O público na cultura contemporânea: tempos e lugares de uma audiência imaginada

Abstract

The public, seen through contemporaneity, seems to keep dialogue, communication and democracy as characteristics that still assure some unity to the audience, but it has changed immensely in different ways. We can detect modifications ranging from a new type of public, the consumers whose speech is attached to the rhetoric of advertising, to matters about media professionals and screens and taking place on discursive mediation in a way previously unthinkable. The sense of public as audience has been developed in parallel with the original meaning, from res publica, and then gradually replaced it through History. The word public appeared as an alternative to designate the literary and social space that drew no longer just around the king, la cour, nor was restricted to bourgeois la ville but goes on to achieve the taste of a grand public and admitted the inclusion of the parterre within an urban cultural unity outlined in France at the end of the seventeenth and eighteenth century (AUERBACH) It points out then the intertwining between a literary form, a specific mentality and the formation of a public within a historical process. This sense of public still guide the imaginary of the artists in their production, although several structural aspects have transformed contemporary social reality. On the emergence of new technologies of information and communication questions are raised about the role of consecration institutions (press, publishers, critics etc.) as alleged publicforming institutions, not only risking the organization and the mediation of the cultural circuit but stressing the idea of presumed audience. Considering this we read some cases on the intention of a deictic gesture (GUMBRECHT) to show the complexity of the matter. Among the cases we highlight Exposição em Desmontagem, an exhibit promoted by Yuri Firmeza in the museum MAC in Centro Cultural Dragão do Mar, events of censorship on erotic-pornographic works and the rise of literature and saraus (soirées as literary gatherings) in the outskirts of São Paulo.