Regina Parra, detail from "The Sinful", 2022. Photo: GRAYSC/Courtesy Galeria Jaqueline Martins

We ended 2022 with the hope of having a more pluralistic Brazil. A Brazil that demands health care, education and culture, where everyone is a little bit responsible for their role as citizens.

A arte!brasileiros, which turns 12, worked in the pandemic and after, to communicate the largest number of initiatives that took place in the world of contemporary art and the efforts that public and public-private institutions made not to dismantle teams and projects. It went after exhibitions in museums, galleries, alternative spaces and became, in recent times, the main channel for disseminating segmented media, focused on art as a producer of one of the richest syntheses of language of the contemporary individual.

If we agree with the statements contained in The Salvation of the Beautiful, by the Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, who grew up and developed all of his literature in Germany, and with his denunciation that we live in a society increasingly prone to the supposed lightness of the “smooth” – even Jeff Koons himself, probably the most famous artist currently sold at unspeakable prices, he claims that the only reaction he expects from viewers of his works is just a “wow” – our role becomes increasingly important (read more difficult and lonely). “An aesthetic judgment presupposes a contemplative distance. The art of the smooth suppresses it.” (p. 10) 

We are not talking here about the smoothness present in minimalism, a movement that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s as a result of industrialization and contemporary with abstractionism, which valued interest in geometry, linear forms and skin the color, wanting to break with the visual pollution. We speak of smooth in the sense of accessing what is easy, “lists”, wanting to “see everything quickly”, “listen to everything quickly”, “click and be clicked as an essence of pleasure”. The “in” and “out” suggested by bloggers on duty. 

“The crisis of beauty today consists precisely in the fact that beauty is reduced to its subsistence, to its use or consumption value. Consumption annihilates the other [present in the work], The beauty of art is a resistance to it.” (p. 98)

Being able to accept art as a producer of meanings, whether pleasant or disturbing, implies accepting our vulnerability and that it can generate more life. We talked a lot about this after our visit to the 16th Lyon Biennale, entitled Manifesto of fragility. 

As editors, critics, researchers and observers, we try to produce work in which information is at the service of reflection. From training. Sometimes hard to digest. 

Thus, we are proud of having had a significant growth not only in the reach and penetration of our work, of our followers, but also in the reading scope and reading time of our pages. Today, with the very high printing costs, it would be impossible for us to achieve this capillarity with just the printed magazine. 

In 2022 we reached more than 554 thousand page views, 225 thousand users frequenting our platform, reaching 74 thousand views and reads in one month.  On social media, just Instagram we reached 328.976 accounts. From 2020 onwards, we have doubled our entire audience. 

In this last edition of the year, we criticize certain Brazilian institutional postures and bring an overview of the dismantling of culture in these last four years and the flourishing of initiatives in important regions of the country.  

We highlight biennials, international market events, unique exhibitions such as the A parabola of progress, at Sesc Pompeia in São Paulo; by renowned artists such as Lenora de Barros: My language, at Pinacoteca de São Paulo, and we dedicate our cover to a warrior, Regina Parra, an excellent Brazilian artist who shows in her works the importance of pursuing life and fertility as synonymous with acts of desire.

I especially want to thank our brave team, the Julia Garcia, to Miguel Groisman, to Eduardo Simões, Eliane Massae, Coil Lopes and Enelito Cruz, as well as the special collaborators of the printed and digital magazine, for their trust in these difficult times. 

Happy reading, a better 2023 for everyone!


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