Ponerse en el mapa. Cosmpolitismo provinciano en los años del Boom

This paper looks back at the expansion of contemporary art institutions and events in the Spanish territory between 2000 and 2010 and the way in which the promise of a new kind of tourism (more sophisticated and with more disposable income) was recurrently tied to it. It then turns to describe how this has been recurrently read as a symptom of a peculiarly Spanish "backwardness"in relation to a global art system. Against this reading, the paper argues that this modus operandi is ubiquitous, with the only salient aspect of the Spanish case being the exceedingly small-scale at which claims on the "global contemporary" were being raised.