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30 arrival/departure card
shopping activities as well as the seat of government.
Tourism in Argentina has traditionally been of
minor economic importance, but since the beginning
of the 1990s this has begun to change as the
rate of growth in arrivals accelerated, outperforming
world averages by a considerable margin, albeit
from a small base relative to the country's size and
apparent potential. In 1995, for example, 4.1
million international tourists spent $4.3 billion
dollars when visiting this country. Investment in
the sector is growing rapidly. During the period
1991±4, 206 accommodation establishments
were opened, 59 were expanded and 142 new
projects were started, together offering over
277,000 hotel beds. Some 450,000 jobs are directly
supported by the tourism industry. Adequate air
transport access is essential for Argentina, and the
government is in the process of restructuring its
airports, setting up a national airports system and
encouraging privatisation and open skies policies.
Air services to the country have doubled in number
since 1991. Tourism is being developed on the
basis of the National Secretary of Tourism's
Strategic Marketing Plan, which aims to attract
tourists from Europe, North America and South
American markets as well as the Asian countries.
arrival/departure card
CARLOS ERNESTO, ARGENTINA
Arrival and departure cards, completed by passengers
at borders and international airports, are
used by governments to control the international
flow of travellers. They contain information on the
passenger's name, place and date of birth,
nationality, arrival or departure details and reason
for travel. They contain useful information used
by national tourism offices and the tourism
industry itself.
art
IAN McDONNELL, AUSTRALIA
Technically an oxymoron or `denial in terms,' the
phrase `tourist art' is universally used to describe all
that is false, ugly, and overpriced in the worldwide
marketplace for contemporary arts and crafts. It
includes not only sleazy souvenirs bought in
airports �`airport art',) but spiritless `folk dance'
shows around hotel pools and lacklustre carvings,
paintings, clothing, and artefacts sold in shops,
galleries and so-called duty-free zones. But the
objects bought and sold through tourism represent
an immense amount of economic, not to say
political and cultural interchange. But not all of this
is bad. Indeed, some truly remarkable and
important arts were created for or first recognised
in tourism settings.
From time immemorial, tourists have brought
back trophies; sailors brought from ancient Greece
the souvenirs that stimulated classical Roman art,
and travellers on the Silk Road exchanged the
goods of China for those of Europe, not only silk in
all its variety but pasta, porcelain and gunpowder.
The earliest known African art works in Europe
were ivory carvings brought across the Sahara from
Nigeria, followed by Àfro-Portuguese ivories' made
by African artisans brought up to Europe. Some
400 years later, African sculptures traded by sailors
for drinks in Paris bars influenced Braque, Picasso,
Modigliani and the Cubists. Napoleonic graverobbers
brought back not only the Rosetta Stone
but also the artefacts that produced the Egyptian
Revival in architecture. The myth of El Dorado
was supported by the gold jewellery brought from
Cocle, Quimbaya and other South American
sites, with designs so popular that reproductions
of many pieces are still sold in museum shops.
Much more recent developments also illustrate
the innate and unpredictable power of cultural
interchange, no matter how casual, unplanned, illintentioned
or misunderstood. Geoffrey Bardon,
teaching in the Australian outback in 1971,
suggested that the local Aboriginal men �see
Aborigine) decorate a bare wall on a shed using
mythical subject-matter and the `pointillist' technique
they used in body and sand paintings, but
replacing the traditional coloured muds with more
permanent gouache watercolours. The results were
so popular that smaller examples were painted on
bark panels and soon on fibre board and canvas for
sale to tourists en route to the nearby immense
stone monolith and Aboriginal sacred area now
called Uluru. The unique paintings soon provided