Contaminação e Quarentena

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Abstract

In this paper art historian Michael Asbury relates the question of new publics for art with the production and dissemination of art itself. Within this context, he traces how the expectation that Brazilian art possesses an inevitable hybrid characteristic leads to a problematic and implicit ambivalence towards its relation to canonical genealogies. Equating this ambivalent character of hybridity with the notions of contamination and
quarantine he traces how the critical discourse that accompanies the art from that region has shifted from one that stresses its identitarian strategies to one of distinction from the canon. For the ‘Western’ gaze therefore it seems that the notion of hybridity acts less as a form of productive relation and more as an signifier of authenticity. Such a manufactured sense of authenticity is then problematically expected to relate to new publics for art. Asbury suggests that instead it should be through the engagement in the production, or self representation, that new publics for art may emerge.