Art and politics are fields that are strongly connected, they attract and repel each other, draw continuity, and cause ruptures. The essays collected in this volume are subject to the tension between these two forces. They are reflections on the contemporary condition, on the artistic practice, on the limits and potential of the museum: each text is located in time and space and reflects the intellectual path of Manuel Borja-Villel, head of important museum institutions, and some of his curatorial concerns, as responsible for numerous exhibitions and public events over the last thirty years. A supporter of hybridization and sharing of knowledge, in front of the inaccessible compartmentalization of knowledge, this book is committed to interdisciplinary research and the interrelation of multiple fields. And it is, above all, an invitation to reflect on art, its organizations, and its actors.

Manuel Borja-Villel, was born in Burriana (Spain) in 1957. He has been director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, director of the Museu d'Art Contemporani in Barcelona, and previously of the Fondació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona. He holds a BA in Art History from the University of Valencia, Spain, and a PhD in Art History from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Curator of XXXV Bienal de São Paulo, he currently lives in Madrid.

There is no more time: democracy must make an effort of imagination and must reinvent itself if it seeks to respond to the challenges and changes of recent years. John Keane, one of the most innovative political scientists on representative democracy and its global evolution, is convinced of this. The author of numerous texts of international importance, John Keane proposes a radically new interpretation of the destiny of democracy in the twenty-first century. And he has coined a new definition to deal with: monitory democracy.

John Keane, born in Australia in 1949, lives in Sydney. He is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Sydney and at the Research Centre for Social Sciences in Berlin (WZB). Keane is also a member of the Royal Society of Arts, founder of the Research Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD), external adviser to the United Nations and member of the American Institutions of Democracy Commission. His texts include: The Life and Death of Democracy, Global Civil Society?, Vaclav Havel: a political tragedy in Six Acts, the award-winning Tom Paine: a political life e Media and Democracy, which has been translated into more than twenty languages. Potere e Umiltà. Il futuro della monitory democracy is in its first Italian edition.