Nuria Enguita, director of the IVAM: "The modern European museum is built by white men"

• IVAM.Rebellion for the dismissal of García Cortés

As so many times in the past, the Valencian Institute of Modern Art (IVAM) returned this summer to be at the center of the controversy.

This time, on account of the

who left the Valencia museum management accusing the Ministry of Culture of wanting to exercise "political control."

The refusal of the department that controls Compromís in the Valencian Government to renew its contract was justified by the need to call a public tender, of the

Nuria Enguita (Madrid, 1967) was elected, endorsed by names such as the director of the Reina Sofía,

, or the former director of the Tate Modern in London Vicent Todolí, Enguita prefers to turn the page.

His predecessor denounced political interference.

Are you concerned?

The controversy takes place between the Department of Culture and the previous direction of the IVAM, and I have nothing to do with it.

I can not enter.

Is there today a greater temptation to interfere in museums?

Not only from the political sphere, but even from the social sphere with the debate on the immorality of some works of art.

We are at the time of least political interference in Spanish museums.

Those in the management at this time are colleagues and I have no record of any interference.

It shows in the programs that each one manages in one way.

I do not want to say that it will not return, because the threat is always there, but not for now.

In the other sense, there is a social involution that has to do with a very dangerous puritanism for our society.

Very dangerous not so much for freedom of expression as for creation.

Freedom of expression is a very sensitive issue, but the arts are places of extraterritoriality and cannot be measured as if they were something real.

You cannot measure a play as if it were real, because furthermore then we are enduring sentences to herds in which it seems that nothing happens and then it turns out that a play does more damage.

What do you think this wave of puritanism is due to?

There is a very strong social regression, of cutting freedoms.

The extreme rights of the whole world show that we are in a very difficult moment.

Should there be limits in art?

Art can and has to talk about anything;

you cannot kill for art.

One of his jobs is to be critical of society.

It seems to me that the limit is for everyone in the same place.

And when it happens the other way around?

When a museum like that of Orsay prohibits entry because of a cleavage.

It is puritanism.

Going back to IVAM, what are your plans?

The first thing is the work on the collection.

I also propose a methodology that has to do with the recovery of history, of the historical backgrounds where the works arise, to understand why they were important at the time and what they can contribute to us today.

And then something fundamental that is popular, that art stories have often left out.

I would like to work from the history of art but also from the history of the world, because the history of classical art is useless.

It no longer serves to explain artistic proposals.

Why?

It was a skewed story.

The theoretical work that has developed from the 70-80s not only opens the framework to minorities and women, but also to outside the West.

The modern European museum was built by white men, so now it is time to work on all the exclusions for reasons of race, gender or sexual orientation.

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