Strategies for thinking about contemporary art collecting in Brazil

Abstract

This article emerged as the possibility of proposing a synthetic version of the Thesis "Contemporary art collectionism: between the centrality of the edges and the mainstream", defended in September 2021 at the Postgraduate Program in Visual Art at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. The research investigated the private collection of contemporary art in its different manifestations and insertion scales, seeking to understand its characteristics and contributions to the development of the art system in Brazil. The qualiquantitative model was adopted as a methodology for surveying indicators and content, combining an electronic form with 45 questions, with 201 respondents, to 83 face-to-face interviews with collectors residing in 16 states in the five regions of the country. We started from a systemic and polysystemic conformation in order to better understand the scope of contemporary art collectionism, which made it easier to observe the different scales of action and insertion that this practice as a whole has reached in recent decades. From the results, it was possible to conceive a conceptual modulation based on three vectors: acquisition, management and entrepreneurship of collections, making an epistemological model that gains the quality of a reflection instrument to understand the processes involved in the way collecting has been conducted in reality in recent decades.