Richard Serra - Literal

For thirty-odd years I dedicated myself to collecting and one night, I found myself at dinner with these
two guys. I told them what I was gathering and they offered to help me and I thought, well, maybe they
really mean it, right? One was the city mayor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador,
and the other a businessman, Carlos Slim.
para el museo era una mezcla de alta cultura y cultura
popular, no para contraponerlas, sino para mostrar
cómo van integradas dentro de un gusto popular, pues
el aprecio a lo que a uno lo rodea es lo que descubre
su calidad artística.
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24 4 L ITERAL. LATIN AMERICAN VOICES • FALL, 2007
Carlos Slim. Both of them came to an agreement, and
they helped me with the museum project. López Obrador
gave us a magnifi cent site, a neoclassical building,
and Slim gave us the profi ts from a record store he
owns to help us pay the salaries of museum employees.
That was our starting point. This alternative curatorial
concept really works, as demonstrated by the fact that
“El Estanquillo” was inaugurated four months ago and
already 65,000 people have visited it, which is quite a
lot for Mexico City. And “El Estanquillo” isn’t the only
museum in this regard, there’s a museum of Economic
History that is doing extraordinarily well; there’s a place
called Indianilla Station for new, postmodern art that
is also working optimally, which demonstrates that
there’s a public for this sort of less traditional museum.
However, the museum par excellence in Mexico City
continues to be the Museum of Anthropology because
it founded an idea, slanted if you will, on a historic
trend of tradition and national patrimony. The next
museum in order of importance is Frida Kahlo’s, due
to any explanation you prefer: she’s a great painter, a
woman who suffered, of feminist attitudes. The third
in terms of visitors is the National Museum of Art, and
then comes us, which is really saying something. The
fact is that between the Museum of Anthropology, the
Frida Kahlo, the National and the other museums in
Mexico City there’s a historic gap; but what the example
of “El Estanquillo” shows us is that there’s also
room for places that young people visit. The recreation
of Mexican taste at “El Estanquillo,” has caught a lot
of attention. Now there are going to be ten traveling
shows, because there are 15,000 pieces in storage and
480 being exhibited, so the idea is to have traveling
shows of José Guadalupe Posada, Miguel Covarrubias,
and Diego and Frida—on a minor scale—, because
basically it consists of representations of both fi gures.
However, this example doesn’t speak to us about cultural
policy so much as a desire to demonstrate that
taste has a way of imposing itself over big budgets.
Taste that requires a minimal investment because it’s
popular taste, but not in the sense of being the opposite
of Art with a capital “A,” given that what I proposed
for the museum was a blend of high and pop
culture. Not to set them at odds, but in order to show
how they’re integrated within popular taste, because
an appreciation for what surrounds us is what reveals
its artistic quality.