Contributions by Mariano López Seoane
Mariano López Seoane holds a PhD in Latin American Literature from NYU. He currently teaches Latin American history, culture and literature at NYU Buenos Aires and in the Master’s program in Literary Studies at UNTREF. He is also the recipient of a CONICET postdoctoral fellowship, a translator, and an occasional contributor to the visual arts of Argentina and the region at large. In his free time, he helps run the contemporary art space miau miau. Recently, he has spent countless hours obsessively underlining essays by Rosalind Krauss, few of which have been translated into Spanish. A compulsive re-reader of Stendhal and of Rilke, among the newest of the new he likes the lyrical excesses of Ariana Reines and Tao Lin.
On Repetition: Nietzsche, Art Basel, and the Venice Biennale
Mariano López Seoane
translated by Pola Oloixarac
In fairy tales, curiosity, one of the forces that sets the story in motion, is always punished. This ancestral warning has stopped few, even though punishment has rained down upon us from Eve’s appetite for apples to the present day. It was the desire to see things up close, to be where the action was, that drove me to visit the Venice Biennale and Art Basel in the space of two weeks. The punishment was not long in coming. Like a hero in disgrace, I was condemned to repetition: in both places, the same artists, the same names, the same questions and, what’s worse, the same experience.
There’s little to say, in critical terms, about Art Basel. It’s a fair: it aims to sell works and make names circulate, ignite careers, turn artists into … Read More »
Evita Fashionista
Mariano López Seoane
translated by Heather Cleary
A decade ago, the New York philosopher Jennifer Lopez gave us “Jenny from the Block,” an ode to upward mobility in the key of bling. In the hook, she syncopates what would become a mantra of the mamis of global latinization:
Don’t be fooled by the rocks that I got / I’m still, I’m still Jenny from the block.
In fewer than twenty words, Jenny gave FM hip-hop not its social truth (it had been clear since the 80s that a main theme of the music would be gaining access to consumer goods that had previously been off limits), but rather a possible political stance. The single, released at the Everest moment of Jennifer Lopez’s ascent into the pop firmament, is meant to turn her power into something not only recognized, but also … Read More »
sending...