Some notes on “the contemporary” in the critic of art in Mexico

Abstract

Since 2009 a question has been raised about the status of art criticism in Mexico, and some have identified it as a crisis related to their alleged incompetence. However, this supposed incompetence is the product of the mythologization of critical work, as well as the lack of a genealogy that allows us to identify how art criticism has worked in different times. I am interested in showing that criticism in Mexico has enunciated space and time in different ways, and this supposed “crisis” of current criticism is produced, partially, by the introduction of the notion of “contemporary” as part of a process. In part, this process has to do with the loss of the concept of style, which was essential to determine if a work was “art” or not, and that stopped operating in the mid-nineties.