The article “Arte Joven con inflación” [Young Art with Inflation] sheds a great deal of light on the exhibition spaces devoted to the promotion of “young art” in Colombia in 1991. The critic Ana María Escallón (b. 1954) describes the Nuevos Nombres [New Names] program (1985−) as an opportunity for emerging artists to exhibit their work and have it legitimized by critics as a step toward establishing themselves as recognized artists in Colombian art circles. The author describes the works in either pejorative or positive terms, expressing her opinions concerning “the risks taken because of the artist’s youth” or suggesting that “the influences here are too obvious for there to be any clearly defined direction.” These comments reveal how institutional power affects the relationships between the artists and the “arte joven” promotional programs. Nadia Moreno refers to these relationships as the “interplay between art’s cultural and symbolic capital” in her article “La ‘tradición’ del arte joven en Bogotá” [The ‘Tradition’ of Young Art in Bogotá] (2009) [see doc. # 1133077], in which she critically reviews “young artist” events, describing them as a legitimizing strategy used by cultural institutions.
However, in her review of the exhibition, Escallón discusses the common features she observes among the artists participating in the Nuevos Nombres program (1991), such as skepticism, technical innovation, an exploration of reality, and violence as subjects used to point out errors committed by the prevailing ideological system. The works also use “poor” resources as a symptom of underdevelopment, seeking to generate a personal aesthetic. On this latter issue, Escallón refers specifically to the title “Arte Joven con inflación” and states that: “There is no ostentatious art here; this art is more familiar with inflation and devaluation,” a comment that underscores the desperate economic conditions in Colombia in the early 1990s. That situation actually took a turn for the worse with the fall of the drug cartels in 1993, which partly explains certain aspects of Colombian art during that decade, including an increase in the popularity of performance art and a new approach to the meaning of materials based on their historical and symbolical significance, a conceptual transition that prompted the rise of installation art in Colombia.
Ana María Escallón is a writer, critic, and curator; she is a graduate of the Ciencias de la Comunicación Social [Social Communication Sciences] program at the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano and of the Master’s program in History at Georgetown University at Washington, D.C. She has been a columnist at the El Espectador newspaper, and has contributed to magazines such as Arte en Colombia [Art in Colombia] and Credencial [Credential].