On Museum Expansions

This essay was meant to be part of the second volume of Antoni Muntadas´ catalogue of his Reina Sofia retrospective in Madrid in 2011 ENTRE/BETWEEN, but the global economic crisis that hit Spain for so long had the Museum cancelled the second volume on the last minute and our contributions were not published.

The essay is the result of a year of research and bimonthly meetings with Muntadas, to talk about different Museum expansions throughout the world. His retrospective was a sum of old works plus a new intervention he did BETWEEN the two buildings of the Museum – the old Hospital and the Nouvel expansion. In order to think about it and develop and idea, he used me to catalogue all the most important museum expansions in the world and discuss them with him.

At the end of my research, I was to write an essay on Museum Expansions (if you remember my college final thesis, it was a new expansion of the Prado Museum, right after Moneo had done his. So, I was well versed in the subject already 😊 Reason why he hired me.

After a year of work and writing the essay (which was never published by the Museum) I decided to self-publish it, as you can see it here.

I have to say that I was young and naïf, and feel a bit used by this artist, who did not pay me at the end, after a year of working for him and feeding him content -- since in his view the Museum was not paying for it. But the Museum did not asked me to do anyting. He did.

To not have a problem I said "it´s fine"... But it is not. It is not cool that such famous and wealthy artists use young people for nothing, and abuse their fame to get away with things like this. Reason why I am writing it here. I got older now.