Schone Kunsten, ver weg: Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires, 12,000,000 inhabitants, where the corridors of the National Bank were once piled high with gold, is trying to awaken from a number of simultaneous nightmares such as the colonels’ regime, inflation and terror.The fine artist César Paternosto (La Plata, 1931) left Buenos Aires in 1964, because he felt he was banging his head, like a balloon, on the ceiling. Today he returns to talk to an old university friend, Victor Grippo (Junín, 1936). Both men chose an artistic existence, far removed from the ivory towers. They discuss the traumas of emigration, the solemnity of the Argentines, the artificiality of art, the potato as the basis of Grippo’s art, and the unexploited field of pre-Columbian textiles.In a TV studio in Buenos Aires, the art organiser Jorge Glusberg (Buenos Aires, 1938) is criticised by the voice of Argentina, the Peruvian Hugo Guerrero Marthineitz.The art collection of George Helft (Paris, 1934), which spans more than forty years of contemporary art, is visited by art historian Nelly Perazzo (Buenos Aires).Argentine art discussed exclusively by Argentines.