Abstract
This article aims to trace the relay of Latin American literature by the visual arts as to its international diffusion within half a century. While the Latin American literary Boom of the 60s was extinguished gradually and almost imperceptibly, there are critics who claim that the market distribution and demand as well as exploded monetary value of the visual arts threaten to disappear all of a sudden. This phenomenon is evoked through the metaphor of the bubble, which we examine here in its multiple economic, artistic and literary facets. As an artistic device the plastic image of fragility can paradoxically illustrate violence, besides fugacity. In the processes described in this article, we may ask the question to what extent it is the market demand which creates or strengthens homogenizing movements or collective and aesthetic programs. The sudden and massive success through canonization, fame, and circulation can always act as a catalyst in the formation of aesthetic schools. In Latin America, the Boom with its global impact also promotes a pan-American and transnational orientation. Influential curators, collectors and art fairs contributed decisively to remove the visual arts from a rather fragmentary, rhizomatic, reduced diffusion of individuals, in which literary writers are currently moving.
Keywords
Latin American art and literature; boom; bubble; fugacity; transnationalization; market; dissemination; canon; Valeria Luiselli and Teresa Margolles