Abstract

This article attempts to assess the capabilities of the current art museum to really decolonize the aesthetic hierarchies modern geopolitics inseminated within global museographic imaginaries. By considering the inherent contradictions of the so-called new internationalism as well as those of the new regional interplays that appeared in the early 1990s, I will describe the way in which some art museums and some international bodies have been actively attempting to rewrite the geopolitical designs produced by the modern/colonial museum. In my view, the geopolitical revisionism adopted by some progressive art museums has consisted in a criticism of the legitimacy of the historical geography of the modern art that, paradoxically, has reinforced the museographic imaginaries which provide support for the universalistic discourses and the westernized uses of the global art concept. Through the examination of the case of the market-led reinvention of Latin America as a strategic region for global contemporary art exchanges, I will argue that what was previously considered a set of stereotypical representations regarding the peripheral, or non-western geographies, began to be used as a new kind of geoaesthetic asset after the rise of the new internationalism.