The 2024 Exhibition of Scandalous Art

Exhibit number one

I have decided to open up a gallery of scandalous art that will showcase works and projects that monstrously distort history. The idea occurred to me when I was thinking about the notorious 1936 Exhibition of Degenerate Art in Munich when Hitler and his entourage denounced the masterworks of George Grosz, Otto Dix and other avant-gardists, and replaced them with paintings of busty blond maidens and strapping lads in leather shorts frolicking in the Bavarian mountains. Art that ostensibly depicts ‘national history’ is notoriously susceptible to myth and ideological conceit. Brasil is no exception and its towns and cities are littered with artworks that represent its history, in particular its colonial past, in highly contentious ways. That said, there is a strong countercultural tradition that challenges official narratives about the past. But for every statute of Zumbi, the African guerrilla leader, or gable end painting that celebrates the Sem Terra, there is public art like this that I have decided will be exhibit number one in my 2024 Exhibition of Scandalous Art. At some point I will include a series of paintings that depict Bolsonaro holding a child under the watchful eye of Jesus and mounted on horseback leading the people into the future, disturbing images that remind me of the murals of Franco in the Valle De Los Caidos in Spain. Abstraction and philosophy have no place in the fascist imagination and authoritarians have always favoured the picturesque and figurative, art that “the people can understand”. So, what is there to understand here? It tells us that when the Portuguese conquistadors arrived, a spontaneous party erupted. As the sun set, the priest, the soldiers, and Tupi-Guarani, took hallucinogenic drugs and danced all night in a celebration of mutual love and respect.