What's happening is simple, according to Teresa de Anchorena. After years of being brutalized by dictators, battered by the economy, and made to feel stagnant while other South American countries were finally getting their acts together, "Argentines are searching for a certain pride," she tells me. Anchorena came back to town in 1983, after living in Paris for more than a decade. (She'd left during the military junta, whose crackdown on dissidents resulted in the state-sponsored murders of as many as 30,000 Argentineans, euphemistically declared los desaparecidos, or "the disappeared.") Porteños are finally getting in touch with "a national feeling, roots that they never accessed before," Anchorena adds.
Argentinean art, for instance, once dismissed by fashionable porteños as having zero name-recognition and thus being bereft of bragging rights, has become an unexpected sabor del día. Daniel Maman Fine Art recently hosted a solo show for Mondongo, an art collective with an eye-popping oeuvre that includes Internet porn images translated into giant intricate mosaics composed of sliced cheese, cookies, and cold cuts encased in resin. (The Museum of Modern Art in New York and London's Tate Modern have bought Mondongos for their permanent collections.) Critical opinion of Mondongo and its young artists, Agustina Picasso, Manuel Mendanha, and Juliana Laffitte, remains uneven. "Is this a joke?" one visitor to the gallery whispers to her companion as she stands perplexed before a wall-sized panel made entirely of fluffy marabou feathers dyed various shades of blue. But the popularity of the show—the works nearly sold out within weeks of opening night—astonished many locals, given the conservative slant that has defined Buenos Aires society for more than a century.
"Rich porteños are afraid of looking foolish," says Jorge S. Helft, a pioneering collector of 20th-century Argentinean art and an organizer of art exhibitions around the world. I meet Helft one night at a cocktail party in the Palermo Chico home of Teresa Aguirre Lanari de Bulgheroni. It is the kind of evening only Buenos Aires could produce. A vivacious philanthropist who is the president of the Fundación Teatro Colón, Bulgheroni had the garden of her mansion encased by a tent and transformed into a 1940's-style salon, complete with sparkling chandeliers, white-upholstered Louis XVstyle furniture, and mirror-and-trellis walls.
"Porteños always rave about what they've seen at the Whitney and MOMA but will not buy a modern painting to hang on their wall unless one of their friends has it," Helft says. "Edgardo Antonio Vigo, one of the great Argentinean painters in history, has half a room devoted to him at Tate Modern but most Argentine collectors could not care less." Like so many people in the city, he is heartened, somewhat tentatively, by this Argentinean creative revival, however late it is in coming. But, he says, "What's important is whether this enthusiasm will last." The note of caution is understandable. But it's clear that Argentina's young movers and shakers have enough energy and ideas to keep the momentum going.
MITCHELL OWENS writes for the New York Times and Elle Décor.
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