The article “La ‘tradición’ del arte joven en Bogotá” is important to a critical analysis of the events that act as “display cases” of “young art” and “young artists” in Colombia. Many art venues in Bogotá hold exhibitions whose curatorial visions or themes revolve around young art and young artists. Moreno dates the origin of the notion of “young art” in Colombia to the I Salón Nacional de Artistas, held in 1940. Critics mockingly called the event, which had no tradition, the “young people’s competition.” Not until 1947 did Walter Engel—a Viennese critic who lived in Colombia—vindicate “young art” as a form of collective rebellion against the academy and as a means of assimilating the Modern avant-garde. On the basis of this notion, art critic Marta Traba (1923–83) formulated two generations of artists pursuant to a new age that her generation called “Modern Masters.”
Significantly, Nadia Moreno (b. 1977) exposes the fact that age is irrelevant to whether an artist is considered a “master” or a “young artist.” In Colombia, she argues, the terms are deployed arbitrarily in art discourses to endorse an artist or an art institution. Thus, a “promising” young artist is granted prizes and distinctions at museums which, in turn, gain symbolic and cultural capital by entering into the economy of “charity, generosity, and legacy.” Moreno, then, condemns the power relations operative on the local art circuit which, in her view, are at the service of “art’s interplay of cultural and symbolic capital.” Significantly, Moreno indicates that the generational model is a Modern form of reading, one that reveals the logic behind terms like “intermediate generation” [see “La generación instalada”, doc. no. 1132436]. This article is a far-reaching institutional criticism of the Modern vision that prevails in Colombian art institutions.
Colombian artist and researcher Nadia Moreno has a degree in the visual arts from the Universidad Nacional of Colombia. She has done advanced studies in the Cultural Studies program of the Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá. At present (2010), she is pursuing a master’s degree in art studies at the Universidad Iberoamericana (Santa Fe) in Mexico City.