On Wednesday 11th December 2024 the inauguration of the exhibition of the works selected in the 24th Painting Competition of the University of Murcia was held in the Palacio del Almudí in Murcia, among which was my work "Chico Píxel 01".
The winning work was entitled "Over and over" by the painter Fátima Conesa.
I would classify this work within Mark Rothko`s Abstract Expressionism, an abstraction that has also been defined as chromatic abstraction, since the motifs were soft bands of colors recreated in a kind of texture of irregular brushstrokes. This type of abstraction emerged as the artist`s response to the Pop Art of David Hockney and Andy Warhol that was so fashionable in the mid and late twentieth century.
The fact that one of the members of the jury, a professor at the University of Fine Arts in Valencia, defended his choice of the winner only confirms my perception that the art authorities in Alicante and Valencia have a tendency towards the abstract expressionism of Mark Rothko, as I have seen in other competitions, perhaps this inclination towards this type of work has arisen, as happened in the case of the American artist Rothko, as a reaction to the hyperrealist figuration, led by Antonio López, which predominated in Madrid at the end of the last century.
As this member of the jury recognised, the selection of works in the competition (you can download the catalogue of the exhibition in the link at the foot of the photo of this article) was intended to be a sample of the diversity of styles and trends that currently coexist in Art and of the complexity of the current artistic moment, which he didn`t know how to explain.
From my particular point of view, Art was perfectly defined in the Art for Beans competitions, in which we answered the question "What is Art", and in the books on this subject that I subsequently wrote as a result of the competitions. Anyone who doesn`t want to understand what Art is today is because he lives off it and, although he already knows that Art is a corpse, he doesn`t want to acknowledge it publicly because it feeds him.
I can say it: "Art is dead". I summarise the conclusions of my books in case you feel like reading them:
When Duchamp and Warhol put portraits and objects of everyday life in a gallery (portraits of Marilyn, images of Campbell`s soup cans, urinals, Brillo boxes, etc.. ) what they did was to sentence Art to death (and of course get their well-deserved glory for such a feat) because since it was possible from then on that any object of everyday life could be considered Art (after the mediation of a prestigious gallery, of course) then neither pictorial skill, nor subject matter, nor anything else that was considered Art in the past made any sense. What we artists have done since then is to try to provoke in the same way that Andy Warhol and Duchamp did in their time, so artists rack their brains trying to find shit that, without being illegal, offends the critics and the public in the same way that the aforementioned artists did in the past.
The problem is that this only works when it is done for the first time, everything that comes after (be it a piece of shit in a jar or a banana stuck on a wall) brings nothing new to the world of Art. In fact, the banana stuck on the wall that Sotheby`s gallery sold for more than 5 million Euros to a Chinese businessman from Hong Kong was auctioned together with a lot with a Duchamp urinal. This shows that the last possible works of art are those by Warhol or Duchamp, everything that comes after is only worth what one wants to pay for them because conceptually they do not contribute anything new,And for their discourse to make any sense, they have to be put together in a lot with some original work by the last possible artists, works created before Art was executed by those same artists.

Besides all this there is another issue about competitions, questions like whether it is worthwhile for Art to be subsidised and what is the point of owning such a "Domesticated" Art, Art which on the other hand is dead as I have explained before. That is another interesting subject worth talking about as well, although I would like some professor in Valencia or some councillor of Culture to explain to me why nobody wants to acknowledge this evidence about Art, I suppose that if they did they would have to dedicate themselves to something less entertaining than Art. But that`s another matter, the fact is that the challenge facing the new generations is immense, they have to resurrect a corpse, Art, and I`m telling you that it`s not enough to stick bananas on a wall or put shit in jars, they`ll have to think a bit more, but they can no longer say that they didn`t know that Art was dead because I`m telling you now, another thing is that my ideas want to be swept under the carpet and hidden as has happened in the past with other critical thinkers, Of course, this is also an option that will allow them to live off the corpse of Art for a few more days in the hope that no other critic will announce the death of Art and they can continue using the rhetorical discourse that Art today is not really what it is, while the general public, who neither likes nor dislikes Art, has long since realized that Art is bullshit, the only ones who seem not to have realized it are the artists and those who live off Art.