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.