CONCRETA 10

Art and tourism - José Díaz Cuyás

In this issue we remember what Smithson already knew: that the whole land should be imagined as a museum of natural history. Hence, the dialectic of its non-sites contributes to illuminate the construction of tourism "places" and, as James Meyer indicates, the emergence of site-specifics must be interpreted by its dialectical relationship with the increase in mobility . Lanzarote is a site-specific singular, an island turned into a "total work of art", says Mariano de Santa Ana, thanks to the tourism industry. The same one that builds beaches as huge non-sites, result of full correspondence, says Vicente Benet, between visual representation and constructive staging. A museum as static as the Prado also enhanced its attractions, insists Eugenia Afinoguénova, to mobilize its visitors for identity reasons. Beatriz Herráez addresses the case of the Athenian headquarters of the last documenta, whose expressly political discourse remained comfortably blind to its own reality as an artistic-tourist event, a contradiction that some of its "hosts" made explicit by accusing them of practicing, significantly, a « tourism of misery ». Roberto Gil deals with the theory of souvenirFernando Estévez, an advance in taking it seriously, not to turn it into something "serious", he said, but because "banality is a condition of our existence, which is a very serious thing". His proposal is a cry for the liberation of things in front of his submission by the museum and tourism devices. Finally, Dean MacCannell broadly explains his thesis of tourism as a search for authentic experiences, understanding authenticity as a rhetorical effect fed by the perception of the inauthenticity of our daily life. From all this it would be possible to deduce a still unthinkable familiarity between the experiences of art since the sixties and its parallel commercialization in the popular culture of tourism.