This article is significant as a harsh institutional criticism of the structure and organization of the Salón Nacional de Artistas, the most important visual arts event in Colombia. The critic performed a close examination of the institutional policies of the Colombian Ministry of Culture, which led the organization of the exhibition. She believed they had changed the emphasis of the event to speculation away from the practice of art as evidenced by contemporary art practices in Colombia. The Salón Nacional de Artistas was established as a program in 1940 under the administration of the liberal Colombian politician Jorge Eliecer Gaitán (1898–1948) while Eduardo Santos (1888–1974) was the Minister of Culture. The effort to pull together a national exhibition had begun in 1931, under the administration of Enrique Olaya Herrera (1880–1937), when there was an attempt to establish a definitive salon. This would serve as a successor to exhibitions held since 1886 and established as national overviews of the arts of each period. By 2013, the Salón de Artistas had been held forty-three times, and it was the longest-standing significant art event in Colombia.
Ponce de León’s criticism took the discussion of the benefits and detriment of an exhibition on the scale of the Salón Nacional de Artistas to the national level, highlighting a number of problems. These included the lack of a specialized physical space and the partial solution of holding the event at the Centro de Negocios y Exposiciones Corferias—the venue for the XXXIV (1992), XXXV (1994), XXXVI (1996), and XXXVII (1998) salons. Later, this venue would be identified as one of the greatest obstacles. But most importantly, the discussion also addressed the relevance of official exhibitions, established to provide a general overview, as opposed to curated or theme-oriented exhibitions. Detailed statements along these lines and the high cost of renting that space fostered the creation of the Proyecto Pentágono (2000), a curated, thematic model. This project was established as an alternative to the Salón, instituting into government cultural policies the figure of the curator as an element indispensable to subsequent rounds of the event. It also highlighted statements made by Ponce de León, who characterized the Salón as nothing but a space where artists could consolidate their work, and where painting as a medium was in most evidence. She deemed sculpture and installations timid successors to the art traditions or simple attempts at “theatrical esotericism.” Finally, she pointed out the emphasis on prizes at the XXXV Salón as confirmation of the unquestionably stereotyped and exoticist expectations of Latin American art.
Carolina Ponce de León (b. 1957), Colombian art historian, critic, and curator, is the author of El efecto mariposa. Ensayos sobre arte en Colombia 1985–2000. She used the proceeds of a Colciencias scholarship to do the research for the book La crítica de arte en Colombia 1974–1994. As of 2009, she was serving as director of the Galería de la Raza in San Francisco, California, U.S.