Galleries, collectors and other contemporary art players will be travelling from all over the world to Madrid, the capital of Spain, for ARCOmadrid_ 2010, the International Contemporary Art Fair, from February 17th through 21st. Given its growing influence, this annual fair is one of the world's major art market events and turns Madrid into an exciting world capital for contemporary art.

The most noteworthy new introduction at the upcoming edition of the art fair is the focus on Los Angeles, one of the world's epicentres for art right now, as the fair's special invited guest. In its PANORAMA program ARCOmadrid_ 2010 is inviting a city, instead of a country as was the case before, and L.A. was chosen for the dynamic creative diversity that has earned it a place at the top of the art market ranking. This is the beginning of a number of editions of the fair that will bring to Madrid the very best of what's happening in contemporary art worldwide, focusing not only on countries as it has done up until now, but also on major regions or urban centres in a globalised world that is increasingly more diverse and plural, overstepping national boundaries.

Theatre, dance, music, circus. The world of performing arts is the star of the new edition of the Festival de Otoño (Autumn Festival), which will be held in Madrid from November 4 to 29. 

This will be the last year the capital celebrates the traditional Festival de Otoño, since from 2010 it will change its season to spring. After 26 years as one of the most important cultural events in Europe, it promises to say goodbye to the fall in style: 35 shows performed by six Spanish companies and troupes from 19 other countries in 11 venues in Madrid and 10 in municipalities of the region.

The relationship between sexual desire and death instinct through visual arts.

The exhibition takes us on a journey through the history of eroticism in Western art: from the Baroque period, with work by Rubens and Bernini (17th century), to the Surrealist movement (20th century), although it does in fact mainly focus on 19th-century artists.

Georges Bataille, one of the most controversial French intellectuals of the early 20^th century, gave the title Tears of Eros to a strange and evocative essay on aesthetics which looks at beauty, desire and pain. Although the actual book was only published in 1961, the relationship between eroticism and death has been a obsession for philosophers, psychologists and artists since the Romantic period. Following in their footsteps, in the way Surrealists also did, Bataille produced a vast oeuvre on all sorts of paraphilias which featured surprising moments of lucidity.