Gerardo Mosquera considers the usefulness of the idea of Latin American art, ultimately taking a firm position against it as it has been understood up to now. He begins by describing Latin American culture’s “neurosis of identity” as the inevitable result of its complex history of cultural and ethnic intermingling, colonialism, and oppositional relationships with Europe and the United States. Mosquera warns of the “traps” into which Latin American art is apt to fall with the globalization of art and culture, even though, thanks to globalization it is increasingly visible in the so-called mainstream. In this context, Latin American art that insists on its identity as such is in jeopardy of, among other things, 1) becoming a postmodern “cliché,” 2) being seen as derivative of art produced in Western centers, and 3) of “self-exoticism.” Instead, Mosquera argues that Latin American artists should be understood as part of what he calls a “third scene,” in which difference and displacement is accepted as an inherent aspect of globalization. Artists in Latin America have furthermore, he argues, been forced to produce art “on the rebound,” responding to mainstream ways of making art with results that ultimately transform the very frameworks of the mainstream. In conclusion, Mosquera calls for more “horizontal” contact between Latin American countries, and characterizes the most relevant contemporary art of Latin America as that which has participated in “. . . the global development of . . . a minimal and conceptual international, postmodern language.”

The Cuban art critic and theorist Gerardo Mosquera emerged during the early- 1990s as a key voice in the re-framing of contemporary art produced in Latin America. In this essay, “Del arte latinoamericano al arte desde América Latina,” which appeared in Art Nexus (April 2003), Mosquera rejects the term “Latin American art” as a useful moniker for describing how contemporary artists make and exhibit their work. Instead, he urges his readers to consider the term “Latin American” as an invention, a colonial and imperialist label that has been forced on Latin Americans from outside. He argues that, among other things, concepts such as hybridization and syncretism have been adopted to carve out a (common) place for Latin American art in ways that are unsatisfactory, postmodernism is in danger of reducing Latin Americans to clichés, and concepts of Latin American difference, such as mestizaje and magical realism, have been historically useful but have since hardened into stereotypes. As a theoretician, Mosquera seems to be interested in aligning Latin American art with other post-colonial discourses and their engagements with Marxism and Post-Structuralism. He cites V. Y. Mudimbe’s question “What is Africa?” to ask the same of Latin America; and, when considering Latin American art as a problem, he urges his readers to think about systems of production and reception, and about the emphasis on the “signified.”