La Nacion has an editorial here about what a great success the Museum Nights initiative was this year with 104 museums opening their doors till 0200 on a Sunday morning and being visited by some 414,000 people. So far, so unobjectionable, even praiseworthy. Where are these people the other 364 days of the year though? How come it takes a barrage of publicity to get them to cross the threshold of a museum? Much the same goes for the BAFICI; you have to queue for hours to get tickets for the films and if one of them is shown in the Sala Lugones or the Cosmos later in the year the audience tends to consist of me, two old blokes looking for a place to kip and the usual platoon of crazed sweet-eaters. I suspect the same holds true of the International Theatre Festival but I am not sure as there matters are complicated by the presence of foreign artists and the average porteño consumer of culture would donate a kidney to have the opportunity to see a performer from abroad; the words “abroad” and “foreign” here refer to Europe, the United States and, at a pinch, the Far East, it definitely doesn’t refer to other South American nations.
I don’t really know what all this adds up to or how it compares to patterns of cultural consumption in other countries.
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