Cortocircuitos del museo y la autonomía

This text offers a historical account of the way in which the museum has taken autonomy as a concern of its own and how different institutional agents – artists, artworks, viewers and others– have been taken as the holders of such an autonomy. It points both to the impossibility of uncoupling art from autonomy while retaining its emancipatory promise, and to the task of building this autonomy on different grounds, ones that move away from the faux universalism inherited from the European 19th century.