The aim of this text by Mário Pedrosa is to discuss the situation of the artist in a modern society oriented to mass production—an essential consideration in current artistic expression. Pedrosa provides a historical overview that begins with the independent artist in pre-capitalist communities; he then considers what Adam Smith called the “unproductive worker,” reflecting on the ambiguous relationship between the unproductive and the productive once the market begins to take hold of leisure. The artist went from being an independent producer who, like a silkworm, made use of a natural gift given by his creator to one who produces for consumption as art becomes “merchandise,” that is, an alienated object with exchange value. According to Pedrosa, mass production tends to do away with the personal and human facets of art. Regardless, he believes that in a mass-production regime not geared to a capitalist or socialist market, the artist would be able to return to a pre-capitalist state, thus restoring the art work’s authenticity and identity by means of mechanical reproduction. In that sense, artists would have a glimmer of the impulse for freedom; the challenge they would face in a society geared to mass pleasure would be to preserve their freedom.

In this text, art critic Mário Pedrosa develops the ideas he posited one year before in the essay “Crise do condicionamento artístico” [ICAA digital archive (doc. no. 1110433)]. Specifically, he discusses the role of the artist in mass society and the artist’s ability to protect free creation outside the laws of the market. In that earlier text, he uses the expression “experimental exercise of freedom,” a concept essential to his understanding of artistic practice in the “postmodern” period that he envisions

[For further reading, see in the ICAA digital archive the following texts by Mário Pedrosa: “Arte, necessidade vital” (doc. no. 1110355), “Bienal e participação... do povo” (doc. no. 1111108), “Crise nas artes individuais” (doc. no. 1110406), “Crise ou revolução do objeto: homenagem a André Breton” (doc. no. 1110434), “Da abstração a auto-expressão” (doc. no. 1085707), “Da dissolução do objeto ao vanguardismo brasileiro” (doc. no. 1110435), “Da lógica na apreciação artística” (doc. no. 1086587), “Debate: o artista e a crítica” (doc. no. 1110951), “Do ‘informal’ e seus equívocos” (doc. no. 1085759), “Quinquilharia e pop-art” (doc. no. 1110437), “Variações sem tema ou arte da retaguarda” (doc. no. 808010), “Pintura brasileira e moda internacional” (doc. no. 1126469), and “Problemas da pintura brasileira” (doc. no. 1075171)].

Intellectual and politician Mário Pedrosa (1900–81) was unquestionably the pivotal figure in 20th-century Brazilian art theory and criticism. He began as an international politics correspondent for the Diário da Noite. He joined the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) in the 1920s, and in 1932 he was arrested for his political activism as a Trotskyite. During the Estado Novo under Getúlio Vargas, Pedrosa lived in exile in France and New York, returning to Brazil after World War II. A contributor to Correio da Manhã, he later founded the weekly Vanguarda Socialista due to his anti-Stalinist position. For his doctoral thesis in aesthetics, entitled “Da natureza afetiva da forma na obra de arte” (1949), presented at the Faculdade de Arquitetura (Rio), he made use of his background in philosophy and Gestalt psychology. He was one of the founders of International Association of Art Critics (AICA) (1948) and he helped organize the International Congress of Art Critics (Brasilia, 1959). From 1950 to 1954, he wrote a column on art for Tribuna da Imprensa and, in that decade, he was a member of the organizing committee for the 2nd and 3rd editions of the São Paulo Biennial (1953 and 1955 respectively) before becoming the director of MAM-SP from 1961 to 1963. He was the Secretary of the National Council of Culture during Jânio Quadros’s brief term as president. During the military dictatorship in Brazil, he sought exile in Chile where he directed the Museo de la Solidaridad in Santiago. After the coup under Pinochet (1973), he went to Havana where he was the secretary of the Museo de la Resistencia Salvador Allende. He did not return to Brazil until 1977, at the beginning of the amnesty. In 1980, he was the first person to sign the manifesto founding the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT). Part of his vast library (some eight thousand volumes) is available at the Biblioteca Nacional in Rio de Janeiro.