LatinArt.com: Do you think these shifts in "high" and "low" art first occurred at an institutional or an individual artistic level? Or perhaps it is a parallel development?

Carolina: Pop culture and the media are constantly devouring the margins and elicit new forms of cultural voyeurism that feed on the spectacle of tabloid drama and high pop sensationalism. However, I still believe that it is the artists who explore these new cultural margins in depthóor at least that is their formidable taskówhile institutions "institutionalize" and commodify them.

LatinArt.com: How does all this shifting of terms affect the very description of what is considered art? Spaces have traditionally defined the objects they house, such as fine art in a fine art museum, and cultural artifacts in ethnographical/ historical museums, so how will this shifting affect our preconceived notions of what we expect to encounter in different spaces?

Carolina: Codes of meaning change constantly, and art centers are challenged to keep up the pace. From a cultural perspective the understanding of "low" versus "high" art is also related to "otherness." Non-Euro-American art is often viewed as "outsider art." Ití­s a colonial model. There seems to be both a trendy "low" and an anthropological "low." Corporate advertising and the media are flooded with images of diversity and "photogenic" depictions of race and ethnicity. The fashion industry is inspired by exotic ethnicity, by the homeless, by S&M aestheticsóby unlimited otherness. Racial diversity in the media attempts to illustrate a glossy, picture perfect (and marketable) multicultural society. The "positive" racial and ethnic representations that pervade corporate advertising, the art world, the media, and pop culture promote the illusion that American societyóand "global" culture in generalóhave come to terms with ethnic and racial diversity. However, the fact is that these representations are refracted in a white mirror. Given the current, global realities of cultural production, art and diversity must continue to define spaces in which cultural dialogue does not depend on institutionalized agencies such as the global art network or the market.

LatinArt.com: It is now seventeen years after the groundbreaking and very controversial Primitivism exhibition at MoMA, New York, that focused on "primitive" influences on modern, western art. What do you think we have learned since then about how to understand, label, and exhibit the highly sensitive, yet inseparable relationship between fine art and popular culture in a museum space?

Carolina: Exhibitions like MoMA's Primitivism, or the French blockbuster Les Magicien de la Terre (Magicians of the Earth), were very controversial at their time because they followed a binary opposition between Us/Them, High/Low art, Third/First World, etc. Traditionally, the self-proclaimed "international" art circuit has been extremely centralized and restricted. Yet in the aftermath of identity politics, it began to open its doors to the work of artists exploring issues of cultural disparity and difference. This was, to a certain extent, advancement in terms of erasing the artificial boundaries between "low," "outsider," "otherness," and "Western" art models. This larger access of so-called "artists of color" and of representations of cultural difference into the Eurocentric "universe" of Western art is creating the illusion of a "globalized" art world. However, despite its improved attempts towards inclusiveness, the "global art world" only embraces specific expressions of cultural diversity as a new exotic art trend. From the perspective of U.S. Latino and Latin American artóas one case among other similar cultural experiencesóthere is only a significantly small number of artists who actually exhibit or have their work collected by mainstream institutions and art galleries in the U.S. or Europe, are featured in Euro/American art journals, or participate in international art events organized by the mainstream. The "global art world" is a small world, and it is fashioned by how the network of the centers accept notions of "low art" only when they meet their standards of "high style," "high art," and "color blind" aesthetics.

About the Author
Ms. Ponce de León has twenty years of experience as a Latin American art scholar, writer, curator, and arts administrator in both the United States and Colombia. She is currently Executive Director of Galerí­a de la Raza in San Francisco. She has published numerous essays in exhibition catalogues and specialized art journals such as Art Nexus (Colombia), Poliester (Mexico), Parkett (Zurich), Art in America (USA), and Bomb Magazine (USA). She is a contributing author for Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism From Latin America, ed. Gerardo Mosquera, (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1995), and "Latin American Art in the Global Artworld" in Beyond Identity: Globalization and Latin American Art, ed. Mari Carmen Ramirez and Luis Camnitzer (in press). She is currently working on her up-coming book, The Butterfly Effect: Critical Writings on Art and Culture in Latin America (Bogotá: Villegas Editores, Fall 2001).