Art and life in the Latin American metropolis. Art and city in times of globalisation

Abstract

The context of globalisation has given special characteristics to the Latin American avant-garde tradition of relating «Art» and «Life» within the metropolis. The institutional and market circuit of art exist outside the museum and gallery, the artistic-visual-industrial design gains a growing presence in the city, and the new tendencies in urban studies put forward the theory of urban marketing, which proposes art and culture as a means to produce urban identities in order to successfully compete in the global market of cities. These new «global» trends of the relationship between art and city seem to be a cynical application of avant-garde traditions. But in Latin American cities they have not been obliterated, instead they coexist in the public space with a constantly renewed but also globalized political art.