Overview

In The Politics of Taste Ana Maria Reyes examines the works of Colombian artist Beatriz Gonzalez and Argentine-born art critic, Marta Traba, who championed Gonzalez's art during Colombia's National Front coalition government (1958-74). During this critical period in Latin American art, artistic practice, art criticism, and institutional objectives came into strenuous yet productive tension. While Gonzalez's triumphant debut excited critics who wanted to cast Colombian art as modern, sophisticated, and universal, her turn to urban lowbrow culture proved deeply unsettling. Traba praised Gonzalez's cursi (tacky) recycling aesthetic as daringly subversive and her strategic localism as resistant to U.S. cultural imperialism. Reyes reads Gonzalez's and Traba's complex visual and textual production and their intertwined careers against Cold War modernization programs that were deeply embedded in the elite's fear of the masses and designed to avert Cuban-inspired revolution. In so doing, Reyes provides fresh insights into Colombia's social anxieties and frustrations while highlighting how interrogations of taste became vital expressions of the growing discontent with the Colombian state.

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9781478003977

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Reviews

Ana Maria Reyes tackles an important but understudied subject that is absolutely essential to understanding contemporary Colombian politics, culture, and society: the relationship between aesthetics and the Cold War in Colombia. Her analysis of Beatriz Gonzalez's artistic practices, Marta Traba's art criticism, the institutions where they worked and exhibited, and Colombia's cultural politics and Cold War policies during the National Front period is brilliant and compelling. --Mary Roldan, author of Blood and Fire: La Violencia in Antioquia, Colombia, 1946-1953 In this exciting and enlightening book, Ana Maria Reyes provides an entirely new perspective on the art of Beatriz Gonzalez, on Latin American engagements with pop, and on Marta Traba's assessment of Gonzalez's work. By offering a clear sense of the cultural dynamics of the Cold War in Colombia and class politics within Bogota during this period, Reyes allows readers to better appreciate Gonzalez's subject matter, style, color sensibility, and use of appropriation. --Mary Coffey, author of Orozco's American Epic: Myth, History, and the Melancholy of Race

Author Information

Ana María Reyes is Assistant Professor of the History of Latin American Art and Architecture at Boston University, coeditor of Simón Bolívar: Travels and Transformations of a Cultural Icon, and founding member of the Symbolic Reparations Research Project.

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