The exhibition begins with a 1989 photograph by Antoni Muntadas that shows the advertisement of a hardware store painted on its own façade. In it, we see a paint bucket and the following slogan: ‘Pintar es fácil! Hágalo usted mismo.’

Muntadas’s work introduces the paradox in question. If, in theory, each person is a singular agent within a post-productive utopia that would fulfil Joseph Beuys’s idealized maxim of a creative ‘social sculpture’ – ‘Every human being is an artist’ – we find that, under present circumstances, it is the narcissistic drive of the contemporary subject that is transacted as a liberalization of subjectivities. This paradox reflects a relatively recent shift in the traditional concepts of factory, product, and consumer. We now witness the transversal circulation of these concepts: society itself is the factory.

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In a culture that has naturalized self-entrepreneurship and the attention economy, the value and persistence of the artistic object become uncertain within contemporary worldviews.

The exhibition observes the transition of poetic modes that negotiate, in their productive, material, and conceptual qualities, the prescience of this perception, establishing a relation with experimental and critical practices from the last 50 years. A critical assessment on the value of art within the collective imagination in the current historical frame.