Aracy Amaral addresses the unquestionable mismatch between forms of artistic expression and their reception and promotion. She is aware that the lack of proper education for artists leads to the redundancy of “experimental” art already created in earlier decades. She points out the importance of both the recovery of the national memory and support for art history research. She wonders if artists deserve support or if their work must remain at the margins of the system, and she discusses a debate that took place at the Symposium on Abstract Art, held in Medellín, Colombia. Amaral highlights the failure of the audience that attended that debate to understand the subject being discussed. She believes it is essential for cultural spaces to be properly equipped in order to support lectures and debates, also stating that museums must overcome their inability to present experimental approaches. In her opinion, the hybridism that is currently taking hold in art is simultaneously incorporating a range of different skills. Finally, she returns to the issue of artists’ lack of training, this time in terms of spaces available. Artists must therefore deal with the times in which they are working and the failure of their work to communicate with the viewing public; this is why Amaral emphasizes the ties between economic products and cultural products. 

This document makes an important effort to address the problems surrounding the links between art that is experimental by nature, art institutions, the viewing public, and the art market. The public projects that are in the background of this article certainly require alliances as well as models related to both action and arts administration. This is why the writer emphasizes an ideological criticism of the art market.

Aracy A. Amaral (b. 1930) is an art historian and critic. After participating in a symposium in Austin, Texas, in 1975, she developed a specific interest in Latin American art. She then sought out Latin American critics such as the Argentinean Damián C. Bayón (1915−90), organizer of that event; the Peruvian living in Mexico Juan Acha (1916−95), and Marta Traba (1923−83), the Argentinean initially working in Colombia. Through these contacts, the problems of “identity” as well as the incursion of “what is popular” became the axis around which much of her writing revolved. In this case, while the specific Colombian invitation was outside the range of her interests, in earlier years, both “abstract” and Conceptual art had been important art issues around the world.

The most radical related article is the manifesto drafted in 1960 by Ferreira Gullar, “Teoria do não-objeto,” published in the Sunday Supplement of the Jornal do Brasil as a vital contribution to the II Exposição Neoconcreta [see doc. no. 1091374]. Aracy Amaral outlines her own historical path in this regard in the article “Aspectos do não-objetualismo no Brasil” [doc. no. 1111221].

The premise of the journal Arte em São Paulo was the possibility of developing a journal that would have its own independent impact on the Brazilian art world. To begin with, its editor was artist Luiz Paulo Baravelli, and years later the editorial function was performed by the journalists Marion Strecker Gomes, and Lisette Lagnado, who was also a curator. There were a total of thirty-seven issues of this journal, which was published until 1987.