'Art belongs to nobody'

Abstract

Salão da Bússola (Compass Exhibit) that took place in the Modern Art Museum of Rio de Janeiro (MAM/RJ) in the end of 1969, a year after the enactment of the Institutional Act No.5 (AI5) by the dictatorship installed by the military coup in 1964, was meant to be an unpretentious commemorative artistic exhibition but, for reasons related to the tense context of the then political issues, it turned out to be a decisive event in the trajectory of the Brazilian experimental production, launching a new, controversial and talented generation of artists. “The Exhibit was based on an absolutely conventional regulation, but it became one of the groundbreaking marks of a new Brazilian avant-garde”, recalls Frederico Morais, an art critic and historian, one of the most respected organizers of artistic exhibitions and events in the country, among which are the memorable Do Corpo à Terra and Domingos da Criação, considered by many scholars as crucial for the recent development of the national contemporary art. According to Morais’ report in this interview, one may infer that these two important cultural initiatives, promoted respectively in the beginning of the 1970’s in Belo Horizonte and in Rio de Janeiro, embodied his understanding of the collective and public nature meaning of art, which cannot be considered, in his point of view, private property of museums, galleries, collectors or even artists. “Art is a common good that belongs to the citizen, to humanity”, argues Morais, who, born in Belo Horizonte in 1936, lives in Rio de Janeiro since 1966, where he coordinated MAM and Parque Lage Visual Arts School, besides being their director. Author of 39 books on Brazilian and Latin American art, Morais was curator and co-curator of 83 exhibitions and events in Brazil and abroad, and signed, between 1975 and 1987, a newspaper column on visual arts in O Globo.