Samuel C.
Yelp
Fundacion PROA is an art museum in the Boca Distrct of Buenos Aires.
Never mind the paintings.
They are awful.
This is still an utterly amazing place.
* * *
Why in the world would you go to a museum with awful paintings?
Three very very good reasons.
1) The Boca District itself is even worse.
Boca is known for its colorful artistic brightly painted houses made out of shipping containers.
Colorful statues lean out the windows.
In theory, this should be a beautiful place.
But it has turned into the biggest tourist trap in Buenos Aires.
The area is jam packed with tourists,
And jam packed with sheep-shearing merchants out to fleece those tourists.
Going to a museum gets you away from most of the tourists,
Since most of them are there to see real Argentine tango, eat a real Argentine steak, and buy leather wallets embossed with the word "Argentina".
Fundacion Proa is too intellectually demanding for what they want to do.
2) The bookstore at Fundacion Proa is one of my favorites in Buenos Aires.
Argentina is the best city for serious bookstores anywhere in the world.
Repeat.
Anywhere in the WORLD.
London can't compete.
Paris can't compete.
New York City can't compete.
The books are all in Spanish - because - odd thing - Argentinians tend to speak and read Spanish.
But they read serious works from everywhere on the planet, on every serious subject imaginable.
This is not just university professors and nerdy types.
High school kids hang out in bookstores, buy serious books and take then home to read.
Teenaged girls looking at their phones will discuss which socioecological theory book they are going to take home.
On books, I prefer social science, economics and history - notably Argentine history.
Fundacion Proa is weak on those.
But they have some of the most of the extraordinary art books I have seen -
and at amazingly cheap prices.
The art theory and the cultural criticism collections are second to none.
The philosophy section is better than any I have seen outside of Argentina.
I left Fundacion Proa with an extremely large format poetry and photography book that intelligently addressed questions of non-substantiality, death, linkages and parallel realities.
There would have been nothing this sophisticated in the bookstore of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
3) The cafe is one of the most beautiful rooms in Buenos Aires.
The food is standard museum cafe food . Pleasant enough.
The cafe is modern class and steel and features seemingly wrap-around light-filled air-filled views of the Great Harbor of Boca.
Some of the expansiveness is illusory.
Close examination will show that mirrors abound.
But here you are surrounded with angular light,
space expanding all across the city,
the complex geographic forms of industrial Buenos Aires
and an unlimited blue and white sky.
The view is absolutely positively transfixing.
And YES - you ARE supposed to spend all day in the cafe and just look at the view.
The building was designed so that the terrace would be the piece de resistance.
And a piece de resistance it really is.
* * *
You want the perfect place to connect with the beauty of the world,
Far away from the chaos and crowds of the tourist armies?
Far away from the slums and impending struggles of the villas miserias?
Far away from the brutal real world which is Buenos Aires just beyond La Boca itself?
* * *
The terrace at Fundacion PROA is that last perfect abstract clear geometric space
Before the surly disorder of Buenos Aires reasserts itself.
Distill yourself in the transfiguration.
Before they throw you out at seven, and you have to take a cab back to safety.
