Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and Eduardo Costantini Collections: connected histories in Latin American Art Collecting

Abstract

This article is the result of a master's research that addressed the development of Latin American art as a collection category, particularly from the 1970s onwards, based on a comparative study of the formation trajectory of the private collections of Eduardo Costantini and Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, and its conversions into a public dimension and respective institutionalizations in the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, MALBA, and in the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. Under an interdisciplinary approach, from History, Criticism, Sociology and the Economy of Art, it was conducted a bibliographic survey and secondary information sources on collection projects, the structuring of both case studies in transregional contexts and market and cultural instances, and the establishment of comparative attributes of constitution of the collections, composing a texture of connected histories. The analyzes allowed a better understanding of the emergence of Latin American art collecting by collectors on the continent, the principles that organized the consolidation of a system and circuits of artistic production under this label, and the influences exercised by collections and collectors as legitimizers of a type of symbolic good, its economic value and a mode of appropriation.