Reviewing art from the periphery. A comparative analysis of reviews of Brazilian art exhibition in the press

This paper investigates how the reception and evaluation of artists coming from a relatively peripheral and emerging art market might vary in transnational settings. Studies on cultural globalisation have primarily focused on the transnational diffusion of products and the opening up of national fields to cross-border flows. Questions of reception and evaluation of cultural products – particularly as they ‘break out’ of the periphery - remain relatively untouched, and this paper contributes to bridging this gap. Our data consists of reviews of solo shows of the top 50 Brazilian modern and contemporary artists, published in elite newspapers in three countries (Brazil, the UK and the US). We describe how two of the most salient evaluative repertoires are mobilised in the reviews. These repertoires relate to the institutional recognition bestowed upon the artist in Brazil or abroad; and to the associations made with living or deceased Brazilian or international artists. Our findings suggest that recognition bestowed by Brazilian museums and cultural institutions does not easily convert into an internationally valued marker of worth, while quite the opposite is true of international institutional recognition and its use in the Brazilian press.