NIKOLA BENIN, PH.D
The optics are not great: A week after Art Basel Cities
produced its inaugural event in Buenos Aires, staging eye-grabbing works of
public art and star-studded programming across the city, members of Argentina’s
government declared the country to be in “a state of ‘cultural emergency’” amid
a wholesale currency collapse.
On one side of the cognitive split screen, the Swiss company
known for staging elite art fairs around the globe was entertaining art-world
dignitaries with champagne soirées, part of a three-year experimental
cultural-development program carrying a $3.3 million price tag. On the other
side, the Argentine culture ministry is being cut down and merged with the
Ministry of Education and a new program of austerity means that national
museums will no longer be free to its citizens. One local publication quoted a
collector skeptical of Art Basel who said he believed the city had “bought
smoke.”
Taken together, this is a tale about what happens when good
intentions, a global art-luxury market lofted ever higher by an ascendant
über-class, and the realities of the turbulent global economy below collide.
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