The limits of the global pop and its exhibitions: A Brazilian critique to the expanded pop

Abstract

The exhibitions International Pop (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2015-2016) and The World Goes Pop (Tate Modern, London, 2015-2016) reopened the discussion about pop art and presented it as a global phenomenon. The bias of both exhibitions was based on discussions raised by anthropology and art history in the last two decades around the notion of global art, which, according to Hans Belting, would be involved in the problematization and displacement of the universalist modernist canon based on the notion of artistic hegemony. From this, some museums, mainly located in the United States and the United Kingdom, have been conducting shows that try to formulate expanded canons driven by a kind of obsession with the global. Thus, we wonder if what has been operated in some exhibitions would be a "rhetoric of the global", in the sense of using this conception as a multiculturalist looking key in order to maintain the dynamics of artistic hegemony, which would be reaffirmed by the megainstitutions that holds the discursive power to insert the art of "others" in a history of the so-called global art. This article analyzes this problem from a case study that considers these expositions as radiating nuclei of theoretical, historical and critical questions related to the Brazilian artistic production of the 1960s that has been read in the key of pop art, especially to those works figuring in the exhibitions.