In The Politics of Taste Ana María Reyes examines the works of Colombian artist Beatriz González and Argentine-born art critic, Marta Traba, who championed González's art during Colombia's National Front coalition government (1958–74). During this critical period in Latin American art, artistic practice, art criticism, and institutional objectives came into strenuous yet productive tension. While González’s triumphant debut excited critics who wanted to cast Colombian art as modern, sophisticated, and universal, her turn to urban lowbrow culture proved deeply unsettling. Traba praised González's cursi (tacky) recycling aesthetic as daringly subversive and her strategic localism as resistant to U.S. cultural imperialism. Reyes reads González's and Traba's complex visual and textual production and their intertwined careers against Cold War modernization programs that were deeply embedded in the elite's fear of the masses and designed to avert Cuban-inspired revolution. In so doing, Reyes provides fresh insights into Colombia's social anxieties and frustrations while highlighting how interrogations of taste became vital expressions of the growing discontent with the Colombian state.

Ana María Reyes is Assistant Professor of the History of Latin American Art and Architecture at Boston University, coeditor of Simón Bolívar: Travels and Transformations of a Cultural Icon, and founding member of the Symbolic Reparations Research Project.

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction. Dis-cursis  1
1. Vermeer in Bucaramanga, Beatriz in Bogotá  33
2. A Leap from the Domestic Sphere into the Sisga Reservoir  73
3. "Cut It Out": Impropriety at the MAMBO  113
4. Notes for an Exclusive History of Colombia  153
5. Modernist Obstruction at the Second Medellín Biennial  181
Epilogue. Underdeveloped Art for Underdeveloped People  218
Notes  231
Bibliography  283
Index  303