“Art as a Right”: On the Tensions Between Popular Art and Access to Its Decoding

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to account for the discourses around which the category of art was constructed, and to characterize, from different approaches, the current state of the question regarding this topic.

It also seeks to find clues that may account for certain concepts produced by European cultural imposition, and to objectify the lack of theoretical updating in the field of art. This lack is evident in the absence of critical approaches capable of revising the discriminatory use of hundreds of terms coined by the Enlightenment, which to this day have not been resignified in light of epistemological ruptures produced by different theoretical, anthropological, sociological, linguistic, semiotic, and aesthetic approaches, among others, within a Latin American context.

The paper also aims to make evident the absence of artistic education from an early age, which legitimizes these signs of distinction by granting only “some” people access to “read” artistic codes; that is, to decode “Art”.

It is the codes of Popular Art that circulate in the street. For this reason, I approach the concept of Folklore as a non-institutional social discourse from a semiotic framework, in order to account for the visibility-invisibility of certain popular artistic practices that are not considered “Art” and that have a particular aesthetic production, neither lesser nor greater than any other.