The first portuguese Art Agency: a case study

At a time when new places for art are emerging, the search for a critical reflection on agents and dealership processes is extremely relevant, in an attempt to attain something new that is sociologically significant and also able, perhaps, to contribute to an understanding of certain features of the present context of the Portuguese contemporary art space. The general questions at the base of this article are as follows: appearing in December 2003, what did the 'Vera Cortes-Art Agency' model bring to the space of contemporary art? How is it to be understood within that same panorama? An art agency not taken in a merely descriptive sense but as an 'immersion zone', in an attempt to unveil a nexus of reciprocal interactions, i.e. by creating a dialogue between the configuration of the artistic field and the singularity of the case-study and then seeing how they question each other, and how both question the paradigms and the sociological corpus relating to art.