STATE OF THE ART

Denis Rodriguez & Leonardo Remor

2014 – 2018

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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.

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. 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?

http://www.pivo.org.br/en/blog/denis-rodriguez-e-leonardo-remor/