Next Thursday, August 1, at 6:30 p.m., the book La tristeza de nuestros museos, by researcher Cecilia Bettoni, will be launched at the Il Posto Research and Documentation Center. The author will discuss the contents of this essay with art historian Ignacio Smulewicz.

About the book

The sadness of our museums is an essay that addresses the inevitable tensions between the importation of cultural models in Latin America and the slogan of the settlement of a project of modernity. The book analyzes these tensions based on the painting exhibition «From Manet to our days», an official shipment of the French government that circulated between 1949 and 1950 in Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Peru, Chile and Uruguay, and places special emphasis on the dynamics and positioning of Latin American artistic circuits in the new cultural and geopolitical map that was beginning to take shape after World War II.

Through diplomatic and press archives, correspondence and other sources, Cecilia Bettoni puts together an agile and meticulous account that contrasts the anachronism of the French strategy to recover its cultural domination over Latin America and the skepticism of Latin American countries regarding the validity of that model, in a cultural, political and economic scenario significantly transformed by the American influence and by the legitimate desires for vanguard and autonomy that were emerging in the Southern Cone in the middle of the 20th century.

About the author

Cecilia Bettoni (Créteil, 1984) is a teacher and researcher. She received her PhD in Philosophy with mention in Aesthetics and Art Theory from the University of Chile with a thesis on the declinations of the Benjaminian concept of aura, partially published in various articles and essays. He has specialized in theories of art and visuality, art historiography, and art institutions and systems. His translations include Matthew Rampley’s books In Search of Lost Time. On Aby M. Warburg and Walter Benjamin (2017) and Jean-Louis Schéfer’s The Ordinary Man of Cinema (2020). He currently works in the Art Department of the Universidad Alberto Hurtado, where he directs the BA in Theory and History of Art.