Biennial of Bogotá. An Essay by Jorge Sanguino
When Did You Start Liking Art?: The Re/created Spectator
Originally Published in Esfera Pública. Oct. 10th. 2025
Within the framework of the Bogotá Biennial, this text invites us to think about the event not so much through curatorial programming, but through its reception and its devices of visibility.
The International Bienniale of Art and the City, BOG25, serves here as a starting point to observe a broader shift: the transition from the contemplative spectator to the re/created spectator. In the age of social media, the exhibition, the artwork, and the opening have ceased to be spaces of contemplation or confrontation and have instead become mechanisms of recreation. This shift not only redefines the relationship between artwork and audience but also transforms artistic and curatorial strategies themselves. This text revolves around the Biennial in Bogotá, but it is not a review of the event.
There are two reasons why I cannot write a review of the International Biennial of Art and the City, BOG25. The first is practical: the day and a half I spent in the city was not enough to visit the Biennial in its entirety. The second is structural: for several years now, any major art event has been condemned to the scaffold for taking place in an era when art is expected to simultaneously fulfil countless social, political, cultural, and representational functions—functions which, as Hernán Borisonik warns, place art within the paradox of an “impossible profession.”¹ These functions are also in constant contradiction, since they are issued from the singular perspective of the many participants in the art system. Each of them—artists, curators, institutions, collectors, publics—has their own definition of what art should contribute or how it should operate. Most of these definitions stem from personal narratives, economic interests, or ideological fashions.
To make Bogotá happy with a Biennial whose central axis is an essay on happiness is, therefore, a high-risk task.²
The question about the Bogotá Biennial may also be formulated on an individual level: does the Biennial make us happy?
In recent years, the theme of happiness—as well-being and as art—has appeared with force in contemporary discourse. According to studies in mind–body medicine, attending art exhibitions produces feelings of well-being. Not only does the practice of art generate benefits, but living with art also has positive effects on health.³ The consequences of these studies are equally promising for artists and other professionals, since they provide a solid argument to resist government cuts to cultural budgets—so frequent today⁴—in a context where post-industrial governments face the demographic challenge of aging and the health issues it entails.
Beyond the scientifically measurable sphere of art and happiness as well-being, the art event—be it an exhibition or a biennial—has become a “re-creator” of subjectivities in the age of social networks. The most common gesture flooding Instagram feeds is that of a person standing beside a painting or artwork. In many accounts, it is not just one photograph but a series: multiple images taken beside or behind artworks construct a visual profile, an identity in which the physical body and the artwork can no longer be separated. This change in the coordinates of looking is recent. In Museum Photographs, Thomas Struth still portrays the visitor standing in front of the artwork—in a position of distance and reverence. Today, by contrast, the omnipresent camera has dissolved that distance: it mediates every experience and, in doing so, becomes the device par excellence of contemporary subjectivation. The spectator no longer contemplates; they self-represent. They “recreate” their identity, expecting the transfer of symbolic capital—prestige, belonging—from the art event to their own individuality. In an age in which we are all VIPs,⁵ the selfie taken at an opening beside a million-euro painting seems to function as a balm against certain existential fears.
The transformation from the contemplative or confrontational spectator to the “recreated” one aligns perfectly with the neoliberal logic that allows all human and social activity to be capitalized for individual benefit. We have thus moved from the earlier capitalist logic—where the benefit of art was limited to the education of shared sensibility—to another in which the individual’s existential void finds in art a form of social signification.
Today, the singularity between that void and the possibility of capitalizing one’s social activity manifests itself differently: in the constant repetition of the photograph with the artwork or the artist. Thanks to the mysterious algorithm, this repetition has produced a new equivalence:
curator = influencer.
The new distance between artwork and spectator has altered the rules. The artwork now belongs as much to the re-created spectator as to the artist. The contemporary curator is no longer necessarily the one who produces a system of knowledge around the artwork—an accumulation of cultural capital through research and writing. The spectator–curator–influencer is the one who decides which artworks can circulate in physical space and which possess the attributes necessary to circulate on social media, which has become the privileged arena for the production of symbolic capital. This figure began to emerge with the appearance of blogs and consolidated itself with the rise of social platforms, which granted it unprecedented power: to operate within the art system without producing knowledge, merely by managing visibility.
The re-created spectator also implies that the viewer must, within an art event, recreate themselves—that is, to have fun, to enjoy, to live an experience. To satisfy the demands of this new type of public, exhibition devices now privilege the installation. It is not that installation is a recent invention. Otto Piene, for example, remains a paradigm of works conceived for the viewer. Or the DIA Art Foundation, founded by a German, which continued that lineage. Both the ZERO Group and other artists of the 1960s and 1970s responded to the postwar need to rebuild dismantled social fabrics.
By contrast, the spectator who recreates themselves in the contemporary art event does not aim at the collective, but rather at the possibility of maximum individualization within the installation. This attitude is what we now colloquially call instagramable. The re-created spectator re-creates themselves—constructs and entertains themselves—within the installation.
“When did you start liking art?” was the question—accompanied by a puzzled expression—that I overheard a visitor asking his companion at the entrance of the Palacio de San Francisco, while she checked her Instagram account. Artists know that the re-created spectator must be offered more than mere contemplation: they can offer a network of T-shirts through which visitors can insert their limbs to pose; a LED screen cube lined with mirrors; installations composed of kitsch and popular objects; or altars made of ceramics and colorful Chinese lights accompanied by pottery. In some cases, artists add so many elements that the installation loses its internal unity, preventing coherent interpretation. Others dissolve by failing to engage with the spatial attributes around them, allowing architecture and ornament to dominate.
Meanwhile, community-based activities that dispense with installation strategies—such as collective embroidery—resist being captured in a single shot that would confirm the spectator’s “recreation.” Other installations, however, reinforce the axioms of social media: the speed of circulation and the erasure of historical context in favor of a quick, playful gesture capable of generating followers—not only among general audiences but also among collectors and curators, for whom the metric of visibility has begun to operate as a new form of validation.
There are, however, fortunate experiences—such as those at the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano—where the use of everyday materials, echoing arte povera, produces a narrowing of space that forces the re-created spectator to turn inward while winding through the exhibition. In these works, the use of vernacular materials is consistent with broader transformations in contemporary sculptural practice.
It is possible that this new sculptural syntax—emerging from the use of vernacular materials—and the new distance between the re-created spectator and the artwork (no longer in front of it, but beside it) are generating new tensions between viewer and public sculpture or installation: tensions that go beyond the mere reaffirmation of hegemonic power. The re-created spectator senses no distance and thus appropriates the artwork’s symbolic capital through “interventions.”
At both the Palacio de San Francisco and the Archivo de Bogotá, disparities in the grammar of exhibition-making are evident. Moments of success coexist with empty passages despite the abundance of works. This does not invalidate the experience, but it signals the need to rethink installation practice as both language and strategy.
More than establishing protocols or discussing needs, what BOG25 seems to reveal is a question that exceeds its institutional frame:
What does it mean to look at art at a time when looking at oneself has become the most automatic—and perhaps the most unreflective—gesture of all?
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Notes
¹ Hernán Borisonik, “El arte como profesión imposible,” El Ojo del Arte, September 4, 2025, https://elojodelarte.com/ensayos/el-arte-como-profesion-imposible-202509040220.
² Here I express my admiration for Elkin Rubiano, whom I found in the exhibition halls conversing with Mona Herbe outside the opening days, embodying that longed-for role of the curator who is always present. Elkin was the one who responded to my open letter to the Biennial and personally informed me that the organization would reply before its publication. He understands what this high-risk task entails: responding thoughtfully instead of sending the innocuous hearts and good wishes that circulate across social networks.
³ M. D. Trupp, C. Howlin, A. Fekete, J. Kutsche, J. Fingerhut, and M. Pelowski, “The Impact of Viewing Art on Well-Being—A Systematic Review of the Evidence Base and Suggested Mechanisms,” The Journal of Positive Psychology (2025): 1–25, https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2025.2481041.
Although this article analyzes and categorizes studies on art and well-being, it also provides extensive bibliographic references for those wishing to explore the topic further.
⁴ Jorge Sanguino, “The Decline of Cultural Politics,” ADesk Magazine*, August 25, 2025, https://a-desk.org/en/magazine/the-decline-of-cultural-politics/.
⁵ esferapública, “Todos somos VIP: Conversation with Jorge Sanguino on ‘The Formalism of Global Rich Kids, Middle-Class Followers, and the Aesthetic Extraction of the Marginalized: The New Aesthetic Regime’,” YouTube video, January 21, 2022, https://youtu.be/6k44pqOXkoY?si=3XZWwnIHxq3RieoK.