STATE OF THE ART

A Brazilian baker from Belém, a city situated in Para’s Amazonian estuary, names his bakery Bread With Art. What do small-business owners seek with the word “art” on their shop signs? Is it merely the classical commodity fetishism of the goods sold? Is it to justify raising prices to cover high storefront rental costs and overhead? Is it because art is gourmet?

“Value is never based on the inherent property of objects, but on the subject’s judgment of them,” explains Georg Simmel in The Philosophy of Money from 1907. The art system understands this capitalist logic: the value of an object surpasses its economic and exchange value. A symbolic value is attributed to the art object and its creator and equally so to its consumers: the art collector and institutions.

Do the photographs above illustrate some aspect of Brazil? Do they indicate a clue about which is the art’s value outside its own system? Do they reflect only the literality, the trivialization and the neglect of art’s place and the artist’s role in Brazil?

Initiated in 2014 in Bahia, STATE OF THE ART (Brazilian Portuguese title: EM NOME DA ARTE) is an endless collection of photographs made in numerous Brazilian cities and states. The essay presented here is an excerpt from currently over a hundred images. For this first presentation, seven new images will be uploaded every week for four weeks as an unfolding online essay.

Denis Rodriguez and Leonardo Remor

April 2017

*Through artist conversations, collaborations and presentation of works over time, curator and artist Leonardo Remor proposes a shared long-term intermittent residency at Pivô Pesquisa (São Paulo) as part of Não Sou Daqui, Nem Sou De Lá (tr. Neither From Here Nor There), initiated by the artist-run Galería Península in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and funded by FUNARTE. Never alone during the residency, Remor physically and virtually dialogues with invited artists to reflects on the places, potentials and institutionalization of art practices. The photo collection STATE OF THE ART introduces artistic collaborator, interlocutor and co-curator of Galeria Península Denis Rodriguez as the first guest of Remor’s residency.