"For the love of art”. The problem of autonomy in Buenos Aires' cultural associationism (The Cultural Association of Bahía Blanca, 1919-1927)

Abstract

This article examines the problem of the relations between cultural associations, the market and the State in the province of Buenos Aires at the beginning of the 20th century. The double claim of autonomy linked to modern associationism and to the configuration of a specific sphere of the arts, was a permanent source of tensions that confronted them with the dilemma of sustaining their independence and suffering the endemic lack of funds or asking for external resources and thus assure its survival. This situation was faced by the Asociación Cultural de Bahía Blanca between 1919 and 1927. Emerged in an intermediate city of southwest Buenos Aires, this entity had to survive in dialogue with a municipal state where cultural issues were not subject of a systematic policy and in an environment in which the circuit of academic music continued to be strongly linked to dilettantism. Added to this, the incipient mechanisms of the cultural market struggled to introduce an economic logic that opposed the primacy of "disinterest" that was consolidating as a principle of legitimacy in the world of arts.