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Let's say I'm talking about Madrid.
They repeat, like a ghostly chant, that mantra that one goes "from Madrid to heaven," they declaim, with hollow resonance, that everyone is welcome, they dance the chotis on a tile, setting up posh entertainments everywhere, "the cream of the intellectual establishment" going viral. They have heard from irrefutable oracles that "what doesn't happen in the capital doesn't exist," a theorem that not even Berkeley's idealism could present so brilliantly. The self-congratulatory revelry turns the peripheral areas into gloomy, if not abysmally depressed. Brutally, but, paradoxically, almost unnoticed, the centralism of a Spain was reinstated, converting the "vertebración" (postulated by Ortega y Gasset) into a vassalage to the gentlemen who sit in the halls of power, almost bolted to "kilometer zero."
It may sound cryptic, but I'm actually referring to the disaster of hypercentralization, which dismantled the entire state of autonomous regions and any "federal" project. In the cultural sphere, it has had as many consequences as in all other political and economic decisions. I'm not exaggerating: power (political, economic, media, and cultural) has been concentrated, and anything not "cooked" in Madrid! (with those exclamation points in its outrageous advertising campaigns) since the years of the Aznar government has actually taken on the texture of an inconsistent mist.
When a number of galleries moved into the shadow of the MNCARS (on Doctor Fourquet Street) more than a decade ago, hoping for a "handout" in the form of institutional purchases that rarely came, I heard (perplexed, I must say) a veteran Barcelona art dealer comment that he was too old because, without a doubt, "the right thing to do" was to settle in Madrid. No fireworks were needed; the staff was clapping their hands with their ears: complete happiness because contemporary art was showing "green shoots" (remember that pathetic metaphor for the time of the real estate bubble crisis and the subsequent austerity process) at a plateau.
The apotheosis of the center generates all kinds of pathologies, from peripheral victimization to deliberate deafness to any differentiation, imitative megalomania, or wallowing in the poetics of failure. The truth is that there is a lack of spaces for dialogue, respect, and networking that would allow an artist or any other agent in the art system to avoid dreaming about and mystifying a (somewhat retro-zarzuela) capital that is less welcoming than omnivorous.
