| Summary: | Was Victoria Ocampo a snob? Argentine press and critiques have always considered her as such, from her earliest steps in culture in the 1920’s and all throughout her life, until her death in 1979. Posterity has also reserved her that first epithet. But what does being a snob mean? Is it possible to define senses, uses and values in her well-known snobbism? How can one distinguish the snobbism she incarnated from the one that others decided to see in her figure? The director of Sur was a rich, elitist and cosmopolitan woman, who did not reject the beliefs of her patristic class and had, from time to time, sporadic and trivial snob gestures. But what she really practiced with devotion and rigorous asceticism was the snobbism of modernity, whose specificities have gradually been lost in the collective, indiscriminate yet long-lived projection that eclipses her figure. As Paul Valéry used to say: “It is impossible to understand and to punish at the same time”. Against this dimension of her reception in Argentina, it is necessary to discriminate, conceptualize and order different aspects in Ocampo’s snobbism, in order to confront it with that by which she was judged as a paradigmatic figure. After a quick theoretical outlook on the notion of snobbism, and a presentation of Ocampo as a social figure in Buenos Aires’ cultural field in the 1920s (that is, before she founded and directed magazine SUR), this article intends to inquire into the significance, misunderstandings, uses and benefits from Victoria Ocampo’s snobbism.
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