Over the last years art has undergone significant alterations related to the market and to the idea of value, which has made us reflect on its current function. Not that art has not presented several curious developments throughout history, which have become apparent at the time of the appearance of artistic currents, and in other movements and tendencies adopted in the most different areas of knowledge. These manifestations were all ephemeral, and efficiently served the aesthetic orientations, the fundaments and manifestos behind the works, the critics’ opinions, the buyers’ options and the general environment of what was projected outwards. However, underlying all these circumstantial elements that have skilfully refined what we today understand as the past, and which have established margins and delimited styles, there has always been a subjective dimension intrinsic to art, a charge that has to do with emotions and affections, so often determining in the notion of value, but, contrary to the mutating and unstable dimension of that which has structured societies and taste, has been able to persist in a subliminal and continuous manner.
One day, like the individual who believed that nothing that exists is so big that it cannot be measured (Archimedes), someone invented the Formula of Profit, to synthesise a reasoning capable of incorporating the calculation of value on all things, in a simple rule, resumed to a mathematical equation. The invention of the formula MV/C+V – which synthesises the relationship of the total added-value with the sum of the constant capital and of the variable capital – reinforced the hope that one could await the most sought-after changes in a society marked by social and economic disintegration, in which any idea of transformation was embraced within a redeeming viewpoint. This concept was deepened further by the Marxists, involving a major theoretical work on the functioning of Capitalism. What they did not foresee, in keeping with so many clever and preponderant men who challenged and rewrote the most significant parts of what we have learned to identify as collective memory, is that the more one tries to discover an idea capable of containing a solution that is sufficiently all-embracing for a determined problem, the more its content is specialised and redefined into particularities.
There was a time when mathematical formulae took us over like paternalistic entities; religion and science confronted each other in their task of reiterating a trust in the dominion of nature and of time, reinventing solutions, until societies discovered the degree of illusion in which they found themselves, enmeshed among so many wrong turnings and deceiving reasonings, and replaced them by others. Despite all the problems of profit and all the formulae that ever claimed the possibility of turning something into something measurable, a permanent media action was granting a certain currentness to its substance.

In the specific case of the Formula of Profit, nowadays one realises that it makes no sense: if MV/C+V were not a rate of profit on capital, but a rate of profit on the number of business deals carried out. Just as the object of study disturbs scientific experiment, the results obtained and their later condensation into a mathematical equation, in ignoring the reality from which the object comes, reveal that all thought is independent of the context that it describes, and that no sequence of events and answers manages to escape from a deconstruction through the method. Curiously, and despite a short time after having been found becoming obsolete, easily decomposed and understood by specialists as a childish method of analysis and solution, its discovery caused enormous impact on all those who lived beneath the powerful force of capitalism. Its spectre managed to survive, redefined in a fetish singularity in the context of a mass communication that insists in overvaluing all the possible accesses to knowledge through a set of tasks of systematic uniformisation The changes introduced by progress seem to have accelerated its decomposition, without ever corrupting an exemplary and very human interest as to the way we perceive the world and the most varied productive activities that we have been carrying out in it.

The damage resulting from this form of equating that which surrounded us for so long, summing up and including decades and decades of transactions and movements of capital in such a simple account is extensive and perverts alienation towards the error. It is known that no one solves anything anymore through the stating of formulae, although the search for a final norm, the ultimate of all formulae, might still manage to bring us a soothing feeling. In a market context that is increasingly open to the public in general, art cannot remain separated from this inclination that grants a hierarchy to all the objects of desire, more than through the fulfilling and satisfaction of the beautiful, through the fundaments of some theory capable of providing a definitive and correlative calculation about its real value and about the future value of artists’ works.

If formulae were in fact a solution, the art market could already have solved all the problems of the calculation of the value of the artistic object, starting from the principle that there is a natural propensity for balances to be established between supply and demand. With this fact being the case, many of the parallel situations that actively contributed towards the redefining of a price over time, and which were always based on strategic diversions into much more mundane terrains of ostentation, expurgated from the rigorous tasks of calculation that gave rise to all the scientific models, would never have happened. This superficial dimension of the work of art as a source of speculation and advantage has increasingly stood out in the visible part that involves and determines it as a space of global communication, using all kinds of opinion expedients and devices in order to cover over the emptiness and cultural poverty in which we exist. Art is dependent upon certification by the critic in order to set itself up in the market; it is at the mercy of the narrating of arguments that unite formulae to theoretical dissent, in a strange profusion of social words and acts that include, in the pith of their own darkness, systematic and permanently failed attempts at elucidation of the world.

Today we restrict ourselves to recognizing that all the formulae of the present will be questioned and altered in the future, and that every year new possibilities of interpretation of the same subject appear as science moves in closed contexts of comprehension, seeking out strategic ways for us to get out of the vicious circle of the market and of the crisis of values in which we find ourselves.

In choosing a formula for the title of this exhibition, we intend to react on the small portion of space determined by the freedom for us to move away from this medium. The centre of art may be stated as an epicentre of creativity of the being. The feeling of enclosure in the schemes of functioning of a system that is sells itself and publicises itself makes our history be shown through a major general history in which there is no reference to all the great silent processes of freedom that are born out of lack of determination on the psychic part of each one of them and in the lack of determination that belongs to each conscious individual.

This exhibition celebrates the ruin of a formula – MV/C+V. The present situation of the art market reveals the more aggressive facet of going against everything that is presented as the creation of spaces that generate imagination. In the validity of the processes of choice throughout the history of man, there is a strange confusion between the act of buying and that of being able to acquire freely. We are left with the contingency of all formulae and the certainty of their destruction, so that we may be able to rebuild from nothing among the minimum ruined spaces of autonomy.

MV/C+V =

This exhibition intends to show a group of twelve artists, which lives a particular reality that may be projected onto many different dimensions, ranging from a framework of a more geographical nature to the language or form of expression that refers to an idea of global identity.

MV/C+V or the Formula of Profit is a possible approach, among many others, to the condition and work of these artists, and its choice as an agglutinating image for this project has to do with pressing and current issues in the context of the arts. An idea of profit that has evolved towards patterns that are increasingly abstract and subjectivised can only be counterpoised by an abundance of proposals capable of seeing it ironically.

It would be far too obvious to state that nowadays art is subject to processes of speculation and investment, in acts that structure presuppositions little or in no manner related to the values intrinsic to artistic practices. In making a choice of young artists we see how it is difficult in terms of economic value to establish any kind of threshold or hierarchy, as they all are in a situation of equality in relation to the future. Thus, we have managed to deflect any type of problem in relation to selection criteria, given that the material values to take into account are manifestly intangible.

The most interesting aspect in this exhibition is the fact that the artists are willing to show their work, to have a will to produce, to risk entering a system that is so often regulated by conveniences and according to highly debatable patterns in the arguments and justifications it states.

It is obvious that when one observes the list of invited artists one may state that this is a selection with clear links to Guimarães. This choice is justified, primarily because there is a sufficient number of artists active in the city to permit a careful choice; secondly, because for several years now there has been the development in Guimarães of an important work in the field of training and divulging contemporary art, which it would be inadmissible to ignore. So this exhibition intends to commemorate all the work carried out up to now by the Oporto Higher Artistic School – Guimarães, by the galleries and by the independent groups of artists.

This project, in accepting its status as a close collaboration between the Vila Flor Cultural Centre (CCVF) and the Oporto Higher Artistic School – Guimarães, has shared the joint responsibility of conceiving and carrying out an exhibition and a document that illustrates the potentialities of the city and of this nucleus of artists in particular, formalised in the elaboration of a careful and sufficiently informative document about the works previously produced by each one, capable of carrying out a comprehensive synthesis of the different curricula through photographic and textual registers, with the aim of completing the exhibition part of the project as much as possible.

The CCVF wishes to continue to periodically venture onto this kind of strategy of action in a natural and spontaneous manner, taking into consideration the several different local sensitivities in order to make Guimarães a reference on the contemporary art circuit in Portugal and to be able to grant the artists the opportunity to see their works published.