This article, jointly written by Carlos Zílio, José Rezende, Ronaldo Brito, and Waltércio Caldas Jr., discusses Brazilian art in the mid-1970s and examines its connection to the local market, a relationship that affected both the circulation and the institutionalization of local art. Until that time, artists and buyers dealt directly with each other and art was usually sold without any intermediaries. During a period of galloping inflation in 1970–73, the art market replaced the stock market as a place in which to invest capital, which created a sort of financial “boom” whose effects subsequently prompted sarcastic articles with titles such as “posboom” and “disboom”. According to the authors, this phenomenon did not create a true art market in Brazil (one that dealt with local artists and was concerned with developing the history of Brazilian art). As distinct from what happens in international markets, where the institutionalization of art is a result of its participation in the historic process (a product of the interaction between art production and the market), in Brazil works of art are evaluated independently of the market, which deals in art that has already been institutionalized. The Brazilian art market is thus not an agent for the activation of works of art; it is an agent for the appropriation of works of art, and has absolutely nothing to do with the development of a history of local art. It is precisely because there is no history of Brazilian art that the distinctions between the various artistic languages are also not clearly defined; they can, however, be manipulated in a variety of ways. This accounts for one of the characteristics of the art of the 1970s, which was less concerned with formal ruptures than with the development of a different “point of view” about art and its cultural and ideological insertion into the most precarious areas of the terrain it explored.    

This article, signed by the art critic Ronaldo Brito (b. 1949) and the artists Carlos Zílio (b. 1944), José Rezende (b. 1945), and Waltércio Caldas Jr. (b. 1946), discusses the Brazilian art world in the mid-1970s, a time when a significant number of Brazilian artists were involved in developing strategies to promote an alternative means of circulation for their works. The article criticizes both nationalist and cosmopolitan approaches; the former were in favor of national unity, and the latter were inspired by a wish to introduce to Brazil the institutional model of art used in the major power centers of the world. In the authors’ view, these are two versions of the same desire to reject Brazil’s contradictions, either to satisfy a yearning for an order that overrides local ambiguities, or to gain recognition for an imaginary sense of international accommodation. In their article, Brito, Zílio, Rezende, and Caldas are defending a critical approach in the artistic discourse that is prepared to question the links between art and society at a moment of genuine transition such as the one in question. This was something that could only happen (in the public context of a debate) if “the contemporary readings” could apply to the “contemporary languages” that were being defended at the time.