, its connections with politics and with the sphere of capital. What artistic practices are political? How does one define the political in art?
