TRAJECTORIES, HORIZONS AND PERSPECTIVES OF LATIN AMERICAN ART CRITICISM SINCE 1950
Latin American art criticism since the postwar period has become a central space for the production of discourse in debates on regional art, developing reflections on the aesthetic, the political and the cultural that shape, through different strategies, interpretations of the artistic phenomenon in Latin America. In this sense, art criticism has not only accompanied or legitimized different practices, but has played an active role in constructing interpretive categories, defining historical itineraries and circulating Latin American art through dialogue with the sociocultural processes of the subcontinent and its relations with the history of modern and contemporary art.
In dialogue with processes of cultural and sociopolitical modernization and the transformations of the global art system, Latin American art criticism has debated and thematized proposals on modernity, the avant-garde, the problems of identity, and the conditions arising from dependency, underdevelopment and globalization, which are articulated in theories, methodologies and periodizations guiding Latin American critical production.
Throughout the proposed period, Latin American criticism was crossed by debates on commitment and militancy, discussions on revolutionary art in the 1960s and 1970s, the problematization of popular arts, and contemporary reflections on feminisms, ecologies and coloniality, constituting itself as a space of public intervention and symbolic dispute.
Furthermore, different forms of materialization of these practices have emerged, including intellectual, editorial, institutional and exhibitionary networks that enable the circulation of these critical discourses within Latin America and beyond its borders. In this sense, art criticism in the period addressed constructs situated conceptual frameworks, capable of thinking about the artistic, cultural and political specificities of the continent in relation to other models and traditions of thought.
This symposium proposes to reflect on the trajectories and perspectives of Latin American art criticism from 1950 to the present, attending to the theoretical shifts it has undergone, its media of dissemination and its links with the social and political contexts of the region, recognizing the heterogeneity that historically and theoretically constitutes it. In doing so, it seeks to highlight that Latin American art criticism constitutes itself as a discursive space through its historical and conceptual understanding, foregrounding its modes of knowledge production, the spaces and media in which it develops, and the horizons it proposes for thinking about the arts and culture in Latin America, emphasizing comparative analysis of authorial, local, national, regional and global experiences.
Thematic axes:
1. Theories, periodizations and study methodologies for Latin American art criticism
2. Networks, media and circulations
3. The social and political in Latin American art criticism
4. Discourses and modalities of Latin American art criticism
5. Art criticism at the local, national, regional and global scale
6. Case studies
