In this article, Salzstein discusses how contemporary art takes its place on the international art stage, while analyzing the contradictions implicit in a state of peripheral modernity. She explores the connections between the factors involved in the dynamics of the development of Brazilian art since the 1950s, which explain some of the challenges of its ongoing internationalization: a dogged perception of what is “modern,” which shed its utopian connotations bit by bit and eventually became a problem. In other words, [there exists] an institutional life that is marked by incessant cycles of modernization that is incapable of creating a social art environment or establishing the basis for a cultural system. The cultural debate also addresses the elusive subject of the legacy of Brazilian modern art as a result of local resistance to the public aspect of art, or more specifically, to the concept of a “public space,” which includes some of the works that Salzstein analyzes in her article. 

The author, Sônia Salzstein, who is an art critic and researcher, writes incisively about the art world and art history. From 1989 to 1992, she was in charge of the visual arts department of the Centro Cultural São Paulo, where she introduced a program designed to expose the work of young artists. She is currently a professor of graduate and postgraduate studies at the Visual Arts Department of the ECA-USP (Escola de Comunicações e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo). She is a member of the curatorial board at the Fundação Iberê Camargo—that organized the Bienal do Mercosul in Porto Alegre—and is the coordinator for the visual arts editorial section of the Editora CosacNaify. She has written a number of books, including: on painting, Volpi (São Paulo: Silvia Roesler/Campos Gerais, 2000); on sculpture, Franz Weissmann (São Paulo: CosacNaify, 2003) and Diálogos com Iberê Camargo (São Paulo: CosacNaify, 2004).

In this article, Salzstein once again defends her thesis that the contradictions involved in Brazil’s peripheral modernization were what gave rise to the idea of the country’s endemic “backwardness” as compared to western modernity, and introduced the concept of a specific criticism of that very modernity; it therefore became possible to critically distinguish its key points. Salzstein’s article very clearly refers to the reflections of the critic and theoretician Roberto Schwarz (b. 1938) on the intrinsic imbalances and disorders of Brazil’s cultural development, thus emphasizing the paradoxical nature of the critical possibilities of its own modernity, which was always out of step.    

In another article, “Desocupações de espaço,” Salzstein explores certain Brazilian discussions concerning the process of development from modern to contemporary works, in this case specifically related to sculpture [see doc. no. 1111272]. In general, Salzstein has spent a great deal of time working on this subject, as in the case of “Problemas atuais da arte brasileira: o moderno e o contemporâneo,” in E. M. de Melo Souza, ed., Cultura brasileira: figuras da alteridade (São Paulo: FAPESP/HUCITEC, 1996).