Globalizing Art

This edited collection reassesses East-Central European art by offering transnational perspectives on its regional or national histories, while also inserting the region into contemporary discussions of global issues. Both in popular imagination and, to some degree, scholarly literature, East-Central Europe is persistently imagined as a hermetically isolated cultural landscape. This book restores the diverse ways in which East-Central European art has always been entangled with actors and institutions in the wider world. The contributors engage with empirically anchored and theoretically argued case studies from historical periods representing notable junctures of globalization: the early modern period, the age of Empires, the time of socialist rule and the global Cold War, and the most recent decades of postsocialism understood as a global condition.

The “biennale culture” now determines much of the art world. Literature on the worldwide dissemination of art assumes nationalism and ethnic identity, but rarely analyzes it. At the same time there is extensive theorizing about globalization in political theory, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, political economy, sociology, and anthropology. Art and Globalization brings political and cultural theorists together with writers and historians concerned specifically with the visual arts in order to test the limits of the conceptualization of the global in art. Among the major writers on contemporary international art represented in this book are Rasheed Araeen, Joaquín Barriendos, Susan Buck-Morss, John Clark, Iftikhar Dadi, T. J. Demos, Néstor García Canclini, Charles Green, Suman Gupta, Harry Harootunian, Michael Ann Holly, Shigemi Inaga, Fredric Jameson, Caroline Jones, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Anthony D. King, Partha Mitter, Keith Moxey, Saskia Sassen, Ming Tiampo, and C. J. W.-L. Wee. Art and Globalization is the first book in the Stone Art Theory Institutes Series. The five volumes, each on a different theoretical issue in contemporary art, build on conversations held in intensive, weeklong closed meetings. Each volume begins with edited and annotated transcripts of those meetings, followed by assessments written by a wide community of artists, scholars, historians, theorists, and critics. The result is a series of well-informed, contentious, open-ended dialogues about the most difficult theoretical and philosophical problems we face in rethinking the arts today.

How global contemporary art reanimates the past as a resource for the present, combating modern art's legacy of Eurocentrism. If European modernism was premised on the new—on surpassing the past, often by assigning it to the “traditional” societies of the Global South—global contemporary art reanimates the past as a resource for the present. In this account of what globalization means for contemporary art, David Joselit argues that the creative use of tradition by artists from around the world serves as a means of combatting modern art's legacy of Eurocentrism. Modernism claimed to live in the future and relegated the rest of the world to the past. Global contemporary art shatters this myth by reactivating various forms of heritage—from literati ink painting in China to Aboriginal painting in Australia—in order to propose new and different futures. Joselit analyzes not only how heritage becomes contemporary through the practice of individual artists but also how a cultural infrastructure of museums, biennials, and art fairs worldwide has emerged as a means of generating economic value, attracting capital and tourist dollars. Joselit traces three distinct forms of modernism that developed outside the West, in opposition to Euro-American modernism: postcolonial, socialist realism, and the underground. He argues that these modern genealogies are synchronized with one another and with Western modernism to produce global contemporary art. Joselit discusses curation and what he terms “the curatorial episteme,” which, through its acts of framing or curating, can become a means of recalibrating hierarchies of knowledge—and can contribute to the dual projects of decolonization and deimperialization.

"Art and activism in the age of globalization" takes the measure of contemporary activist art. Is it a relevant practice or a pseudo-activity in the margins of its politics proper? What is the position of art and activism in the post-Fordian society of the spectacle? The book makes space for a critique of engagement as pose, but also for the present era's urgencies. Besides case studies by established figures such as Steven Cohen and Christoph Schlingensief, young pubs like Renzo Martens and Les Chiens de Navarre are also given a platform. There are also investigations into urban activism and the activism of anonymous networks, and there is special consideration for the effect of the 'War on terror' on activist practice.

In a series of newly commissioned essays by both established and emerging scholars, Globalization and Contemporary Art probes the effects of internationalist culture and politics on art across a variety of media. Globalization and Contemporary Art is the first anthology to consider the role and impact of art and artist in an increasingly borderless world. First major anthology of essays concerned with the impact of globalization on contemporary art Extensive bibliography and a full index designed to enable the reader to broaden knowledge of art and its relationship to globalization Unique analysis of the contemporary art market and its operation in a globalized economy

Today, contemporary art is a global phenomenon. Biennales, museums, art fairs, galleries, auction houses, academies and audiences for contemporary visual art are all institutions whose presence on a global scale has widened tremendously during the past two decades. Thus, by including contemporary art from non-Western regions, these traditional Western art institutions have not only broadened their scope to a greater extent, but have also been challenged themselves by the new cultural, economic and media world order of globalization. How contemporary art is made 'international' is the subject of this book, tracing as it does developments during the past two decades, while focusing particularly on the mechanisms of 'globality' which are at work in the art world today. The book critically investigates fundamental questions like: What is 'New Internationalism' in contemporary art, and how it affected the art world? How does New Internationalism relate to concepts like ethnicity, aesthetics, standard art history, and new media? And how is New Internationalism, rather paradoxically, furthered to a greater extent by global capitalism than it is by seemingly progressive art projects?

Today, contemporary art is a global phenomenon. Biennales, museums, art fairs, galleries, auction houses, academies and audiences for contemporary visual art are all institutions whose presence on a global scale has widened tremendously during the past two decades. Thus, by including contemporary art from non-Western regions, these traditional Western art institutions have not only broadened their scope to a greater extent, but have also been challenged themselves by the new cultural, economic and media world order of globalization. How contemporary art is made 'international' is the subject of this book, tracing as it does developments during the past two decades, while focusing particularly on the mechanisms of 'globality' which are at work in the art world today. The book critically investigates fundamental questions like: What is 'New Internationalism' in contemporary art, and how it affected the art world? How does New Internationalism relate to concepts like ethnicity, aesthetics, standard art history, and new media? And how is New Internationalism, rather paradoxically, furthered to a greater extent by global capitalism than it is by seemingly progressive art projects?

The “biennale culture” now determines much of the art world. Literature on the worldwide dissemination of art assumes nationalism and ethnic identity, but rarely analyzes it. At the same time there is extensive theorizing about globalization in political theory, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, political economy, sociology, and anthropology. Art and Globalization brings political and cultural theorists together with writers and historians concerned specifically with the visual arts in order to test the limits of the conceptualization of the global in art. Among the major writers on contemporary international art represented in this book are Rasheed Araeen, Joaquín Barriendos, Susan Buck-Morss, John Clark, Iftikhar Dadi, T. J. Demos, Néstor García Canclini, Charles Green, Suman Gupta, Harry Harootunian, Michael Ann Holly, Shigemi Inaga, Fredric Jameson, Caroline Jones, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Anthony D. King, Partha Mitter, Keith Moxey, Saskia Sassen, Ming Tiampo, and C. J. W.-L. Wee. Art and Globalization is the first book in the Stone Art Theory Institutes Series. The five volumes, each on a different theoretical issue in contemporary art, build on conversations held in intensive, weeklong closed meetings. Each volume begins with edited and annotated transcripts of those meetings, followed by assessments written by a wide community of artists, scholars, historians, theorists, and critics. The result is a series of well-informed, contentious, open-ended dialogues about the most difficult theoretical and philosophical problems we face in rethinking the arts today.