On April 27th, more than a hundred people gathered in the underground auditorium of a prestigious contemporary-art museum in Mexico City. Those who couldn’t find seats lingered outside, watching a live video feed of what was transpiring within; more than seventy thousand others streamed the proceedings at home. For almost two hours, the audience looked on as epic and often metaphysical questions—of faith, language, taste, value, ownership, legacy—were debated with ferocious intensity. The subject of the discussion was a diamond—2.02 carats, rough-cut—which, as I reported last year, was made from the compressed ashes of the late Mexican architect Luis Barragán. Created with the permission of the local government in Guadalajara, where Barragán was buried, and with the blessing of his direct heirs, the jewel was set in a silver engagement ring. The ring was conceived as part of a project by the American conceptual artist Jill Magid, with the idea that it might be exchanged for the architect’s professional archive, which has been kept in Switzerland for close to twenty-five years.

Cuadra San Cristóbal, in Mexico City, designed by the architect Luis Barragán, whose cremated ashes the artist Jill Magid turned into a diamond.
Cuadra San Cristóbal, in Mexico City, designed by the architect Luis Barragán, whose cremated ashes the artist Jill Magid turned into a diamond. © RENE BURRI / MAGNUM

Many of the critics and curators I spoke with in Mexico agreed that an article published last August by Juan Villoro, a prominent Mexican writer, had set the tone for many of the dozens that followed in the mainstream press. “The master of austere spaces is now a banal decoration,” Villoro wrote in a scathing op-ed. “What explains this grotesque act of recycling?” He went on to suggest that the diamond was “worthy of a horror museum.” The piece closed with the warning that, as a result of the art work, the nation’s mass graves might be soon viewed as jewelry stores.

In the next months, the project was called, among other things, “a sickening story” and an example of “neoliberal magical realism.” The diamond itself was referred to as a “tacky memento” and a “cheap souvenir.” Necrophilia was invoked and the words “barbaric” and “desecration” used. Barragán’s Catholic faith was cited; distant relatives emerged to announce themselves disgusted. Nobody seemed to object to the diamond on the same grounds: some thought it was sacrilege, others called it an act of arrogant American paternalism, and many believed it to be the result of an unforgivably negligent local government.

In February, an open letter was published, full-page, at a cost of two hundred thousand pesos (roughly ten thousand dollars), in a handful of Mexican papers and Web sites, calling for an investigation into the public servants who had allowed Barragán’s ashes to be exhumed, and for an audit to determine whether taxpayers’ funds had been used to exhume them.

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Meanwhile, within much of the art world the project was interpreted as a political bellwether. MUAC’s chief curator, Cuauhtémoc Medina, was among the project’s staunchest defenders. “It’s curious that the intellectual and artistic community transforms its aesthetic unease or personal disgust into a longing for a type of patriarchal and pre-modern moral authority,” he wrote. Medina had seen the response to the art work as part of a disturbing pattern in which art-engaged audiences called for the censorship of unsettling ideas. Christopher Fraga, an anthropologist who studies Mexico City’s contemporary-art scene, compared the response to the work to the recent protests triggered by the inclusion of Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till in the Whitney Biennial, in New York. “The idea that a tactical response to my being offended by an art work is to call for that art work not to exist is a very extreme reaction,” Fraga said. Othiana Roffiel, a Mexico City art critic, called the diamond “at once superfluous and indispensable, illusory and undeniable, mournful and promising” and questioned whether “the form, which offends so many people, was necessary to cause the effect that has been unleashed.”

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By this point, the discussion, which had been largely philosophical, had turned to what, exactly, the project had revealed about local customs regarding art preservation, the sufficiency of current laws to protect human remains, and Mexico’s responsibility to preserve its own culturea question that was argued bitterly when Barragán’s professional archive left the country, years earlier. Magid started to look more relaxed. “I felt a great sense of relief,” she told me later. She was glad to know that the work’s provocations were working. The moderator wrapped up the discussion, and, just before Medina announced the exhibition open, he took a small bow. “So,” he said, “We invite you to see the Minotaur.”

Upstairs, the ring sat in a velvet box behind glass. In anticipation of the forthcoming crowds, museum guards were already in the galleries. They paced, waiting for the doors to open, and intermittently peered at the diamond, which was illuminated by a spotlight in an otherwise dark display case. As many visitors would remark later in the night, it looked quite small.