Performative Resistance: Representing Artistic Labor in Julio Llamazares’s El Cielo de Madrid

El cielo de Madrid (2005) by Julio Llamazares is a novel whose plot hinges on the tension the painter-protagonist experiences in the moment of Spain’s rapid adoption of neoliberal economic policies and its integration into global markets during the transition to democracy after the death of Francisco Franco in 1975. Specifically, this novel dramatizes a tension between the artist’s desire for material profit and the equally strong desire to remain autonomous and disinterested—and in this way “authentic.” El cielo de Madrid is a novel of memory in which the protagonist retells the story of his career, which has been marked by fame and success, for his newborn son. This strategy effectively allows him to curate a vision of his own artistic identity that privileges his ostensible authenticity while downplaying his material success. This retelling allows him to engage in Bourdieuian “strategies of condescension” that permit him to benefit economically from the vibrancy of the art world in Spain while appearing to stand apart from it. I posit that this is not simply a strategy used diegetically by the protagonist, but rather also by the author himself who appeals to readers’ desires to access and consume through literature a mythified and rarified vision of disinterested creative labor. By highlighting his protagonist’s “innocence,” and complementing it with interviews and public statements that link his own personal opinions with respect to artistic creation, Llamazares offers up a vision of his protagonist and himself as resistant to their own valorization by the market. The oppositional stance, both within the novel and without, is embodied neither for its own sake nor for a belief in the separateness of the art world from the “real” one, but rather because such a stance has been fully assimilated into the functioning of the creative economy’s markets.