The Art Fairs in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo: Democratization and Access to Art as a Marketing Strategy

Brazil’s art market has experienced a significant growth during the 2000s and the first years of the 2010s. This growth, among other things, has stimulated the creation of four contemporary art fairs in the two richest cities in Brazil-São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Even though they all were inspired by international fair models, and they all have attempted to seize the opportunity the Brazilian art market was projecting, they each use different market and symbolic strategies. Three of the four promoted themselves as privileged places to make art more accessible to a broader audience, not exclusively to buy it, but to see and enjoy it. In this article, my goal is to show the reasons and the context behind this positioning strategy choice, its consequences, and, most importantly, the conflicts and adaptations it produced from the first to the more recent editions of those fairs.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC-ND

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