Taste and geographical movement in contemporary art of the Caribbean

Abstract

This article offers a case study of an officially sponsored arts programme that culminated in two exhibitions staged in 2010 which sought to offer a cultural ‘exchange’ between the cities of Paramaribo (Suriname) and Rotterdam (the Netherlands). Discussion focuses on individual artists and works of art, in order to examine the significance of taste for understanding dynamics of power in the various forms of transnational geographical movement that the programme entailed. In recent decades, attention to processes of global change has occupied a central place in academic writing about contemporary art. While this scholarship has taken a largely progressive form, beyond the academy in the sphere of public art exhibitions, adoption of such conceptual vocabulary has often brought rather more mixed outcomes which this article explores critically