What We Inherited
As the art world fixates on the global present, a new wave of Australian and Chilean artists, critics, and historians are turning backward—embracing archives, provincialism, and forgotten genealogies. Is resisting contemporaneity the most contemporary move of all?
By Verónica Tello
Issue 1, Summer 2023/24
For the better part of the year, I have been living in Santiago, a city currently gripped by an archival fever in its local arts community. It started in 2005 with the founding of the Centro de Documentación de las Artes Visuales del Centro Nacional de Arte Contemporáneo, which made archives from the dictatorial era (1973–90) available for the first time. The fever intensified in 2010 when the Centre digitised its collection. A slew of private and public institutions followed suit. These spaces have fuelled the appetite of younger artists, curators, and art historians who came of age in the post-dictatorship period and sought to wrestle the past they inherited. Santiago’s archive fever is driven by the desire to trace and imagine local art history, manifesting in dozens of books, exhibitions, and artworks.
Related
“There’s no path for the magazine to restore trust in its current ownership.” David Velasco and Kate Sutton reflect on the situation with Artforum and its Summer 2024 issue.
Hollywood thinks it’s exposing the art world’s grift, but it’s just another con. From Velvet Buzzsaw to Picasso Baby, cinema keeps repackaging conceptual cringe as critique—while artists play along. If contemporary art is now just another film genre, it’s a bad one.
Archie Moore’s “impoverished aesthetic” transforms memory, class, and race into immersive, unsettling worlds. Rejecting the tidy self-disclosure of trauma narratives, his work lingers in ambiguity—neither confession nor critique, but something in between.
