I know the news is stale, and that everyone has spent the past week and a half in embarrassment and has even stopped talking about it

I know the news is stale, and that everyone has spent the past week and a half in embarrassment and has even stopped talking about it. But since I was away travelling for a long time and did not follow events closely, I am doubly unhappy about this innovation.

Though, until GES-2, we did not really have all that many free museums in the first place. Take Garage, for example. There, too, the tickets are not cheap, and the mechanics of the institution are similar.

The shock, perhaps, comes less from the discomfort of the transition than from unfamiliarity. Do you remember how villages once had free standpipes with drinking water right there in the street? And then at some point they were made to charge for it. The feeling is roughly the same, but then you recall that there is nothing vitally necessary in museums of contemporary art, and the indignation subsides.

It is simply that this centre of contemporary culture is turning from a space of open experience into a space of paid-for experience, and paid for not on your behalf but by you. One may regard this as an act of peculiar reinforcement of ideology: the curating and organising of exhibitions are in themselves ideologised practices, all the more so in this segment, and the introduction of a financial filter for consuming the product of these practices only adds to their ideological character