Le musée, l’artiste et l’identité comme marques : le cas du musée d’art latino-américain de Buenos Aires (MALBA)

Abstract

The Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA) illustrates what Robert Fleck (2014) calls the "21st Century Museum": a new type of museum built on branding. This concept is aligned with the debates that, since the 1980s, have proposed the end of the museum as an elitist place for the conservation of the canon, to make way for a museum institution conceived as a mass medium that adheres to the logic of the spectacle, as Andreas Huyssen (1994) postulates. The author describes the phenomenon of musealisation, which is evident in the increasing number of museum openings and the public’s growing interest in the museum experience. This article studies the MALBA as a paradigmatic case in which two conceptual categories coexist: a 21st-century museum conceived as a mass media. From its exhibition proposals to its communication strategies, the museum appropriates the logic of the spectacle, constituting a "star system" of Latin American art, variable according to marketing objectives. We are interested in how the institution constructs itself as a brand, and in the discursive mechanisms through which certain Latin American artists and ideas of "Latin Americanness" serve institutional positioning. We also observe how MALBA adopts some of the positioning strategies of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). This article therefore presents a) a study of the institutional communication strategies of the two museums; b) an analysis of four curatorial discourses of the museum’s collection (from 2010 to 2022) in order to observe the different ways in which MALBA presents Latin American art history and Latin Americanness; and c) an analysis of the construction of the MALBA brand based on the artists that make up its collection.