With the 20th Anniversary of the first permanent exhibition, the Ludwig Museum presents until the 23rd of October �Site Inspection – The Museum on the Museum�. The exhibition focuses on the present discussion on the museum and its meaning on art, the artists and the public.

This exhibition is commissioned by Katalin Székely and, together with the museum�s curatorial team, she looks to expose the great changes that the museum space has gone through down the years and the critique that part of the artists have made in all this art process in the 20th and 21st century.

This ambivalent relationship of the artist with the institution has been regular and permanent in the world of art. A contradictory relationship where the artist requires: it, but at the same time directs his most intense critiques to the social representation space that museums are today: a space of power, a fundamental step in the market and a status mark and work value.

The exhibition puts special emphasis on the avant-gardist call of the 70s, both in the local and international space. This special outlook to avant-gardism is because in some shape or form, its institutional review can be considered a precursor of contemporary thinking spaces on the museum.

But we can�t forget previous processes on this critique, like the ones lived by the artists of the so-called avant-garde. Such is the case of Marcel Duchamp, who was one of the first to pose the paradoxes of work and its context, the relation between the artist and the museum and the one between the artist and the spectator.

For the conceptual artists of the 60s and 70s, this becomes crucial. The work loses or gains meaning according to its context and, for this reason, the museums transform into immobile and rigid spaces where the shapes and established spaces for each exhibition become disconnected from its process and from the relation with the spectator. For the avant-garde, the museum is part of the social gearing and, in the same way, ideology, representation of the shapes of social relation and the market in which they�re inserted. For that, its critique and investigation is directed to the social space as a whole.

This interesting and complex situation is well reflected in a series of films and videos that are presented in the film space in the exhibition, with works by artists such as Costa Gavras, Woody Allen, Alfred Hitchcock and Aleksandr Sokurov among others.

The artists that begun the institutional critic through their work or in their investigation projects during the 60s and 70s, they consciously made works that weren�t marketable and salable, many times, with the idea of carrying out a short or invaluable project for the logic of the market.

That way we can appreciate in this exhibition works by artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Andrea Fraser, Halász Károly, NETRAF, Dalibor Martines, Alan Sekula, Hans Haacke or Azorro Group among others.

For more information: http://ludwigmuseum.hu/site.php?inc=kiallitas&kiallitasId=782&menuId=43

Nancy Guzman

If your destination option this summer has been to walk along the shores of the Danube and having a relaxing time in apartments in Budapest you can�t not visit the impressive Ludwig Museum and walk through this exhibition that gathers great 20th century contemporary artists.

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Translated by: aleixgwilliam
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