Luis Camnitzer (b. 1937) is an artist and art theorist who has always acted according to his own principles, and has used his merciless critical skills to assess anything and everything he has ever reviewed. His early articles, published in the Uruguayan weekly newspaper Marcha in the 1960s and early 1970s, and the pieces he wrote for the weekly publication Brecha after 1985, teemed with vital details and information about art events in North America and Europe. On top of all that, his sharp critiques inevitably prompted any number of heated discussions.
In this particular document, Camnitzer turns his critical eye on the “conceptual” and “technical” weakness he sees in the art produced by the younger generation of artists, and on the political gerontocracy that is comfortably ensconced as decision-makers overseeing Uruguay’s art policy. He refers to what he calls “adult art”—using the work of Manuel Espínola Gómez (1921–2003) as an example—and compares it to what he describes as the (voluntary) “infantilization” of current art. He traces the origins of this process to the 1970s, a decade when the philosophical underpinnings of Torres García’s signs were trivialized and turned into decorative doodles, for example; a time when the research and political potential of drawing was distorted and transformed into an ironic anthropomorphism that was ideologically innocuous. Camnitzer also condemns what he calls the (involuntary) “infantilism” in art that was spawned by the same complex cultural factors that laid the groundwork for a simplistic (“tacky” or “nutty”) view of the world.
When it was published, this article provoked a furious response from young artists who thought the “external, ruthless” critique was aimed at them.
