Perhaps because of the intensity of the emotions that are handled, the superlative egos that populate it and, why not, because of the patina of glamor that is assumed, the world of contemporary art tends to be the setting for fictions. In recent years we have seen horror films (Candyman, Hereditary) set in that environment, tragicomic satires (The Square) but perhaps not so much pure comedy. That is why there is a lot of curiosity around Bellas Artes, the series by Andrés and Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn (the trio responsible for films like Competencia oficial and series like Nada) that will premiere in January on Movistar. The protagonist, played by Óscar Martínez, is an art historian and cultural manager who is appointed director of a contemporary art museum in Madrid. Once installed in the position, he has to face all the agents, from curators to artists to politicians, who intervene in that environment.
WHO ARE YOU CALLING 'COZY'?
There is an adjective that is gaining popularity to describe cultural products of a very different nature: “cozy”, that is, cozy or tender. It applies above all to a subgenre of crime novels that has come to be called “cozy crime.” It is written by authors such as Richard Osman or M.C. Beaton, who update the rules of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple (have an amateur investigator, not a detective) and set their crimes in picturesque settings dotted with lovable characters, with little gore. In these autumn days, lists of “cozy movies that you can watch with the new blanket” also proliferate in digital media and which usually do not lack titles such as You Have an Email. There are authors, however, who do not intend to allow that somewhat lethal adjective to be applied easily. Alexander Payne, the king of American awkward indie, has said that he hates it when people say his new film, The Holdouts, starring his usual muso, Paul Giamatti, is described as “cozy”. True, the film takes place during Christmas and the characters spend a lot of time indoors, presumably well acclimatized and wearing soft sweaters, but the reason, says Payne, is that it has been proven that a disproportionate number of suicides occur at Christmas. And anyone knows that a family vacation is anything but cozy.
GIFTS THAT ARE NOT BUYED IN EL TÍGER
What do you give to the person who has everything? Celebrities often face this dilemma and the answer they come to is: art, and very expensive. Whether because they buy pieces to offer to their loved ones – Victoria and David Beckham paid Damien Hirst 600,000 libas when their daughter Harper turned one year old, to make them a piece that represented a heart with butterflies with the words “Daddy's Girl”, daddy's girl – or because her gestures are so exaggerated that they become a performance in themselves. While Kim Kardashian and Kanye West were together, the rapper entered into a competition with himself with the gifts he gave to his wife to make them more and more galactic. In 2013, he gave her a Hermès Birkin bag customized by painter George Condo (which the entire Internet found horrifying) and on her 40th birthday he gave her a hologram of her deceased father. Justin Bieber seems to want to take the lead in this and recently gave his wife, influencer Hailey Baldwin, a sculpture by the duo Idiotbox Art that represented a text message she sent him when she was in Paris. What happens is that, in this, Kanye was also ahead of him: in 2020 he engraved an antique Cartier medallion for Kim Kardashian with a text message that he had sent to her.
A PIQUITO?
Is there consent in Gustav Klimt's The Kiss? The painting that has become an emblem of romantic love by being reproduced on refrigerator magnets, table calendars and tote bags, actually represents a man subjecting a woman to unwanted touching. That is what at least half of the curators and art historians who intervene in the Klimt documentary argue.
LOUISE'S LIBRARY
Louise Rémy was an Art History professor born in Nancy who lived in Catalonia since the 1950s. When she died last June, aged 94, her daughters wondered what to do with the powerful library of art volumes that she had been accumulating and They contacted Terranova, the bookstore specializing in art on Comte Borrell Street in Barcelona. There they decided to pay a last tribute to all those books that have lived together before they disperse. During the month of November, in their back room, where they always organize temporary mini exhibitions, there will be a reproduction of Louise Rémy's library, also with her desk and the lamp that she used and the slides that she made herself for her classes. Some of the books (monographs on Balthus and Courbet and Brassaï's Converstions with Picasso) are already for sale on the bookstore's website and others can be purchased there, many of them with the handwritten notes that the professor wrote.
