Bad economic times would be expected to fuel a rise in dark humor. But Argentina’s recession has sparked a boom across all genres of art, from opera to film to painting. Despite plunging incomes, Buenos Aires’s cultural centers are doing brisk business. A talented group of film directors is attracting international attention with a series of bold, gritty works. Says Hugo Caligaris, director of the arts section of Argentine daily La Nacion, “We often have more ads in the entertainment section than the rest of the paper put together. Cars and apartments are not selling right now. The entertainment industry is one of the only things that is still working.”
That’s partly because of the high value that Argentines continue to place on culture. The Buenos Aires government still spends 5 percent of its budget (or $42 million) on the arts, even though its coffers have shrunk by 10 percent. And voters, who are otherwise fed up with their leaders, are not complaining. Says Jorge Telerman, the Buenos Aires City Council’s cultural secretary, “Today society viscerally rejects the state. But while people call for cuts in military or political spending, nobody wants cuts in culture.”
For their part, institutions are finding creative ways of profiting from their setbacks. Following the massive currency devaluation, Buenos Aires’s grand and slightly decaying opera house, the Teatro Colon, found itself unable to attract top international artists. Instead, it turned to lower-paid local performers and chopped ticket prices. On Monday nights the theater now offers admission for just two pesos (less than $1). As a result, the number of performances is up by 40 percent and attendance by half. Telerman says the changes have opened the door to new voices. “A few years ago the press would have destroyed me if I had tried something like that,” he says, referring to the lack of international stars in the state-funded Colon’s productions. “Now, on the contrary, they appreciate the promotion of Argentine artists. The crisis has helped us value what we have.”
Indeed, artists in several different disciplines are drawing inspiration from the country’s plight. Gallery owner Horacio Dabbah says that during the prosperous 1990s, Argentine art was “pretty light and frivolous. Now it is less banal… The crisis has sharpened the senses.” The public is in tune with the new mood. At last July’s ArteBA 2002, an art festival that Dabbah helped organize, “sales were extraordinary, beyond our wildest dreams,” he says. Theater, too, has seen a similar shift. One of Buenos Aires’s most successful stage shows features the comedian Enrique Pinti holding forth on the state of Argentina as if he were running for office, mercilessly mocking a candidate’s proposal to jail all those who pick through garbage.
The outside world has been exposed to this budding artistic renaissance primarily through a slew of stylish and provocative movies that are making the rounds of festivals and art houses. From the mainstream thriller “Nine Queens,” about two con men on the mean streets of Buenos Aires, to the more adventurous “The Swamp,” about a decadent provincial family, these films share a common sense of terminal decline, leavened with unexpected bursts of humor.
Officials are also hoping that the weak peso will help persuade foreign filmmakers to use Argentina as a backdrop. In the capital, Telerman has trimmed back on red tape and is offering more than 6,000 council-owned properties for use as sets. The initiative has already met with some success: last month Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith wowed starstruck Argentines during the shooting of “Imagining Argentina,” the first major international production in Buenos Aires since Madonna’s “Evita.” Banderas plays a theater director whose wife is kidnapped by the military during the country’s “Dirty War.”
The increase in film work has in turn given rise to a buzzing new neighborhood near the city center, popularly known as Palermo Hollywood. While other areas, like the formerly chic Puerto Madero district, are boarding-up their storefronts, this once-sleepy enclave has over the past five years grown into a hive of film- and video-production companies, avant-garde fashion studios and art galleries. The lively scene has attracted trendy bars, clubs and restaurants, which on the weekends draw hipsters from as far away as London.
The current renaissance feeds on Argentina’s rich cultural history. For decades, local publishers were the first call for writers and poets from all over Latin America and Spain. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterwork, “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” was first published in Buenos Aires in the 1960s. In the 1940s and ’50s, the country enjoyed a golden age of cinema and theater that featured such luminaries as Lolita Torres and Mirta Legrand, film actresses famous throughout the Spanish-speaking world.
Argentina also has a tradition of art struggling through hardship. During the repression of the 1970s, musicans took the lead. Mercedes Sosa, famous for her role in the Nueva Cancion (new song) movement, was forced into exile for her rousing political ballads. The explosion of the rock scene during the same decade gave young people a means of protesting the last and bloodiest dictatorship, between 1976 and 1983.
Argentines draw inspiration from that history, despite their reduced circumstances. “[Art] is entwined in society’s cultural fabric,” says Luis Alberto Quevedo, a sociologist at the Latin American Social Sciences Faculty. “The weight of our cultural history surpasses the crisis.” Perhaps it will also see the country through its recovery.
