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The Spanish Miracle


Beyond the Prado: Museums and Identity in Democratic Spain
by Selma Reuben Holo
Smithsonian Institution Press, $34.95
THE LAST TIME Selma Holo had set foot in Spain was 1975 – just six months after Franco’s death. Returning on a 1994 Fullbright fellowship, the USC art historian was unprepared to find a nation so utterly transformed.
The so-called “Spanish miracle” had healed the scars of a bloody civil war and 40-year dictatorship, leaving behind a vital, full-blown democracy. “Everyone acted and talked as if they had never known any other way of life,” Holo observed.
Looking beyond the ob-vious social changes, the director of USC’s Fisher Gallery noticed what she notices best – the museums. They had proliferated, in striking variety. Nowhere is Spain’s political and cultural renaissance more evident than in its museums, argues Holo in her new book, Beyond the Prado: Museums and Identity in Democratic Spain.
“The museums offered me a way, a methodology, for understanding the new Spain,” says Holo, who also heads USC’s elite Museum Studies Program. “These cultural institutions have helped create a profoundly democratic nation – one in which ethnic and regional diversity, once suppressed, is not only tolerated but
celebrated and openly marketed.”

TAKING A BROAD view of Spain’s museums, Holo’s book offers case study after case study attesting to the Spanish miracle.
Witness the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The decision to hire an American architect – USC alumnus Frank Gehry – to design this world-class Spanish museum was no accident. No less bold was the decision to situate the new museum in the heart of the Basque country – a region long ravaged by separatist movements, state-sponsored oppression and, after Franco’s death, a period of political terror.
“Spaniards have rejected the politics of vengeance. They have found a way to
balance memory and forgetting,” she says.
Another remarkable testament to the nation’s fine balance between memory and forgetting is the Extremaduran and Ibero-American Museum of Contem-porary Art. Formerly a Francoist prison, it is now an art museum. Where nonconformists were once sent for punishment, they are now sent for exhibition.
The military museums also remain, preserving memories of Franco and his victory in the Spanish civil war. Their walls are hung with idealized images of the late dictator.
“I was stunned until I realized how truly phenomenal this is,” Holo says. “A democracy allows it. In a democracy, even awful things can be said.”

– Inga Kiderra


Glyph
by Percival Everett
Greywolf Press, $22.95

Praised by the New York Times Book Review for his “omnivorous intelligence and wordplay,” English professor Percival Everett creates a most unlikely hero in his new novel. Baby Ralph is a genius, mute by choice yet able to read philosophical tracts. Everyone wants a stake in this infant prodigy, including a fiendish psychiatrist, a not-so-sweet Nanna, even military intelligence operatives. As the kidnapped wunderkind becomes the subject of a nationwide chase, he ponders theories of literary form and comes to conclusions only a tot could dream up.

The Fuzzy Future: From Society and
Science to Heaven in a Chip
by Bart Kosko
Harmony Books, $25

Binary logic sees the world in black and white. Fuzzy logic, the most explosive scientific concept since chaos theory, sees the world in shades of gray. Electrical engineer Bart Kosko foresees how fuzz will shape every aspect of life in the digital age – how we vote, pay taxes, view abortion, have children and more. “Suppose we replace your brain with a computer chip,” asks Kosko. “Would your digital brain house a digital mind? Or would your mind use fuzzy logic?”

The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity
by Sarah Banet-Weiser
University of California Press, $17.95

Communications scholar Sarah Banet-Weiser takes a hard look at hotly contested but enduringly popular American ritual, zeroing in on the Miss America pageant in particular. Drawing on cultural criticism, ethnographic research and interviews with contestants and officials, the author depicts the beauty pageant stage as a place where concerns about national identity, cultural hopes and desires, and anxieties about race and gender are crystallized and condensed.

 
Photograph by Rick Szczechowski
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