Post by Grubb.
The first museum we hit yesterday—MALBA (Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires) led us out of our neighborhood past some embassies to a busy boulevard by a park. (When I mention boulevards in this city I’m talking six lanes of traffic and a symphony of horns.) MALBA is large and modern with plenty of space featuring art heavy on the political statements. If I wanted to experience a Kantian detached sense of beauty, I was in the wrong building. Artists were suffering a colonial hangover and waking up angry about a heritage of slavery, sexism, and capitalism. It was all too didactic for my taste. Leaving little room for the imagination, the plea for retribution implicit in painting after painting was, ironically, oppressive.
Okay, it’s not the Belle Epoque anymore. I get it. In the angry art mode, there was one painter, Antonio Berni, whose smile I could feel behind his use of material.
