art and globalization essay

Art Theory for a Global Pluralistic Age pp 39–63 Cite as

The Effects of Globalization on Art and Aesthetics

• Steven Félix-Jäger 2  
• First Online: 03 December 2019

459 Accesses

This chapter traces the ways globalization caused art around the world to shift toward inclusion. Both the West and the majority world followed unique paths toward the same globalized reality, creating a vast cross-cultural dialogue that envelops every aspect of culture, including art. In today’s world of art, globalization is not a one-way street where Western artists indoctrinate the total discourse on art. Rather, majority world artists and markets are also feeding into and changing the global discourse. The rise of global art biennials, and the sociological concept of “reverse flow,” perpetuates a plurality of critical voices. With a new emphasis on plurality, theories of art fail if they are based on particularized intrinsic qualities. As such, a glocal theory of art must find extrinsic qualities for classifying and evaluating art.

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For instance, Caroline Jones says that the transnational suggests a moving beyond a singular world picture and has entered into a pluralistic era with several coexisting world pictures. Caroline Jones, The Global Work of Art: World Fairs, Biennials, and the Aesthetics of Experience (Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 2016), 159.

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Jones, “Globalism/Globalization,” 134.

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Although a proper noun, the term is stylized with the lower case “d” in “documenta 5.”

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I would add the philosophy of art to this list.

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For a discussion about other options beyond the global or glocal, see Roudometof, Glocalization (London: Routledge, 2016). Roudometof discusses other terms such as “hybridity,” “creole,” and “mestizaje,” stating that these are sometimes used to discuss contemporary art as well, but they have their limitations. Hybridity refers to the mixing of two streams, but does not account for the origin of the streams (14). Creole and Mestizaje discuss the mixing of a native group with immigrant groups. These are also too limiting since most people experience the global from the vantage point of a dominant, and not mixed, heritage.

Roudometof, Glocalization , 2.

“Glocal,” Oxford Dictionary, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/glocal (accessed June 18, 2018).

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This idea will be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter.

Roudometof, Glocalization , 76.

Kathleen Marie Higgins, “Global Aesthetics – What Can We Do?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , Vol. 75, No. 4 (2017), 339.

Additionally, Higgins argues that the very term “global aesthetics” is problematic. The fact that aesthetics is modified with a qualifier (global) implies that a “global aesthetics” is not an aesthetics proper (340). Since aesthetics as a field of particular philosophical inquiry arose in the West, Western aesthetics has long been equated with aesthetics proper. Qualifying the more particular sense of the term to broaden its semantic range seems backward, however, and ignores the fact that cultures around the world have offered some sort of perceived or construed insight into aesthetical matters. But, as James Elkins points out, the West has indeed established the parameters of the field of aesthetics; hence this odd reversal.

Higgins, “Global Aesthetics,” 342.

Higgins, “Global Aesthetics,” 344.

Higgins, “Global Aesthetics,” 344–345.

This notion will be fleshed out in Chaps. 5 and 6 .

Raminder Kaur and Parul Dave-Mukherji, “Introduction,” in Raminder Kaur and Parul Dave-Mukherji, Eds., Arts and Aesthetics in a Globalizing World (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 1.

The “ethnographic turn in art” was an idea initially espoused by Hal Foster in his 1995 essay, “The Artist as Ethnographer.” Foster claims that the subject of art “is now the cultural and/or ethnic other in whose name the artist often struggles” (302). Thus artists seek to uncover identity within and outside of local and immanent orientations.

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Félix-Jäger, S. (2020). The Effects of Globalization on Art and Aesthetics. In: Art Theory for a Global Pluralistic Age. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29706-0_3

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Flows and Counterflows: Globalisation in Contemporary Art

Here are the first few paragraphs of the second chapter in Marcus Verhagen’s new book, Flows and Counterflows; Globalisation in Contemporary Art . The chapter looks at the efforts of artists to engage with the tourism industry and to use it as a prism for the examination of globalisation and its effects.

On Artists and Other Tourists

What theoretical and practical affiliations might an artist choose to have when working far from his or her home? This is a topical question: after all, many artists today travel constantly, to take up residencies, to study and teach, to carry out research, to participate in shows and biennials. And in works grounded in their travels, they are bound to reflect on the movements of other travellers. Pierre Huyghe has taken on the role of the explorer, Barthélémy Toguo has performed the part of the illegal migrant, Emily Jacir has played the visitor and go-between, other artists have aligned themselves with globetrotting businessmen, ethnographers, refugees, tour guides, and translators. And some have identified their movements with the travels of the tourist. On the face of it, this is an obvious gambit. In using taxis, cafés, hotels, Wi-Fi connections, and other amenities, travelling artists are in any case shadowing the tourist. So it comes as little surprise that artists have alluded to the cultural underpinnings, infrastructural arrangements, and paraphernalia of tourism while elaborating on their own movements. Maurizio Cattelan acted as a tour operator when he built a replica of the iconic Hollywood sign above a landfill site in Sicily and then flew a group of collectors, curators, and critics over from the Venice Biennale to see it, his work highlighting the rise in art tourism while at the same time casting the tourist as a wide-eyed consumer of globally distributed fantasies ( Hollywood , 2001). Simon Starling crossed the Tabernas Desert, in Spain, on a fuel cell–powered bicycle and then used the water produced by the engine to paint an image of a cactus that is native to the region ( Tabernas Desert Run , 2004). Hans-Peter Feldmann has displayed his collection of postcards of the Eiffel Tower, drawing out the conventions of postcard photography while commenting on the transformation of the structure into a cultural fetish ( Untitled (Eiffel Tower) , 1990). Din Q. Lê has ironically suggested that tourism can bring post-conflict reconciliation in travel posters featuring sights in Vietnam with captions like “Come back to Vietnam for closure!” ( Not Over Us , 2004). All of these projects were on display in “Universal Experience: Art, Life, and the Tourist’s Eye,” a sprawling show put on in 2005 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago by the curator Francesco Bonami, who set out to explore the parallels between museums and (other) tourist destinations, between artworks and sights.

To underline the affinity of the travelling artist with the tourist, as Feldman, Bonami, and others have done, is to recognise that the artist often follows in the footsteps of the tourist as he or she moves between nodes in a now-global art network. But it would be wrong to understand efforts to couple the travels of the artist and tourist as uninflected affirmations of commonality—they are, on the contrary, charged gestures. Most of us are tourists at one point or another and yet our attitudes to tourism are often uncertain or dismissive. Even when our experiences of travel are richly rewarding we may view the structures of tourism—the guidebooks, the restaurants with “tourist menus,” the designated attractions, tourist trails, photo opportunities, and so forth—with misgiving. Certainly, many of the works in “Universal Experience,” including those by Cattelan and Lê, were premised on a sceptical appraisal of tourism. So what is to be gained from an association with the tourist? More specifically, what can artworks tell us about the processes of globalisation when they picture those processes from the perspective of the tourist?

“Tourism is the march of stupidity.” So wrote Don DeLillo in 1982, starkly expressing a view that has been put forward many times, before and since. The bumbling tourist has long been a staple of comic fiction, doing duty, for instance, in Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad (1869), in Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) (1889), and more recently in the travelogues of Redmond O’Hanlon. The crowd of tourists proceeding mindlessly from sight to sight is another common literary image, one that is rehearsed in Raymond Queneau’s Zazie dans le métro (1959) when, at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, Zazie’s uncle is adopted by a group of tourists who mistake him for a guide and then follow him, open-mouthed and uncomprehending, across Paris. The same view of tourism is occasionally expressed in an openly discriminatory key, American tourists coming in for particularly harsh treatment, as they do, for instance, in Nicolas Bouvier’s Chronique Japonaise (1975) when the author describes “three mature American women, solidly kitted out in hats and corsets and equipped with cameras—the kind that can take in a dozen temples and one or two imperial residencies in a day without even feeling bloated.” The tourist who expresses contempt for other visitors on the mistaken understanding that he or she has somehow risen above them is another familiar comic figure, appearing in a range of novels from E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908) to Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011). Tourists are routinely compared to sheep, geese, pigeons, and flies—they don’t walk or gather, they “flock” and they “swarm”—and their appearance in a given location is regularly described as an irruption or an invasion. They are also often and unfavourably compared with other travellers, as they are, for instance, in John Buchan’s thriller The Three Hostages (1924) when a hunter speaks of tourists as “blatant and foolish and abundantly discourteous,” unlike mountaineers, who get on with their climbing quietly, without frightening the deer away. This literary critique of tourism has received academic sanction in the work of the conservative historian Daniel J. Boorstin, who describes the experiences of the modern tourist as superficial and inauthentic, contrasting him or her with the adventurous traveller of earlier times. And this critique has a certain currency in the art world. The Gervasuti Foundation in Venice, for instance, put out a magazine advertisement bearing the caption, “Tourists Not Allowed!!! Real Travellers and Native Venetians Only.”

Contemporary artists have also disparaged the tourist. The photographer Martin Parr has made a career of it, picturing groups of travellers as they follow guides, buy souvenirs, and take pictures of one another in various locations around the world. Often sunburnt and inappropriately dressed, his tourists rarely seem to be enjoying themselves; more often than not they look lost or harassed. Olaf Breuning adopts a more corrosive comedic tone in his videos Home (2004) and Home II (2007), which follow the travels of an inanely enthusiastic young American, played by Brian Kerstetter, who takes part in a tribal dance in Papua New Guinea, distributes bananas in a market in Ghana, and parades with men and women wearing Pokemon masks in Tokyo. Watching or intruding on local events, including many that are plainly put on for the benefit of visitors, Breuning’s tourist is a brash and uninformed presence. Wherever he goes, he is keen to immerse himself in local society but his understanding of it is largely conditioned by popular entertainment and travel guides and his encounters are, as a result, painfully one-sided. “Look at this,” he intones as he surveys a Papuan village in Home II, “it looks just like a remake of a Disney film—it’s that real, I feel I want to go up and touch it.” The tourist makes a handy buffoon and plainly appeals to satirists like Parr and Breuning, who follow Boorstin in picturing the tourist’s experience not as an open engagement with unfamiliar places and communities but as a closed loop of media-derived expectations and stage-managed encounters.

In the remainder of this chapter, Verhagen argues that although the tourist is not at first sight a promising metaphorical vehicle for reflections on cross-border contact, some artists have adopted the tourist’s perspective to great effect, offering startling insights on travel and global exchange despite the ridicule that attaches to that perspective—and in some of the more probing works precisely because of it.

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29 Art and the Cultural Transmission of Globalization

School of Art, RMIT University

• Published: 11 December 2018
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This chapter assesses how from early modernity to the present day, art has been a significant agent in the cultural transmission of globalization. It is a cultural legacy, however, that continues to be divided by a deep sense of ambivalence toward the question of how social imaginaries are delimited by the ubiquitous processes of global capital. The field of contemporary art is often entirely complicit with a culture of manufactured exclusivity and large profits, yet it also has its critical edge that has shown how the glossy allure of transnational capital obscures visions of other possible, less inequitable worlds. Other possible worlds have also appeared in art in a recent turn to the great, circulatory systems of the oceans as both the historical conduits of globalization and the channels through which we might envisage what kind of global imaginary will prevail in response to environmental crisis.

There is no precise historical juncture that can be identified as the point when globalization began to influence the visual arts. The term globalization itself only came into common usage by the late twentieth century, although its history as a process of sociopolitical transformation is, of course, centuries old ( James and Steger 2014 ). Cultural responses to this process also have a long history with complex geopolitical origins that no doubt could be traced back along ancient migratory trade routes such as the Silk Road. In Europe, the cultural engagement in unfolding globalization was greatly extended by maritime circumnavigations of the world from the sixteenth century, when notions of a vast New World began to shape how people in young nation-states recalibrated the contours of their “imagined” communities ( Anderson 1991 ). Hence, the imagery of the globe—of distant lands, exotic islands, or brave “new” worlds—combined with various imperialist tropes were commonplace in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century art, literature, and letters. Not least in Anglophone culture, in which they often appeared in the works of major poets such as Shakespeare, Donne, Marvell, or Milton (M. Frank, Goldberg, and Newman 2016 ; Lim 1998 ; Mentz 2015 ). Shakespeare wrote from England of the shimmering new global horizons of the seventeenth century:

O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in ‘t! — The Tempest (1611)

From the outset, however, early modern concepts of the global were tempered by the context of emergent nationalism and a robust colonial discourse imbued with world-destroying implications for subaltern peoples and unforeseen ecological consequences ( Crosby 2003 ; Grove 1997 ). And by the twentieth century in England, Aldous Huxley’s futuristic vision of the price of global modernity was much less sanguine than those of earlier writers:

“What you need,” the Savage went on, “is something with tears for a change. Nothing costs enough here.” — Brave New World (1932)

Cultural concepts of the global were also shaped by the deep shift in Western economies beginning in early modernity and now remaining within what Peter Sloterdijk (2014) refers to as the “world interior of capital” It is important to acknowledge this function of art as a “soft” agent of the extensive channels of international capital, a role it continues to occupy today. Yet this has never been its sole function because, paradoxically, art also has the capacity, as Franz Kafka (1904/1977) noted, to act “like an axe, to break up the frozen sea inside us.” And it this transformative capacity of art that offers counternarratives to what has now been conceived as an advanced form of global socioeconomic Empire ( Hardt and Negri 2000 ). As material culture, art is generally less capable of avoiding everyday contingencies than are poetry and philosophy, for example, yet since the reception of art is not based primarily on either language or literacy, this same materiality and the persuasive power of images can be powerful conduits for shaping transnational social imaginaries.

The concept of the social imaginary has gained considerable critical traction in the humanities ( Appadurai 1996 ; Castoriadis 1987/1998 ; Connery 1996 ; James 2015 ; Taylor 2004 ), and the concept of a global imaginary is also gaining momentum (C. Frank 2010 ; Steger 2008 ). And while a unilateral social image of the global is clearly inconceivable in a highly contested geopolitical field of intensifying inequalities, the struggle to visualize a global imaginary has become a consistent theme of contemporary visual art. This aesthetic objective to visualize globalizing processes draws largely on a late twentieth-century cultural turn toward what George Modelski (2008: 11) called connectivism, in which globalization is viewed primarily as a condition of interdependence. This is particularly the case with themes of social justice and global ecological change in contemporary art, as discussed in greater detail later, but it also applies to the openness and connectivity of the global art markets that artists must negotiate. The connectivist approach to globalization, moreover, should be distinguished from an institutional approach that in the case of art applies to the persuasive power of cultural institutions, now commonly referred to as the culture industry, that effectively facilitate global art markets. Modelski observed,

Both connectivity and openness are the product of a set of organizational and institutional arrangements. They derive from the organizations that originate and manage these flows; the regimes that facilitate and govern them; the matrices of mutual trust that sustain them; and the systems of knowledge that guide them. (p. 12)

If relations between the interior and exterior worlds of global capital are deeply contested, the same applies to the field referred to in developed countries as “contemporary art,” produced by the “creative class” as an essential attribute of financially successful cities ( Florida 2005 ). It is a field of cultural production disseminated by galleries and national biennales 1 and then endorsed by museum collections, art dealers, and private collectors. Yet it is also a field of critical discourse and social critique. Hence, the term “contemporary art” represents a frequently conflicted domain of social consensus confirming the way the world recognizes its most recent cultural self-images and that has, moreover, included many attempts to incorporate art from the “outside” into the interior of late modern culture.

Sloterdijk (2014; 265) identifies the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London as a turning point when the world was “transfigured by luxury and cosmopolitanism” from the far reaches of empire. Yet European maritime expansion had ensured that London’s Crystal Palace was anything but “an agora or a trade fair beneath an open sky, but rather a hothouse that has drawn inwards everything that was once on the outside” (p. 12). In the field of contemporary art, there are comparable problems in how the global mainstream appropriates what it perceives as marginal. This is not just a recent problem; there are many well-known examples of cultural appropriation in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art, such as the use of Japanese or Polynesian art by the post-impressionists or the use of African tribal art by the cubists. Such examples were facilitated, on the one hand, by the rise in the market for Japanese prints and, on the other, by the establishment of the major European ethnographic museums from the 1870s (followed by the first Venice Biennale of 1895). Such examples are often regarded as colonizing gestures toward “primitivism” despite the fact that the artists themselves viewed the works they adapted as sophisticated and saw plagiarizing them as a form of admiration.

In the current discussion, however, rather than engaging in an ethnographic account of the diversity of “outsider” art, my focus is on art that can be described as late modern, which is to say, as art originating in a system of largely Western aesthetic values that, by default, are clearly located within the field of global capital. The fact that such art is no longer exclusively Western has become clearer during the past two decades by the global focus on contemporary Asian art and, more recently, on art from the global war zone of the Middle East. As, for example, the huge growth in the Western market for Chinese art attests, recent Asian art is as enmeshed in the world interior of capital as the European or American art that is more closely aligned with Western traditions. Notwithstanding claims for a new cultural internationalism, however, as Lotte Philipsen (2010; 80–83) has noted, the formal media of non-Western contemporary art has a conceptual framework that is essentially a product of Western processes of modernity. This is not to say that this global art of the contemporary condition does not have its own pluralities, dissensions, or forms of immanent critique but, rather, that it is delimited by its place inside a Western paradigm and exclusive cultural regime where the pressures of the art market mitigate against the agency of art as a form of social critique.

This global art market originated in seventeenth-century Holland, as distinct from other coeval colonial states such as Catholic Spain, Portugal, or France, where art patronage came mainly from the church and court, and England, where acquiring artworks was still largely a privilege of the court and aristocracy. Whereas in the Netherlands by the age of colonial expansion, there was a thriving middle-class art market for which Dutch artists produced large numbers of paintings (Montiaz 1989). 2 These works often referenced the effects of early globalization, to which I turn briefly before discussing art in the transdisciplinary field, where it has become a significant agent in the transmission of cultural globalization.

An early form of global capitalism first emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when European nation-states competed for imperial supremacy of the oceans. Although long before the era of mass consumption, Dutch art of this period effectively redefined the “cultural biography” of objects as luxury commodities ( Kopytoff 1986 ), yet it also had the capacity to reveal their less stable meanings as objects of desire.

There is, for example, a detectable, if inchoate sense of tension in the imagery of maps and geographers’ globes featured in many seventeenth-century still life or genre pictures. These works were produced at a time when the Western imagination was still shaped by theocentric ontologies and was turning only gradually toward the new economic logic of modernity. In Dutch paintings of this time, the cartographic aim to record with precision the outlines of new lands was at first moderated by attempts to anchor new territories in more familiar traditions by framing them with personifications of the natural elements, biblical narratives, or mythological figures. As the art historian Svetlana Alpers (1983: 122) has observed, however, Dutch map makers were known as “world describers,” a term that she also aptly ascribes to Dutch painters with their heightened skill in carefully depicting the material details of everyday life. Although this “mapping impulse” of Dutch art, as Alpers calls it, certainly shaped new forms of secular landscape painting, it also inclined artists toward achieving greater ethnographic accuracy, where in maps of Africa or South America, for example, continental coastlines were flanked by careful representations of indigenous peoples (although this certainly did not extend to African slaves shipped to sugar plantations in Dutch Brazil).

The art of the new Dutch Republic also referred to geographers’ globes, often rendered as objects as easily grasped as any of the other luxury items on a desk or table. Yet such worlds were also defined by the vast new horizons offered by early telescopes and by the new microscopes that revealed previously unknown dimensions of the physical world. This new lens technology complemented traditional juxtapositions of scale between near and far, small and large, that, as Alpers (1983) acknowledges, had long occupied the artists of Northern Europe. Lenses were also adapted by Dutch and Flemish artists to achieve greater refinement in painted details such as reflections in glass or metal. Hence, as this golden age of Dutch art brought greater visual acuity and focus to a European imaginary reshaped by global colonialism, it also drew on technological advances that offered new lines of enquiry into other kinds of worlds.

Of course, the maps and globes featured in Dutch art were also tools of global mercantile expansion. Companies such as the Dutch VOC (United East India Company, 1602), West India Company (1621), or the British East India Company (1600) were the first of many later multinational companies, including HSBC and BP in London and the Dutch-based ING and Shell. In the seventeenth century, early multinational corporations were new gateways for the trade of luxury goods shipped from afar to Europe. This was a naval trade greatly enabled by technological advances such as the magnetic compass, paper, and gunpowder, which were all invented by the Chinese ( Brook 2008 : 19). The Low Countries in particular were important channels for the trade in material culture (Rittersma 2010), not least in cosmopolitan cities such as Antwerp or in the bustling city of Amsterdam, where in Braudel’s (1984) account,

Everything was crammed together, concentrated: the ships in the harbor, wedged as tight as herrings in a case, the lighters plying up and down the canals, the merchants who thronged to the Bourse, and the goods that piled up in warehouses only to pour out of them. (p. 236)

Antwerp, Amsterdam, and other Dutch cities such as Delft were also centers for the production and trade of paintings with mainly secular subjects, such as still life, landscapes, genre pictures, and portraits. Dutch bourgeois preferences for paintings typically showed “little of colonial working life, concentrating rather on colonial benefits to trade, art and science” ( Westermann, 1996 : 114) while conveying a palpable sense of confidence in national prosperity. The popular genre of still life especially provided a quiet retreat of sorts from the busy pace and noise of the city while also conveying allusions to global horizons: where imported consumer goods such as exotic fruits and foreign flowers were placed beside Pacific Ocean nautilus shells fashioned as wine goblets, or next to pipes for American tobacco and Chinese export porcelain.

In Dutch art of the secular baroque, such imperial luxury goods are typically depicted with skillful verisimilitude, responding to the sumptuous effects of color and light arrayed across domestic objects in ways that suggest a celebration of new forms of consumption. Yet these pictures also suggest an inchoate sense of tension in the way flowers, fruit, or glassware were so often combined with the canonical imagery of still life as memento mori , where skulls, hourglasses, or flickering candle flames signified the vanity of human endeavors. Such references imbued these pictures with a certain ambiguity about the accumulation of worldly wealth that, if not derived from an ambivalence about globalization as such, suggests an unease with the emergence of capital as its driving force that, as discussed later, remains a persistent theme in contemporary art. The historian Simon Schama wrote of dual value systems underpinning seventeenth-century Dutch culture, in which the one “embraced money; power; authority; the gratification of appetite” while the other “invoked austerity; piety; frugality; parsimony; sobriety; the vanity of worldly success; the exclusive community of sacred congregation; the abhorrent” ( Schama 1979 : 113)—a tension he later went on to describe as an “embarrassment of riches” ( Schama 1987 ).

Schama’s account is certainly plausible, especially in light of Weber’s (1905/1965) famous essay on the role of Calvinist salvation anxiety in the spirit of capitalism. Yet, on the other hand, an iconography that juxtaposes new forms of wealth and excess with mortality and decay may also plausibly indicate the nascent signs of a more secular and immanent form of critique. In the context of a new republic recently released from the heavy yoke of Spanish occupation, the experience of a colonization was not foreign to the Dutch people. This obviously did little to prevent the Dutch from profiting from the slave trade as much as other European states. But along with the kind of Calvinist restraint that recoiled from the Spanish baroque, the experience of colonialism may have contributed to an emergent aesthetic that allowed for abundance but drew a line against triumphalism.

The abundant imagery of flowers, fruit, and wine in Dutch still life pictures evoked reflections on mortality through images of dead animals such as birds, rabbits, or fish that were to be prepared as food. Dead animals are also a recurring feature of contemporary art, where they are reconstructed through taxidermy and often appear in a strange new poetic alluding to questions of the industrialized production of animals or global species extinctions. The contemporary Dutch taxidermist company Darwin, Sinke & Tongeren, on the other hand, sells stuffed animals in exhibitions with titles such as New Masters in homage to the seventeenth-century Dutch still life. In 2015, the company exhibited examples of its taxidermy in London, where the British artist Damien Hirst bought every item for his private collection. Hirst’s artworks from the early 1990s of animals preserved in glass tanks of formaldehyde are well known as modern memento mori , although his more recent meditations on death have focused in greater detail on objects saturated by global capital, the subject of the following section.

Global Liquidity

Hirst refers to the currency of diamonds rather than money as such, although their monetary status is clear enough in his paintings and display cabinets with synthetic diamonds. 3 In his major work For the Love of God (2007), references to big money are more explicit because Hirst had a London jeweler construct a platinum replica of an eighteenth-century human skull, embellishing it with the original teeth and 8,600 flawless diamonds at 1,106.18 carats valued somewhere around £10–14 million. On his website, 4 Hirst gave some clues to his thinking about this work:

It becomes necessary to question whether they are “just a bit of glass,” with accumulated metaphorical significance? Or [whether they] are genuine objects of supreme beauty connected with life. 5 The cutthroat nature of the diamond industry, and the capitalist society which supports it, is central to the work’s concept. . . . The stones “bring out the best and the worst in people . . . people kill for diamonds, they kill each other.” 6

These questions seem reasonable enough, but the work was also designed to maximize publicity and, in effect, comments more eloquently on the global art market than on extractive mining or blood diamonds. Hirst marketed the skull for £50 million, and it remains controversial whether or not the artist later sold it for this sum to an anonymous consortium. What it did achieve, however, was a tryst with the media in partnership with an image of a wealthy celebrity artist, vigilant in the protection and promotion of his own brand while also managing a fashionably sardonic refutation of the romantic myth of the heroically impoverished artist.

By contrast, the artists of the Danish art collective Superflex have for some years made elaborate artworks aimed as direct hits on the global system of corporate capitalism. For example, their 2009 video, The Financial Crisis , took advantage of the stock market crash of 2008 and subsequent volatility in global markets to call attention to how global liquidity is manipulated in ways that leave most people with little sense of control. Superflex had an actor perform as a traditional hypnotist seeking to control viewers into believing they were the “invisible hand” of the market. Viewers were then addressed as if—in a hypnotized state—they had assumed the personality of one of the global financial elite and hence would suddenly be able to wake from the nightmare of their financial insecurity to become fully alert to how capital actually works. Like their work Flooded McDonald’s (2009), in which global sea level rise appears to swamp the global fast-food franchise, The Financial Crisis puts satirical humor to good effect so that political critique is close enough to the rhetorical surface of the work to become part of the joke. Later, in an exhibition held in Mexico City, The Corrupt Show and Speculative Machine (2014), Superflex offered the idea of copying corruption as a useful tool for political sedition. Held on the grounds of a Jumex Mexican fruit juice plant to which the factory workers were invited, the exhibition featured banners of “bankrupt banks” displaying the corporate logos of the failed companies the workers once trusted. Viewers were also invited to participate in a work called Copy Light/Factory , encouraging them to appropriate intellectual property, trademarks, global brand ownership, and patents by scanning or photocopying. In ridiculing the corporatization of everyday life, Superflex also provided all the components of popular domestic lamp products so that people could make their own lamps from contemporary design copyrights. In a similar spirit, the group has also opened free shops as artworks. Indistinguishable from ordinary shops, there are no references to art, Superflex, the sponsors, or the word “free” so that buyers only realize there is no cost involved when they receive a printed bill for zero. Superflex’s elaborate strategies include publications on political critique and seminars during which the public is invited to question how global corporations impact on people’s everyday lives. Superflex’s work is clearly a dedicated attempt to provoke counter-narratives to those sanctioned by multinational companies, and it often succeeds because it combines these questions with shrewd satire and innovative ways of engaging its audiences through artworks.

In her work RMB City from 2009, digital artist Cao Fei invited the public to visit her virtual city in the online world of Second Life. Named after the abbreviation for the Renminbi, the currency of the People’s Republic of China, the City Planning for RMB City can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MhfATPZA0g . This playful reflection on life in a Chinese global megacity is followed in other sequences based on the activities of a number of digital avatars living in the city. At first glance, the world of RMB City appears to be an attractive site of hybrid Eastern and Western mythologies—complete with a big floating panda bear and giant sinking statues of Chairman Mao. But RMB City also acknowledges history, as one of the avatars, Uncle Mars, explains to the baby “Little China Sun” ( Live in RMB City , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61k679iP2xU ):

The buildings of this city are merely incarnations of your parents. In another time and space, they reverberate with the hollow shells of despair.

This is a real-world memory inside RMB City, where heroic Chinese modernity meets hard labor and the deepening gulf between wealth and poverty. Moreover, even in the futuristic, super-flat contours of Second Life , where dirt or pain are rarely seen, Cao Fei includes tanks, container ships, belching smokestacks, and the unmistakable signs of pollution gushing from giant drains. Yet her gentle satire on global capital is ambivalent: RMB City is polluted and there are metaphoric shadows that can be glimpsed in the flatness of this digital world, yet it also offers a buoyantly optimistic vision of the potential of technology and the future of China in the world.

Other approaches to money in contemporary art also appear to have a satirical edge, yet this too is frequently ambiguous, as in the case of the German artist Hans-Peter Feldmann, who works in art-multiples based on the playful reconfiguration of traditional taxonomies of apparently arbitrary images drawn from everyday life. In 2010, Feldmann was awarded the prestigious $100,000 Hugo Boss art prize that includes an exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York City. Following this, in 2011, Feldman devised The Art and Money Project , an installation at the Guggenheim where 100,000 real $1 bills were fixed to the walls. Feldmann’s gesture could be read as a statement that the collapsing of distinctions between art and money simply represents a basic category error, yet it could also be understood as a recognition that institutions such as the Guggenheim play a powerful role in determining which artworks become global investments. And it is perhaps for this reason that Cao Fei has carefully constructed a “Guggenheim of the Virtual World” in her RMB City. Understandably, Feldmann took his money home after the exhibition, unlike the British artist Jimmy Cauty and his friend Bill Drummond, who, after becoming wealthy in the 1980s following their years in the successfully edgy band KLF, decided to send a message to the culture industry with an utterly insouciant project: K Foundation Burn a Million Quid. This project was undertaken with real money in August 1994, when it was also filmed.

Artists who do not share such celebrity status are often dissatisfied with the money galleries apportion to them on the sale of their works, and they occasionally make these concerns explicit, as for example in the 2009 work Distribution of Wealth by the Seattle-based arts collective SuttonBeresculler. These artists took a pile of 100 $1 bills and cut them neatly into proportioned pieces to expose the small remuneration received by artists from dealers and galleries. Blake Fall-Conroy’s Minimum Wage Machine (2008–2010), on the other hand, was concerned with more general inequality in the social distribution of wealth. For this project, the artist made a hand-operated vending machine that released one penny for approximately 5 seconds of turning, or $7.67 an hour—a sum representing the minimum wage received by 1.8 million Americans in 2010, while at the same time a further 2.5 million people were paid less than the minimum wage. 7

The theme of money persists in more recent art, as in Vienna in 2015, where an entire series of exhibitions was based on art about money. Photographs of vaults filled with gold bars were joined by virtual art platforms on which the group Cointemporary sold art online for Bitcoin currency, and a work by Tom Molloy, Swarm (2006), comprised a swarm-like mass of dollar bills folded as paper planes that appeared to have pierced the gallery walls. The walls of the world’s galleries, this work seems to suggest, are as malleable to the flow of capital as the international market that rapidly adapts to most art-based social critiques through the processes of exclusivity and commodification. Hence, one of the most contemptuous anti-establishment gestures in modern art, the common urinal Marcel Duchamp transformed as a dada Fountain in 1917, by 2002 sorely disappointed auctioneers at Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg when it fetched a mere £1,185,000.

Displaced Worlds

As much of the world’s history of art patronage indicates, however, there is no cultural law demonstrating how big money compromises aesthetic value, yet on the other hand, when art is valued for the density of its saturation by market value alone, its affective meanings become warped. Apart from their effect on art, inflated art market values also obviously reveal massive differences between the cultural agency of a privileged few and that in the world of the poor, where even the prospect of functioning urinals or clean water is unlikely. Nonetheless, new cultural geographies of inequality have become another major theme of contemporary art, where such artworks are negotiated in the constantly shifting spaces between their means of production and the exclusive sites of their reception in contemporary galleries or the even more rarified domains of corporate philanthropy. These are the main outlets for artists adapting to the aesthetics challenges of representing shifting geopolitical boundaries ( Belting, Birken, and Buddensieg 2011 ; Harris 2011 ; Philipsen 2010 ) or migratory cultures ( Bal and Hernandez-Navarro 2011 ; Barriendos Rodriguez 2011 ) as they attempt to offer viable alternatives to the stream of mass media images in which the anguished face of one refugee seems to meld seamlessly with so many others. Although art in public spaces appears to offer alternative avenues to the usual outlets for artists, access and funding for art to urban sites also require negotiation with civic bodies and developers. And because urban artworks are often publicly contentious, a common solution is often the kind of aesthetic compromises that litter cities with dreary large-scale objects, directing the business of the cutting edge either to ephemeral public artworks or right back into the domain of the gallery.

In 2009, the French Algerian artist Kader Attia brought the shantytowns and markets of North Africa into the public event of the Biennale of Sydney with a work called Kasbah. Attia recycled materials similar to those recycled as roofs by people in urban slums throughout the world: corrugated iron, old doors, scrap metal, along with the ubiquitous satellite dish. This was not a work inviting an easy stroll through an exotic kasbah because the makeshift roofs completely covered the floor so that visitors were required to walk on top of them. It is difficult to gauge what visitors made of the overworked symbolism implied by trampling over the roofs of the poor, but at least the point appeared to be to make the physical negotiation of the work noisy and difficult and to alert people to watch their step.

In an earlier work, Ghost (2007), Attia filled a room with the hollow shapes of enrobed Muslim women made entirely out of tinfoil, kneeling uniformly in prayer. This work was purchased by the influential British collector George Saatchi, who included it the Saatchi Gallery exhibition Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East , and it is described on the Saatchi website as follows:

Attia’s figures become alien and futuristic, synthesising the abject and divine. Bowing in shimmering meditation, their ritual is equally seductive and hollow, questioning modern ideologies—from religion to nationalism and consumerism—in relation to individual identity, social perception, devotion and exclusion. 8

Whatever Attia’s own perception may be of women at prayer, the romanticization of the other in such art-speak obfuscation seems to filter out the lived experience of a largely hidden world rather than bringing us closer to understanding it. It also exposes the risk that the incorporation of cultural difference into the established art system might ultimately lead to a homogeneity that is “equally seductive and hollow.”

Other works are less at risk of mystification, such as those by the Indian artists of RAQS Media Collective, who created a series of hollow and partial figures in white fiberglass, Coronation Park , for the 2015 Venice Biennale. This work was a direct reference to a neglected park of that name in Delhi, where there are still a range of grandiose marble statues of monarchs, viceroys, and colonial officials from the days of the British Raj. For some years, RAQS has been engaged in a robust investigation of concepts of time and how history can be read in the present, and Coronation Park brings that intellectual focus to bear on the ultimate hollowness at the center of imperial power. The transitory nature of colonial authority is made clear enough in these figural sculptures to be generally accessible, not only because they are grounded in history but also because there were circular discs on the plinths with imaginary epitaphs that brought the History of Great Men into the realm of common personal emotions. Hence, beneath one rather pompous-looking figure, RAQS wrote, “The crowd would laugh at him. And his whole life was one long struggle not to be laughed at.” On the plinth of another was written, “It was at this moment, as he stood there with the weapon in his hands, that he first grasped the hollowness, the futility,” and by a figure that seemed to embody the gradual entropy in the pursuit of power, RAQS wrote, “In the end he could not stand it any longer and went away.”

The focus on how emotional life intersects with history also influences the work of the expatriate Iranian artist Sherin Neshat. Neshat’s work questions normative codes of behavior for women, particularly (although not exclusively) in Islamic regimes. Her photographs, videos, and films have a compelling poetic quality drawing on her experience of how gender boundaries are prescribed in both Islamic and Western countries and also how these boundaries shape profoundly the limits of what is possible for people to feel for one another or for their place in the world. The Guggenheim online account of Neshat’s approach provides basic information about her background in a way that allows viewers to draw their own conclusions about the artworks.

Brief biographical outlines are usually all that remain of lives lived in prosperous countries, whereas the lives of countless others in poorer places remain unrecorded, and women especially become part of the anonymous mass conceived as global “population.” Sometimes this is because in some cultures the lives of ordinary women are not viewed as eventful, but it is probably more often because vast numbers of people are regarded as living somewhere “outside” social and historical narratives, especially those who for one cause or another find themselves in exile.

Like Neshat, the Palestinian Mona Hatoum has also lived in both Western and Islamic countries. In an early video work from 1988, Measures of Difference , Hatoum recited letters she received from her home in Beirut and translated from Arabic to English. These intimate letters were from her mother, written to a daughter exiled by war. The soundtrack of the letters is accompanied by a series of discrete photos of Hatoum’s mother in the privacy of the shower and then superimposed with the Arabic script of the letters. And, as if in a private reverie while washing, the mother also confides her reflections on patriarchy. Hence, Measures of Difference responds directly to the wars of the Middle East while confronting some of the rigid gender hierarchies that add to the suffering of women in the region. The key feature of this work, however, is that it binds these major social issues into a much smaller and personally reflective story, so it is as if the artwork itself is Hatoum’s reply to her mother across almost insurmountable boundaries. The old feminist dictum that the personal is political takes on new meaning in this work, which has the counterintuitive effect of making it both public and extending to many in others in the world with comparable cause to reflect on both misogyny and the personal consequences of war. Hatoum does not present such things as global abstractions but, rather, as artworks derived from specific circumstances and an approach to agency analogous to what Bruno Latour (2005) described as “what actors achieve by scaling, spacing, and contextualizing each other” (p. 174).

Hatoum’s ability to visualize the affective qualities of personal life transformed by conflicting global interests in the Middle East was put to good effect in 2005 when her artwork Mobile Home was exhibited in London. This was an installation in which the ordinary stuff of domestic life—used furniture, household objects, children’s toys, and worn suitcases—was shunted along very gradually on wires between two defining metal bollards of the type used in urban crowd control. Arrayed as they were between the bollards, the objects were oddly familiar—perhaps of glimpses of life in refugee camps seen on television screens, yet also easily recognized as items of daily routines of people anywhere in the world. There were also odd laundry items pegged to lines hanging above the objects that were also on the move, highlighting the sheer frustration that involuntary migrants face in maintaining even the most basic requirements of family life. Hatoum’s tactic of using familiar objects to reach across cultural boundaries was also evident in her work of 2011, Suspended , in which a room was filled with children’s swings, each inscribed with a street map of one of the world’s capital cities. In this case, however, it was the viewers who were mobile and whose passage through the room created enough movement for the cities on the swings to shift in relation to each other—in anticipation, perhaps, of ever-increasing numbers of involuntary migrations throughout the world.

The use of everyday objects as common ground between artist and viewer was also an important element in an artwork by the Indian artist Subodh Gupta. Gupta’s monumental sculpture Line of Control (2008) was a response to the potentially explosive border dispute between India and Pakistan over territory in Kashmir. The five states recognized under the international Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons do not include countries such as India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea, although it is widely known that they also have the capacity to use nuclear weapons. Gupta’s acknowledgment of the lethal potential of regional disputes between such nuclear powers is instantly recognizable in his reconfiguration of the shape of the mushroom clouds known to people everywhere following the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945. Gupta’s cloud is also recognizably regional because it is made of hundreds of the kind of steel pots, pans, and bowls that are used daily by millions of people throughout the subcontinent, regardless of geopolitical boundaries, religion, or cultural differences. In India, these mass-produced objects are instantly familiar as signs of the kind of shared experiences to which national boundaries are entirely irrelevant—just as local differences would become insignificant in comparison to the scale of nondiscriminatory destruction that would result from a nuclear war. Gupta’s work was first exhibited in the Tate Triennial in London and later sold by Euro-American art dealers and publishers Hauser and Wirth to the Indian collector Kiran Nadar. It is currently on public display in the foyer of Nadar’s museum of art in New Delhi.

Art materials used by the Kurdish artist Hiwa K also refer to conflict in the Middle East as the result of global incursions into the region. His powerful work Bell , presented at the 2015 Venice Biennale, included videos of foundry workers casting a large metal bell in the Kurdish city of Sulaymaniyah in northern Iraq using metal from military hardware abandoned in Kurdistan. The bell is modeled on the famous Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, a national icon of American independence, which the artist placed in a wooden frame in front of the videos. Although Hiwa K’s allusion to the American gift of independence to Iraq was clearly ironic, he also acknowledged a range of other vested interests because the metal of the bell was taken from weaponry sold by companies from more than 40 countries to supply different armed forces in the region. Hiwa K’s work is a well-crafted example of cultural resilience in a region devastated by years of war. It also evinces a sense of determined cultural resistance in the artist’s reference to the history of art in Iraq, with sculpted reliefs on the bell’s surface depicting the ancient Mesopotamian artifacts in the Baghdad Mosul Museum that were stolen or destroyed by ISIS.

Other artwork aimed at ISIS comes from the recently formed Edge of Arabia art and art education collective, founded by Abdulnasser Gharem, an artist from Riyadh (and until 2014, also a lieutenant colonel in the Saudi army). Gharem’s works often feature stealth bombers or tanks embellished with the intricate decorative imagery of Islamic architecture, along with scaled-down sculptural models of global icons such as the Capitol Dome in Washington, DC, and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Gharem has openly advocated the arts as a viable alternative for disaffected youth drawn to ISIS, public remarks to which the conservative Saudi regime has not objected. Gharem is also known as the highest selling living Gulf artist who has donated proceeds of sales to Edge of Arabia. The practice of art in Saudi Arabia, however, is clearly not without risk, as was demonstrated recently by the case of the Palestinian poet Ashraf Fayadh. Fayadh, the son of refugees and a member of Edge of Arabia, was condemned to be beheaded in 2015 for the religious crime of apostasy, with his poems used as evidence. After an international outcry from arts organizations and human rights groups, and following legal appeal, his sentence was commuted to eight years in prison and 800 lashes. Fayadh is currently in prison, although as a mark of the global status of artists’ rights, the director of advocacy for the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), Elisabeth O’Casey, recently read one of his poems to the UN Human Right’s Council, 9 a committee that includes Saudi delegates:

Prophets have retired so do not wait, for a prophet to be resurrected for you. And for you, for you the observers bring their daily reports and earn their high wages. How much money is necessary for a life of dignity.

Issues of human justice in a global context of shifting geopolitical boundaries and involuntary migration are important themes in contemporary art, as Mona Hatoum’s 2013 work, Hot Spot , also suggests. Constructed in stainless steel, this is a cage-like construction of the globe in which land masses and continents are outlined in red neon that projects an artificial glow of light across the gallery. This large globe is accompanied by a Peters Projection map of the world on an adjacent wall. As with the maps and globes of early modern Dutch art, there is a sense of tension in Hatoum’s work between the realist’s aim to accurately describe the world and the aim to represent the affective qualities of a world of conflicting human interests. Hatoum’s glowing red globe also suggests a world now endangered by climate change, another key theme of contemporary art and the focus of the concluding section.

Global Ecologies

Although artists have always responded to the non-human world, it is really only during the past two or three decades that environmental critique has become a theme of contemporary art. This is a wide international field, emerging with the proliferation of environmental activism from the 1970s and since becoming a global network in which green activists, non-governmental organizations, and artists often work together across international boundaries. One of the earliest icons of this globalizing green movement was the iconic photograph of the earth taken from space in 1972 by the astronauts of Apollo 17, known as the Blue Marble. It was associated not only with the idea of global ecology but also with the notion of a “blue planet” in which the oceans comprise 71% of the world’s surface. Yet most environmental art of the late twentieth century focused on more terrestrial ecologies, and the “oceanic turn” in the arts and humanities came after the turn of the century. 10 The global circulatory system of the world’s oceans provides a powerful image of ecological interdependence analogous to Lynn Margulis’ (1998) model of complex Earth systems understood as a “symbiotic planet.” Yet the oceans are also conduits of military expansion and provide a fluid medium for the perpetual international trade in raw materials and consumer goods, most of which continue to be shipped across the world.

In 1608, Hugo Grotius (1608/1916) published his defense of the rights of the VOC or Dutch East India Company based on the concept of the freedom of the seas as the natural conduit of free trade:

The OCEAN, that expanse of water which antiquity describes as the immense, the infinite, bounded only by the heavens, parents of all things . . . the ocean which . . . can neither be seized, nor enclosed; nay, which rather possesses the earth than is possessed. (p. 37)

Yet as Braudel (1981: 402) observed, the “asymmetry” in global power relations and “the triumph of the West” began when European nations gained world supremacy of the oceans that Grotius represented as immense bodies “beyond” possession. Braudel asked why it was the Europeans rather than capable Chinese or Arab navigators who claimed the globe, and he concluded that along with certain global wind patterns and the sturdy construction of Western vessels, the Western hegemony of the seas was enabled by the driving momentum of merchant capitalism combined with new practical discoveries (p. 415). Whatever the definitive causes, however, by the seventeenth century, the intercontinental routes defined by the “trade winds” were dominated by Europe. And as Sloterdijk (2014) suggests, this required a significant readjustment of the European imaginary away from old Ptolemaic beliefs to the recognition that “what they called the earth was revealed as a waterworld” (p. 40). Steve Mentz (2015) has taken this imaginative shift into the realm of global ecologies in his account of the unforeseen environmental consequences of the early modern “age of shipwrecks.” Drawing on Sloterdijk’s focus on the “waterworld” of modernity, Mentz disputes the notion that the Anthropocene as an era of global environmental decay was initiated by the rise of industrialization in the late eighteenth century (p. xv). As I have also argued elsewhere ( Williams 2016 ), Mentz proposes that it was the processes of “wet globalization” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries rather than the Industrial Revolution as such that destabilized traditional ways of understanding the natural world and precipitated an age of ecological crisis.

This crisis has become a major theme of contemporary environmental art, in which the world’s oceans are increasingly being viewed as a metaphor for what Modelski (2008) calls connectivist concepts of global. As Hester Blum (201) has aptly observed, however, the ocean is not simply a metaphor. Like other ecological systems, it has an extra-discursive ontological status that also happens to be largely incompatible with everyday human “terrestrial” requirements. As such, global oceans consistently resist human efforts to define and control them, yet as Philip Steinberg (2001) notes, the ocean is also clearly a socially constructed space:

As various ocean uses and the contradictions among them intensify, and as each of these constructions conflicts with the spaces of representation being constructed by everyday actors outside the imperatives of capitalism’s dominant (and contradictory) spatial practices, it seems likely that the ocean will become a site for imagining and creating social institutions and relations, for land as well for sea. (p. 209)

In relation to our current concerns about art and the processes of globalization, this raises the question of how contemporary artists have responded to our social relations with the oceans, especially as a way of understanding the processes of globalization.

One outstanding exception to how environmental artists in the twentieth century tended to elide the blueness of the planet was Allan Sekula’s major long-term art project on the oceans (1989–1995), which, if not primarily ecocritical, did investigate the crucial agency of the world’s oceans in processes of globalization. Sekula’s Fish Story culminated in a 1995 book of the same title that combined photographs he had exhibited and a text in which he described his work as an interpretation of “the imaginary and material geographies of the advanced capitalist world” ( Sekula 1995 : 202).

Sekula’s (1995) text effectively traced the history of seafaring in the modern age as a process of globalization from the period of Dutch maritime expansion (p. 45), while the critical realist edge of his photography depicted images of industrial ports all over the world and the ordinary workers who maintained them. Sekula’s photos dramatized how, during the late twentieth century, the world’s seaports and the lives of those who lived in them were transformed by the impact of late capitalism:

If the stock-market is the site in which the abstract character of money rules, the harbor is the site in which material goods appear in bulk, in the very flux of exchange. . . . But the more regularized, literally containerized, the movement of goods in harbors, that is, the more rationalized and automated, the more the harbor comes to resemble the stockmarket. (p. 12)

As containerization became seamlessly standardized by the late 1960s, loading and unloading times were regulated just as tasks that were once performed be merchant seamen and dock workers became mechanized. Sekula suggested that because the ocean was such a primary force in globalization, such workers were in a privileged position to witness the politics of global trade. And he argued that this also enabled them to catch occasional glimpses of the contradictions and secrets of global relations in such instances of his account of the Danish sailors who discovered a broken crate, revealing how Israel was secretly shipping American weapons to Iran in the 1980s (p. 32).

As Elizabeth Deloughrey (2010) has remarked of the Atlantic Ocean, as an agent of modernity, the ocean has often been understood in terms of its capacity to absorb waste: the wasted lives of slaves, militarization and radioactive waste, and the industrialized waste of heavy metals. Although there are visible forms of pollution, such as the great islands of plastic in the five main oceanic gyres, 11 much of the sea often still looks like a shining, pristine expanse of water. Effectively, the most insidious forms of oceanic pollution remain invisible to the human eye so that ocean acidification, mercury poisoning, and pollution by microplastics ( Andrady 2011 ), along with the almost imperceptible effects of ocean warming, are slowly but surely afflicting every ocean on Earth. These invisible processes of oceanic pollution are analogous to what Rob Nixon (2013) aptly described as the “slow violence” of widespread environmental erosion. This slow assault on the world’s oceans, furthermore, represents a risk not only to human food supplies but also to a diverse range of ocean creatures threatened with extinction ( Herr and Gallard 2009 ; Kolbert 2014 ).

The slow violence of ocean pollution is entirely at odds with a powerful Western cultural tradition in which the sea has long appealed to the romantic imagination as an emblem of the power and mystery of nature ( Isham 2004 ). This wild, unsullied image of the ocean that has arguably had a significant impact on the Western imagination of global space is now effectively fouled and endangered by human excess. It is a powerful material contradiction that is entirely incompatible with the imagery of global oceans at the level of affects that has formed the basis of recent environmental art responding to escalating threats to global ecologies, some of which is situated in the ocean itself.

The British artist Jason deCaires Taylor has installed an artwork called Inertia off the coast of Cancún in the Gulf of Mexico at a depth of five meters in the Caribbean Sea. Lodged firmly on the seafloor, the cast-concrete sculpture depicts a man in a pair of shorts slouching on a sofa with a plate of fast food, watching television. The figure appears to be lethargic and so absorbed in the screen that he appears entirely indifferent to the life in the tropical waters around him. Located on the seabed in 2011, the work itself has since accrued different types of marine algae beneficial to the marine environment as they produce carbon carbonates and form the basis of coral formations. Most of de Caires Taylor’s artworks are located underwater in similar marine environments as silent commentaries on anthropogenic changes to the oceans in sea-level rise and pollution. And just to the south of this site, on the shores of the largest biosphere resort in Mexico, at Sian Ka’an, the artist Alejandro Duran collects plastic objects washed up on the shore. Duran has identified plastic waste from more than 50 countries on six continents that he collects and sorts into various colors and shapes before photographing it. The artificiality of the plastic colors forms a sharp contrast to the reserve, and the artist arranges the objects as it they have been washed up by the tide as waves of human waste.

Most of the world’s oxygen is produced by the oceans and is vital to both human and oceanic life. Oxygen is something we readily identify as a human necessity, and as such, it is something the Australian artist Janet Laurence refers to regularly in her artworks through the tubes and apparatuses of hospital resuscitation units. Laurence combines these with fragile specimens such as coral, shells, or fish skeletons presented in a range of glass jars and cases. By exhibiting her work Deep Breathing/Resuscitation of the Reef in 2015 in Paris during the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP21, she sought a way of bringing global attention to the vulnerability of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. In her work Coral Collapse (2015–2016), Laurence aimed to imaginatively resuscitate the Great Barrier Reef itself with the same thin plastic pipes taken from hospital resuscitation equipment and glass jars—translucent materials that she later photographed underwater. In these works, equipment from hospital units is brought to bear metaphorically on reefs made vulnerable by ocean warming and coral bleaching, and if the connections between the art materials and the reef are at first oblique, the general fragility of the imagery is an effective means of encouraging the viewer to make the imaginative leap in joining human illness with the visually seductive images of an underwater world that is slowly dying.

One of the least visible results of how the world’s oceans absorb CO 2 is the drop in calcium carbonates that plankton such as the microscopic creatures known as foraminifera need to build their exoskeletons. This is a serious problem with the potential to erode entire food chains, but there is a massive gulf between the human world and the habitats of invisible marine creatures that is difficult to breach imaginatively. The Scottish artist Anne Bevan, however, has attempted to render this process visible through her fragile sculptural reconstructions of microscopic foraminifera. Bevan is best known for her poetic installations that explore the metaphoric qualities of seawater, such as in Moon Pool (2002), for example, in which the poetry of the ocean was brought into a forest. In her work Source (2001), Bevan tested the quality of seawater transported from Venice in glass bottles that were compared with the northern waters of Scotland before combining them both in Orkney Harbor—a confluence drawing attention to the environmental vulnerability of water and its global circulation. In Nova (2007), Bevan explored a deeper dimension of global ecologies by contracting the spatial distinctions between microscopic and astronomical scale by escalating the scale of marine plankton and illuminating them in ways that suggested strange new worlds. In 2012, Bevan joined a scientist and writer in making Particle (Things Unseen) , which revealed the minute, complex forms of the foraminifera and exposed their vulnerability to climate change and ocean acidification. Artists are in an advantageous position to reveal the poetics of these unseen worlds in which biological conditions as fundamental as ocean chemistry are being changed by the global processes of modernity.

Contemporary artists may have a number of possible new worlds in mind as they take on the challenges of how the most effective forms of global agency often seem to reside in the electronic flow of capital and its connection with military satellite surveillance of the world. In this sense, the prospect of a dystopian global future seems as possible as a more utopian world in which international collaboration succeeds in addressing global problems such as climate change. Occasionally, the two prospects appear in the same artwork, as in Brave New World (1999) by Theo Eshetu, an artist of English and African descent. This work comprises a large globe constructed in a vast mirrored space onto which video images were projected. In order to see this work, viewers had to lean through an open window into the mirrored room. As viewers leaned into the space, their reflections were repeated across hundreds of mirrored surfaces so that they appeared to surround the globe, giving the impression that the world is imagined as something inside each viewer. On the globe itself, there are constantly changing videos with evocative images drawn from a diverse range of cultures, from the sacred scenes of a mass in an Ethiopian church to secular icons such as the Statue of Liberty in New York, sword dancers in Bali, and brash Western television advertisements. The viewer is located in a position of global surveillance where everything can be seen as a vibrant media spectacle. On the other hand, because the globe is contained by the mirrored reflections of viewers, it becomes difficult for them to avoid the inference that their own local perception of global diversity becomes part of the work itself. Hence, as in other themes in contemporary art articulating global processes, Brave New World points to an uncertain future in which the agency of the global citizen essentially becomes the implied core of the project. Effectively, such artists invite us as viewers to reconceive the world as it is presented through such new global imaginaries.

From the first Venice Biennale of 1895, there are currently more than 50 such major art events, including the world’s “hottest” in the Californian desert and the “coolest” in Antarctica, both scheduled to open in 2017. In addition, the Biennial Foundation was initially registered in 2009 with the Chamber of Commerce in the Netherlands.

The renowned English diarist John Evelyn went to Rotterdam in 1641, where he was “amazed” at the huge number of artworks for sale. Evelyn noted that even local farmers had houses “full of them.” Evelyn bought some, along with maps and atlases he later purchased in Amsterdam ( Evelyn 1930 : 21–27).

Cubic zirconia or synthetic diamonds are worth approximately $20 per carat compared to natural diamonds, which are valued at approximately $1,500 per carat, but this increases with stones of greater weight.

http://www.damienhirst.com/for-the-love-of-god .

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US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey,” http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2010.htm (accessed May 7, 2016).

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The “UN Human Rights Council, 32nd Session (13th June–1st July 2016): General Debate on Item 4—Human Rights Situations of Concern: Elizabeth O’Casey,” is reported on the IHEU website at http://iheu.org/iheu-reads-poem-banned-in-saudi-for-apostasy-to-delegates-at-un (accessed July 3, 2016).

This despite influential publications such as Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us (1951) or the increased focus on marine mammals in popular culture.

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What Is Art?

Reading: defining art from modernity to globalization, modernity to globalization.

This section addresses art and architecture from around 1850 up to the present.

During this period, art changed beyond recognition. The various academies still held sway in Europe. It is true that the hierarchy of the genres was breaking down and the classical ideal was becoming less convincing.

What counted as art in much of the nineteenth century remained pretty stable. Whether in sculpture, painting, drawing or printmaking, artworks represented recognizable subjects in a credible human-centered space. To be sure, subjects became less high-flown, compositional effects often deliberately jarring and surface handling more explicit. There were plenty of academicians and commentators who believed these changes amounted to the end of civilization, but from today’s perspective they seem like small shifts of emphasis.

In contrast, art in the first part of the twentieth century underwent a rapid gear change. Art historians agree that during this time artists began to radically revise picture making and sculpture. With the invention of photography and it being employed as the dominant conveyor of realism, painting undergoes a period of experimentation. Painters flattened out pictorial space, broke with conventional viewpoints and discarded local color. (‘Local color’ is the term used for the color things appear in the world. From the early twentieth century, painters began to experiment with non-local color.) Sculptors began to leave the surface of their works in a rough, seemingly unfinished state; they increasingly created partial figures and abandoned plinths or, alternatively, inflated the scale of their bases. Architects abandoned revivalist styles and rich ornamentation. To take one often cited example from painting, while the art of Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) is based on a recognizable motif, say a landscape, when looking at these paintings we get the distinct impression that the overall organization of the colors and structural elements matters as much or more than the scene depicted. To retain fidelity to his sense impressions, Cézanne is compelled to find a new order and coherence internal to the canvas. Frequently this turns into incoherence as he tries to manage the tension between putting marks on a flat surface and his external observation of space.

In fifteen years some artists would take this problem – the recognition that making art involved attention to its own formal conditions that are not reducible to representing external things – through Cubism to a fully abstract art. Conventionally, this story is told as a heroic progression of ‘movements’ and ‘styles’, each giving way to the next in the sequence: Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism… Each changing of the guard is perceived as an advance and almost a necessary next step on the road to some preset goal. This rapid turnover of small groups and personal idioms can seem bewildering and, in fact, this is a minimal version of this story. Whether they sought new expressive resources, novel ways of conveying experience or innovative techniques for representing the modern world, modern artists turned their backs on the tried and tested forms of mimetic resemblance. But what counted as art changed too. Bits of the everyday world began to be incorporated into artworks – as collage or montage in two-dimensional art forms; in construction and assemblage in three-dimensional ones. The inclusion of found materials played a fundamental role in modern art. The use of modern materials and technologies – steel, concrete, photography – did something similar. Some artists abandoned easel painting or sculpture to make direct interventions in the world through the production of usable things, whether chairs or illustrated news magazines. Not all artists elected to work with these new techniques and materials, and many carried on in the traditional ways or attempted to adapt them to new circumstances.

Autonomy and Modernity

Broadly speaking, there are two different ways of thinking about modern art, or two different versions of the story. One way is to view art as something that can be practiced (and thought of) as an activity radically separate from everyday life or worldly concerns. From this point of view, art is said to be ‘autonomous’ from society – that is, it is believed to be self-sustaining and self-referring. One particularly influential version of this story suggests that modern art should be viewed as a process by which features extraneous to a particular branch of art would be progressively eliminated, and painters or sculptors would come to concentrate on problems specific to their domain. Another way of thinking about modern art is to view it as responding to the modern world, and to see modern artists immersing themselves in the conflicts and challenges of society. That is to say, some modern artists sought ways of conveying the changing experiences generated in Europe by the twin processes of commercialization (the commodification of everyday life) and urbanization. From this point of view, modern art is a way of reflecting on the transformations that created what we call, in a sort of shorthand, ‘modernity’.

Greenberg and Autonomy

While it has its roots in the nineteenth century, the approach to modern art as an autonomous practice is particularly associated with the ideas of the English critics Roger Fry (1866–1934) and Clive Bell (1881–1964), the critic Clement Greenberg (1909–94) and the New York Museum of Modern Art’s director Alfred H. Barr (1902–81). For a period this view largely became the common sense of modern art (O’Brian, 1986–95, 4 vols; Barr, 1974 [1936]). This version of modernism is itself complex. The argument presumes that art is self-contained and artists are seen to grapple with technical problems of painting and sculpture, and the point of reference is to artworks that have gone before. This approach can be described as ‘formalist’ (paying exclusive attention to formal matters), or, perhaps more productively drawing on a term employed by the critic Meyer Schapiro (1904–96), as ‘internalist’ (a somewhat less pejorative way of saying the same thing) (Schapiro, 1978 [1937]).

Rather than cloaking artifice, modern art, such as that made by Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) drew attention to the conventions, procedures and techniques supposedly ‘inherent’ in a given form of art. Modern art set about ‘creating something valid solely on its own terms’ (Ibid., p. 8). For painting, this meant turning away from illusion and story-telling to concentrate on the features that were fundamental to the practice – producing aesthetic effects by placing marks on a flat, bounded surface. For sculpture, it entailed arranging or assembling forms in space.

Wassily Kandinsky, Landscape with Red Spots, 1913. Work is in the public domain.

It important to understand that the account of autonomous art, however internalist it may seem, developed as a response to the social and political conditions of modern societies. In his 1939 essay ‘Avant-garde and kitsch’, Greenberg suggested that art was in danger from two linked challenges: the rise of the dictators (Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler and Franco) and the commercialized visual culture of modern times (the kitsch, or junk, of his title). Dictatorial regimes turned their backs on ambitious art and curried favor with the masses by promoting a debased form of realism that was easy to comprehend. Seemingly distinct from art made by dictatorial fiat, the visual culture of liberal capitalism pursued instant, canned entertainment that would appeal to the broadest number of paying customers. This pre-packaged emotional distraction was geared to easy, unchallenging consumption. Kitsch traded on sentimentality, common-sense values and flashy surface effects. The two sides of this pincer attack ghettoized the values associated with art. Advanced art, in this argument, like all human values, faced an imminent danger. Greenberg argued that, in response to the impoverished culture of both modern capitalist democracy and dictatorship, artists withdrew to create novel and challenging artworks that maintained the possibility for critical experience and attention. He claimed that this was the only way that art could be kept alive in modern society. In this essay, Greenberg put forward a left-wing sociological account of the origins of modernist autonomy; others came to similar conclusions from positions of cultural despair or haughty disdain for the masses.

The period from around 1850 onwards has been tumultuous: it has been regularly punctuated by revolutions, wars and civil wars, and has witnessed the rise of nation states, the growth and spread of capitalism, imperialism and colonialism, and decolonization. Sometimes artists tried to keep their distance from the historical whirlwind, at other moments they flung themselves into the eye of the storm. Even the most abstract developments and autonomous trends can be thought of as embedded in this historical process. Modern artists could be cast in opposition to repressive societies, or mass visual culture in the west, by focusing on themes of personal liberty and individual defiance. The New York School championed by Greenberg coincided with this political situation and with the high point of US mass cultural dominance – advertising, Hollywood cinema, popular music and the rest. In many ways, the work of this group of abstract painters presents the test case for assessing the claim that modern art offers a critical alternative to commercial visual culture. It could seem a plausible argument, but the increasing absorption of modern art into middle-class museum culture casts an increasing doubt over these claims. At the same time, the figurative art that was supposed to have been left in the hands of the dictators continued to be made in a wide variety of forms. If figurative art had been overlooked by critics during the high point of abstract art, it made a spectacular comeback with Pop Art.

The Emergence of Modern Art in Paris

Let’s take a step back to the middle of the nineteenth century and consider the emergence of modern art in Paris. The new art that developed with Gustave Courbet (1819–77), Manet and the Impressionists entailed a self-conscious break with the art of the past. These modern artists took seriously the representation of their own time. In place of allegorical figures in togas or scenes from the Bible, modern artists concerned themselves with the things around them. When asked to include angels in a painting for a church, Courbet is said to have replied ‘I have never seen angels. Show me an angel and I will paint one.’ But these artists were not just empirical recording devices. The formal or technical means employed in modern art are jarring and unsettling, and this has to be a fundamental part of the story. A tension between the means and the topics depicted, between surface and subject, is central to what this art was. Nevertheless, we miss something crucial if we do not attend to the artists’ choices of subjects. Principally, these artists sought the signs of change and novelty – multiple details and scenarios that made up contemporary life. This meant they paid a great deal of attention to the new visual culture associated with commercialized leisure.

Greenberg contrasted the mainstream of modern art, concerned with autonomous aesthetic experience and formal innovation, with what he called ‘dead ends’ – directions in art that he felt led nowhere. Even when restricted to the European tradition, this marginalized much of the most significant art made in interwar Europe – Dada, Constructivism and Surrealism (Greenberg, 1961). The groups of artists producing this art – usually referred to collectively as the ‘avant-garde’ or the ‘historical avant-garde’ – wanted to fuse art and life, and often based their practice on a socialist rejection of bourgeois culture (see, in particular, Bürger, 1984). From their position in western Europe, the Dadaists mounted an assault on the irrationalism and violence of militarism and the repressive character of capitalist culture; in collages, montages, assemblages and performances, they created visual juxtapositions aimed at shocking the middle-class audience and intended to reveal connections hidden behind everyday appearances. The material for this was drawn from mass-circulation magazines, newspapers and other printed ephemera. The Constructivists participated in the process of building a new society in the USSR, turning to the creation of utilitarian objects (or, at least, prototypes for them). The Surrealists combined ideas from psychoanalysis and Marxism in an attempt to unleash those forces repressed by mainstream society; the dream imagery is most familiar, but experiments with found objects and collage were also prominent. These avant-garde groups tried to produce more than refined aesthetic experiences for a restricted audience; they proffered their skills to help to change the world. In this work the cross-over to visual culture is evident; communication media and design played an important role. Avant-garde artists began to design book covers, posters, fabrics, clothing, interiors, monuments and other useful things. They also began to merge with journalism by producing photographs and undertaking layout work. In avant-garde circles, architects, photographers and artists mixed and exchanged ideas. For those committed to autonomy of art, this kind of activity constitutes a denial of the shaping conditions of art and betrayal of art for propaganda, but the avant-garde were attempting something else – they sought a new social role for art. One way to explore this debate is by switching from painting and sculpture to architecture and design.

Responses to the Modern World

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), who is now seen as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, occupies an important place in destabilization of the art object. Duchamp started out as a Cubist, but broke with the idea of art as a matter of special visual experience and turned his attention to puns and perceptual or conceptual conundrums (Duchamp, 1975). These activities brought him into the orbit of Dada in Paris and New York, but this was probably nothing more than a convenient alliance. Duchamp played games with words and investigated the associations of ordinary objects. He also messed around with gender conventions, inventing a female alter ego called Rrose Sélavy – a pun on ‘Eros, c’est la vie’ or ‘Eros is life’. Critics and other artists have particularly focused on the strain of his work known as the ‘readymades’. From 1914, Duchamp began singling out ordinary objects, such as a bottle rack, for his own attention and amusement and that of a few friends. Sometimes he altered these things in some small way, adding words and a title or joining them with something else in a way that shifted their meaning; with Bicycle Wheel, he attached an inverted bike wheel to a wooden stool – he seems to have been particularly interested in the shadow play this object created. We can see this odd object among the clutter of Duchamp’s studio on West 67th Street in the photograph by Henri-Pierre Roche. He called these altered everyday things ‘assisted readymades’.

Duchamp was interested in interrogating the mass-produced objects created by his society and the common-sense definitions and values that such things accrued. Mischievously, he probed the definitions and values of his culture for a small group of like-minded friends. It isn’t at all clear that any of this was meant to be art; in fact, he explicitly posed the idea of making ‘works’ that could not be thought of as ‘art’ (Nesbit, 2000). Nevertheless, artists in the late 1950s and the 1960s became fascinated with this legacy and began to think of art as something the artist selected or posited, rather than something he or she composed or made. According to this idea, the artist could designate anything as art; what was important was the way that this decision allowed things to be perceived in a new light. This was to lead to a fundamentally different conception of art practice.

With the breakup of the hegemony of the New York School, artists began to look at those features of modern art that had been left out of the formalist story. During this period, Duchamp came to replace Picasso or Matisse as the touchstone for young artists, but he was just one tributary of what became a torrent. Perhaps most significantly, painting and anything we might straightforwardly recognize as sculpture began to take a back seat. A host of experimental forms and new media came to prominence: performance art, video, works made directly in or out of the landscape, installations, photography and a host of other forms and practices. These works often engaged with the representation of modernity and the shifting pattern of world power relations we call ‘globalization’.

National, International, Cosmopolitan

Whether holding itself apart from the visual culture of modernity or immersed in it, modern art developed not in the world’s most powerful economy (Britain), but in the places that were most marked by ‘uneven and combined development’: places where explosive tensions between traditional rural societies and the changes wrought by capitalism were most acute (Trotsky, 1962 [1928/1906]). In these locations, people only recently out of the fields encountered the shocks and pleasures of grand-metropolitan cities. As the sociologist of modernity Georg Simmel (1858–1918) suggested: ‘the city sets up a deep contrast with small-town and rural life with reference to the social foundations of psychic life’. In contrast to the over-stimulation of the senses in the city, Simmel thought that in the rural situation ‘the rhythm of life and sensory mental imagery flows more slowly, more habitually, and more evenly’ (Simmel, 1997 [1903], p. 175). This situation applies first of all to Paris (see Clark, 1984; Harvey, 2003; Prendergast, 1992). In Paris, the grand boulevards and new palaces of commercial entertainment went hand in hand with the ‘zone’, a vast shanty town ringing the city that was occupied by workers and those who eked out a precarious life. Whereas the Impressionists concentrated on the bourgeois city of bars, boulevards and boudoirs, the photographer Eugène Atget (1857–1927) represented the Paris that was disappearing – the medieval city with its winding alleys and old iron work – or those working-class quarters composed of cheap lodgings and traders recycling worn-out commodities (Nesbit, 1992; see also Benjamin, 1983). This clash of ways of life generated different ways of inhabiting and viewing the city with class and gender at their core. Access to the modern city and its representations was more readily available to middle-class men than to those with less social authority, whether they were working people, women or minority ethnic or religious groups (Wolff, 1985, pp. 37–46; Pollock, 1988, pp. 50–90).

Eugène Atget, Chiffonier (Ragpicker), c. 1899–1901. Work is in the public domain.

Contradictions

Before the Second World War, the alternative centers of modernism were also key sites of uneven and combined development: Berlin, Budapest, Milan, Moscow and Prague. In these places, large-scale industry was created by traditional elites in order to develop the production capacities required to compete militarily with Britain. Factory production was plopped down into largely agrarian societies, generating massive shocks to social equilibrium. In many ways, Moscow is the archetypal version of this pattern of acute contradictions. Before the 1917 Revolution, Moscow was the site of enormous and up-to-date factories, including the world’s largest engineering plant, but was set in a sea of peasant backwardness. This is one reason that Vladimir Lenin described Russia as the weakest link in the international-capitalist chain.

This set of contradictions put a particular perception of time at the center of modern art. Opposition to the transformations of society that were underway could be articulated in one of two ways, and in an important sense both were fantasy projections: on the one hand, artists looked to societies that were seen as more ‘primitive’ as an antidote to the upheavals and shallow glamour of capitalism. On the other hand, they attempted a leap into the future. Both perspectives – Primitivism and Futurism – entailed a profound hostility to the world as it had actually developed, and both orientations were rooted in the conditions of an uneven and combined world system.

The vast urban centers – Paris, Berlin, and Moscow – attracted artists, chancers, intellectuals, poets and revolutionaries. The interchange between people from different nations bred a form of cultural internationalism. In interwar Paris, artists from Spain, Russia, Mexico, Japan and a host of other places rubbed shoulders. Modernist artists attempted to transcend parochial and local conditions and create a formal ‘language’ valid beyond time and place, and ‘the school of Paris’ or the ‘international modern movement’ signified a commitment to a culture more capacious and vibrant than anything the word ‘national’ could contain. The critic Harold Rosenberg (1906–78) stated this theme explicitly. Rejecting the idea that ‘national life’ could be a source of inspiration, he suggested that the modernist culture of Paris, was a ‘no-place’ and a ‘no-time’ and only Nazi tanks returned the city to France by wiping out modernist internationalism (Rosenberg, 1970 [1940]).

A Move to New York

‘No-place’ then shifted continent. Perhaps for the only time in its history, after the Second World War modernism was positioned at the heart of world power – when a host of exiles from European fascism and war relocated in New York. American abstract art was centered on New York and a powerful series of institutions: the Museum of Modern Art, Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery Art of This Century and a host of small independent galleries run by private dealers (including Betty Parsons, Samuel Koontz and Sidney Janis). In the main, these artists, such as Jackson Pollock (1912–56), Mark Rothko (1903–70), Arshile Gorky (1904–48), Robert Motherwell (1915–91) and Barnett Newman (1905–70), and associated critics (Greenberg and Rosenberg) were formed during the 1930s in the circles of the New York Left: they were modernist internationalists opposed to US parochialism in art and politics. After the war, they retained this commitment to an international modern art, while the politics drained away or was purged in the Cold War. The period of US hegemony in modern art coincided with the optimum interest in autonomous form and pure ‘optical’ experience. This was the time when artists working in the modernist idiom were least interested in articulating epochal changes and most focused on art as an act of individual realization and a singular encounter between the viewer and the artwork. At the same time, these artists continued to keep their distance from mainstream American values and mass culture. Some champions of autonomous art are inclined to think art came to a shuddering halt with the end of the New York School. Alternatively, we can see Conceptual Art as initiating or reinvigorating a new phase of modern art that continues in the global art of today.

It should be apparent from this brief sketch that the predominant ways of thinking about modern art have focused on a handful of international centers and national schools – even when artists and critics proclaim their allegiance to internationalism. The title of Irving Sandler’s book The Triumph of American Painting is one telling symptom (Sandler, 1970). There is a story about geopolitics – about the relationship between the west and the rest – embedded in the history of modern art. These powerful forms of modernism cannot be swept aside, but increasingly critics and art historians are paying attention to other stories; to the artworks made in other places and in other ways, and which were sidelined in the dominant accounts of art’s development. A focus on art in a globalized art world leads to revising the national stories told about modernism. This history is currently being recast as a process of global interconnections rather than an exclusively western-centered chronicle, and commentators are becoming more attentive to encounters and interchanges between westerners and people from what has helpfully been called the ‘majority world’, in art as in other matters. This term – majority world – was used by the Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam, to describe what the term ‘third world’ had once designated. We use it here to characterize those people and places located outside centers of western affluence and power; they constitute the vast majority of the world’s inhabitants and this reminds us that western experience is a minority condition and not the norm.

The Local and the Global

The reality is not that the majority world will be transformed into a high-tech consumer paradise. In fact, inequality is increasing across the world. What is referred to as globalization is the most recent phase of uneven and combined development. The new clash of hypermodern and traditional forms of economic activity and social life are taking place side by side; megacities spring up alongside the ‘planet of slums’, and communication technologies play an important role in this clash of space and time. Recent debates on globalization and art involve a rejection of modernist internationalism; instead, artists and art historians are engaged with local conditions of artistic production and the way these mesh in an international system of global art making. Modern art is currently being remade and rethought as a series of much more varied responses to contemporaneity around the world. Artists now draw on particular local experiences, and also on forms of representation from popular traditions. Engagement with Japanese popular prints played an important role in Impressionism, but in recent years this sort of cultural crossing has undergone an explosion.

Drawing local image cultures into the international spaces of modern art has once more shifted the character of art. The paradox is that the cultural means that are being employed – video art, installation, large color photographs and so forth – seem genuinely international. Walk into many of the large exhibitions around the globe and you will see artworks referring to particular geopolitical conditions, but employing remarkably similar conventions and techniques. This cosmopolitanism risks underestimating the real forces shaping the world; connection and mobility for some international artists goes hand in hand with uprootedness and the destruction of habitat and ways of life for others.

This overview has provided examples of the shifting perceptions and definitions of art across time. The first part demonstrated the changing role of the artist and diverse types of art in the medieval and Renaissance periods. The second part outlined the evaluation of art in the academies, issues of style, and changes to patronage, where art and its consumption became increasingly part of the public sphere during the period 1600 to 1850. The last part addressed the way in which artists broke from all conventions and the influence of globalization on art production, in the period 1850 to the present.

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• Revision and adaptation of material. Authored by : Wendy Riley. Provided by : Columbia Basin College. License : CC BY: Attribution
• Modernity to Globalization. Authored by : Kim W. Woods, Emma Barker and Steve EdwardsKim W. Woods, Emma Barker and Steve Edwards. Provided by : Open University. Located at : http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/art-and-visual-culture-medieval-modern/content-section-3 . License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
• Duchamp's Shovel: Art as Concept. Authored by : Beth Harris, Steven Zucker, and Sal Khan. Provided by : Khan Academy. Located at : https://youtu.be/MRv20I13vqM . Project : Smarthistory, Art History at Khan Academy. License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike

The Globalization of Advanced Art in the Twentieth Century

The twentieth century was a time of rapid globalization for advanced art. Artists from a larger number of countries made important contributions than in earlier periods, and they did so in a larger number of places. Many important innovations also diffused more rapidly, and more widely, than in earlier times. The dominance for much of the century of conceptual forms of art, from Cubism and Dada to Pop and Conceptual Art, was largely responsible for the greater speed with which innovations spread: conceptual techniques are communicated more readily, and are generally more versatile in their uses, than experimental methods. There is no longer a single dominant place in the art world, comparable to Paris for the first century of modern art, but it is unlikely that a large number of places will join New York and London as centers of artistic innovation in the future.

I thank Robert Jensen for discussions. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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Art and Globalization

Edited by james elkins, zhivka valiavicharska, and alice kim.

$42.95 | Paperback Edition ISBN: 978-0-271-03717-2

Available as an e-book

304 pages 7" × 10" 1 b&w illustration 2010

The Stone Art Theory Institutes

“In our era of biennales and international galleries, contemporary art compels both a new, wider analysis as well as a rethinking of basic forms and definitions. Presented in the form of dialogues, even debates, in transcript, followed by individual responses, Art and Globalization ’s distillation of collective seminar discussions intends to open, rather than to close, its topics: considerations of both the recent history of visual culture toward some guiding theory of globalization and its consequences for art production and consumption across space rather than time. Readers should be alerted that this seminar will surely engage them as participants and partisans, sharpening their own personal responses to the contemporary art world, but without offering consistency, closure, or conclusions.” —Larry Silver, Farquhar Professor of Art History, University of Pennsylvania

• Description
• Table of Contents
• Sample Chapters

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.

“This multivoiced volume successfully evokes the vastness of artistic production on a global scale. The conversations, assessments, and programmatic introductions and afterword make it crystal clear that if art is to be understood in global terms, the tasks of conceptual clarification, concept development, and methodological innovation must be taken up with intelligence, honesty, and energy, and in a way that takes thinking about art well beyond the usual parochialisms.” —Mette Hjort, Chair Professor and Head, Visual Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong

James Elkins is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Zhivka Valiavicharska is a PhD candidate in the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Alice Kim is a PhD candidate in the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Series Preface

First Introduction

James Elkins

Second Introduction

Zhivka Valiavicharska

The Seminars

1. The National Situation

2. Translation

3. The Prehistory of Globalization

4. Hybridity

5. Temporality

6. Postcolonial Narratives

7. Neoliberalism

8. Four Failures of the Seminars

9. Universality

Assessments

Caroline A. Jones

Karl Eric Leitzel

Rasheed Araeen

Néstor García Canclini

Blake Gopnik

Marina Grzinic

Jonathan Harris

Anthony D. King

Nina Möntmann

Ming Tiampo

Reiko Tomii

C. J. W.-L. Wee

Iftikhar Dadi

Mark Jarzombek

Tani Barlow

Esther Gabara

Ján Bakoš

T. J. Demos

Chris Berry

Hyungmin Pai

Partha Mitter

Carolyn Loeb

Suman Gupta

Saskia Sassen

Charles Green

Joaquín Barriendos

Notes on the Contributors

In the usual course of things, art theory happens invisibly, without attracting attention. Concepts like picture , visual art , and realism circulate in newspapers, galleries, and museums as if they were as obvious and natural as words like dog , cat , and goldfish . Art theory is the air the art world breathes, and it is breathed carelessly, without thought. It is the formless stuff out of which so many justifications are conjured. Art theory also happens in universities and art schools, where it is studied and nurtured like a rare orchid. And art theory happens in innumerable academic conferences, which are sometimes studded with insights but are more often provisional and inconclusive. In those academic settings, words like picture , visual art , and realism are treated like impossibly complicated machines whose workings can hardly be understood. Sometimes, then, what counts as art theory is simple and normal, and other times it seems to be the most difficult subject in visual art.

A similarity links these different ways of using theory. In the art world as in academia, it often feels right just to allude to a concept like picture , and let its flavor seep into the surrounding conversation. That is strange, because picture is so important to so many people, and the habit of using it so informally leads to wayward conversations. The books in this series are intended to push hard on that strangeness, by spending as much time as necessary on individual concepts and the texts that exemplify them. Some books are more or less dedicated to particular words: volume 1 focuses on globalization , translation , governmentality , and hybridity ; volume 2 explores image , picture , icon , and iconophilia . Volume 3 is concerned with the idea that art is research , which produces knowledge . Volume 4 is about the aesthetic , the anti-aesthetic , and the political ; and volume 5 concentrates on visual studies , visual culture , and visuality . This book series is like an interminable conversation around a dictionary—or like the world’s most prolix glossary of art. That isn’t to say that the purposes of these conversations is to fix meanings: on the contrary, the idea is to work hard enough so that what seemed obdurate and slippery, as Wittgenstein said, begins to fracture and crack.

Each book in this series started as a weeklong event, held in Chicago. No papers were given (except as evening lectures, which are not recorded in these books). For a week, five faculty and a group of twenty-five scholars met in closed seminars. In preparation for the week they had read over eight hundred pages of assigned texts. The week opened with a three-hour panel discussion among the faculty, continued with four and a half days of seminars (six hours each day), and ended with a five-hour panel discussion, open to the public. All thirty-five hours of it was taped and edited, and the pertinent portions presented here.

This series is a refinement of a previous book series called The Art Seminar, which appeared from 2005 to 2008. Like The Art Seminar, the Stone Art Theory Institutes are an attempt to record a new kind of art theory, one that is more inclusive and less coherent than some art theory produced in North America and western Europe since the advent of poststructuralism. The guiding idea is that theorizing on visual art has become increasingly formalized and narrow, even as art practices have become wildly diverse. Both book series are meant to capture a reasonable cross-section of thinking on a given topic, and both include people at the far ends of the spectrum of their subjects—so far from one another that in some cases they were reluctant even to sit together in the events, or participate in the books. Some conversations are genuinely dialectic, others are abrupt encounters, and still others are unaccountable misunderstandings. All those species of communication are recorded as faithfully as possible, because they are evidence of the state of understanding of each field.

The Introductions to each volume are meant as straightforward and clear reviews of the critical situation leading up to the seminars. The Art Seminar books then had a set of essays to help set the stage for the transcribed discussions. There are no essays in this series, because it is not possible to usefully condense the hundreds of pages of texts that informed these discussions. (References to most of those readings can be found in the transcripts.) The omission of essays makes this series more “difficult” than The Art Seminar, but the literature of art theory has grown beyond the point where it can be helpfully anthologized. The books in this series are not introductions to the various subjects they treat, but attempts to move forward given the current state of discourse in each field. In that they follow the lead of the sciences, where more advanced textbooks necessarily presuppose more introductory material.

After each year’s week-long event, the editors selected excerpts from the thirty-five hours of audio tapes and produced a rough-edited transcript. It was given to each of the participants, who were invited to edit their contributions and add references. After several rounds of editing, the transcript was sent out to people who did not attend the event. They were asked to write assessments, which appear here in the order they were received. The writers were asked to consider the conversation from a distance, noting its strengths and its blind spots, in any style and at any length. As the assessments came in, they were distributed to people who hadn’t yet completed theirs, so that later assessments could comment on earlier ones, building an intermittent conversation through the book. The Afterwords are intended principally to organize the ideas in the book, so they can resonate with future discussions.

One of the central concerns of this series is making talk about art more difficult. For some readers, art theory may seem too abstruse and technical, but at heart it has a different problem: it is too easy. Both the intricate art theory practiced in academies, and the nearly invisible theory that suffuses galleries and art fairs, are reasonably easy to do reasonably well. As Wittgenstein knew, the hardest problems are the ones that are right in front of us: picture , visual art , realism . The purpose of the books in this series is to do some damage to our sense that we understand words like those.

The Topics in this Series

Volume 1, Art and Globalization , is about writing in the “biennale culture” that now determines much of the art market. 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 politics, postcolonial theory, sociology, and anthropology; volume 1 is an attempt to bring those discourses together with art-world concerns.

Volume 2, What Is an Image? asks how well we understand what we mean by picture and image . The art world depends on there being something special about the visual, but that something is seldom spelled out. The most interesting theorists of those fundamental words are not philosophers but art historians, and this book interrogates the major theories.

Volume 3, What Do Artists Know? is about the education of artists. The MFA degree is notoriously poorly conceptualized, and now it is giving was to the PhD in art practice. Meanwhile, conversations on freshman courses in studio art continue to be bogged down by conflicting agendas. This book is about the theories that underwrite art education at all levels.

Volume 4, Beyond the Anti-aesthetic , is about the fact that now, almost thirty years after Hal Foster defined the anti-aesthetic, there is still no viable alternative to the dichotomy between aesthetics and anti- or nonaesthetic art. The impasse is made more difficult by the proliferation of identity politics, and it is made less negotiable by the hegemony of anti-aesthetics in academic discourse on art.

Volume 5, Farewell to Visual Studies , is a forum on the state of the once-new discipline (inaugurated in the early 1990s) that promised to be the site for the study of visuality in all fields, inside and outside of art. Despite the increasing number of departments worldwide, visual studies remains a minority interest with an increasingly predictable set of interpretive agendas and subjects. Hence our farewell.

Art History & Architecture

           Modern and Contemporary

           Art Theory & Criticism

Also of Interest

What Is an Image?

Edited by James Elkins and Maja Naef

What Do Artists Know?

Edited by James Elkins

Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic

Edited by James Elkins and Harper Montgomery

Farewell to Visual Studies

Edited by James Elkins, Gustav Frank, and Sunil Manghani

Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts

Art History as Writing

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“A very civil idea …” Art History, Transculturation, and World-Making – With and Beyond the Nation

• Monica Juneja

Must a global art history follow the logic of economic globalization or does it call for an alternative conception of critical globality to be able to effectively theorize relationships of connectivity that encompass disparities as well as contradictions? This article investigates the potential of transculturation as a method to address a number of the pressing questions faced by art history in the wake of the ‘global turn’. It begins by tracing the genealogies of approaches that sought to incorporate the ‘world’ within the scope of the discipline a century ago and queries the epistemic legacies of this historiographic move. By shifting the focus of enquiry beyond Euro-America, it looks for a way through which the practice of art history can translate the intellectual insights of non-European experiences into globally intelligible analyses.

At the Venice Biennale of 1993, the Austrian pavilion featured an audio installation, Garden Program , created by the artist Andrea Fraser, that allowed visitors an unusual peep into an important meeting of the Biennale’s national commissioners as they debated whether the principle of national representation, the central organizing principle of the world’s oldest and most canonical biennial, still had a raison d’être in a rapidly globalizing, post-Cold War world. [1] Fraser’s ingenious work was a tongue-in-cheek collage of sound clips with recordings from the deliberations surrounding plans for the 45 th Biennale di Venezia, the first since the end of the Cold War. [2] The recordings usher us into a moment of uncertainty, a roomful of confused, contradicting voices, each looking for ways to handle the challenges with which a transformed geopolitical condition confronted the institutions of the art world. [3] In their anxiety to be global and therefore in keeping with the times, curators from the more established art centres of the metropolitan West spoke for an inclusion of artists from ‘elsewhere’ into the Western art system by proposing that existing pavilions be opened to participants from the ‘peripheries’ in the Eastern and Southern hemispheres. “A very civil idea” was how Achille Bonito Oliva, the director of the Biennale, described what he further termed a gesture of “cultural hospitality”. [4] As opposed to such moves that – in an inverted spirit of patriotism – questioned the rationale of a national pavilion, the response of nations from Latin America, or those from Eastern Europe, or Central Asia, newly born following the demise of the Soviet Union, was not entirely surprising. Their spokespersons made a forceful claim to a demarcated, non-shared space, now due to them as independent nations, to be able to showcase their national cultures on an equal footing with Western nations. [5] In what today has the appearance of a single world that has discarded its former tripartite division, the intimate connection between art and national identity retains its hold over imaginations in diverging, though mutually constitutive ways. While older, metropolitan nations strive to establish their ‘cosmopolitan’ credentials by offering to share their exhibition sites with art from the hitherto neglected backwaters of the globe, ‘latecomers’ in the race for nationhood cling to the view that art bearing exclusive national labels is one effective way of catching up with the present.

II Art, Nations, Cultures

These positions could perhaps serve as a wedge to break open the idea of the nation, conventionally characterized as a juridical, geo-political entity, and instead to conceive of it as an imagined conceptual realm, not territorially bounded, but one that in the imagination of artists and scholars could both be local and transgress boundaries. How do the debates about the tangled relationship between nations and cultures challenge our disciplines and institutional practices as they urge us to develop new frameworks for our scholarly enterprises? More specifically, how does art history negotiate the tension between national identity and such relationships that break out of national frames and inform memories and visions of so much of artistic and literary production? When art is made to stand for or express allegiance to the nation, what does the art historical life of that entity embody at any given moment in the past or present? Have art and artists been able to outline different modes of engaging with the idea of the nation?

The events of 1989 and their aftermath brought forth a flurry of terms announcing a post-ideological, post-ethnic, post-historical, even post-political condition, while art, at the same juncture, is said to have become fully ‘contemporary’, that is, an active component of a shared present. The proliferation of biennials, art fairs, and mega-exhibitions in and beyond Euro-America since 1989, that featured works of artists from distant corners of the world, meant that the “the global contemporary”, according to Hans Belting, could be characterized as a freely circulating, ahistorical, non-situated, and economically exploitable mass. [6] Critical responses to such an interpretive framework that unquestioningly links aesthetic changes to the geopolitical shifts of 1989 have since then come from several positions. [7] The discussion of the contemporary has now shifted from the issue of visibility gained by art from beyond the West in the exhibition circuits and scholarly accounts of the ‘mainstream’ to querying the conditions that make such visibility possible. [8] The new geo-aesthetic maps of globally networked “artworlds”, [9] that figured prominently in the Karlsruhe exhibition curated by Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg, cannot be read as an unproblematic dissolution of hierarchies without examining the nature of relationalities that connect the luminous nodal points distributed across the surface of cartographic representation. Like all signposts, 1989 has not turned out to be consensual; grasping its explanatory message depends on the location of the traveller. The inability to gather from a single viewing position the dispersed elements of a world map has, however, turned into a productive exercise, given the shifts in critical attention that have followed. The euphoria over the forces of globalization expressed in the writings of the early 1990s that celebrated an effortless, even naturalized ‘flow’ of materials, goods, capital, and human resources, dissolving national and cultural boundaries, has given way in the new millennium to critiques of neoliberal economics and politics, the disregard of human sovereignty, and evasion of environmental responsibility.

For art historians some key questions have been: Must a global art history follow the logic of economic globalization, or does it call for an alternative conception of globality to be able to effectively theorize relationships of connectivity that encompass disparities as well as contradictions and negotiate multiple subjectivities of the actors involved? What are the choices available to artistic producers to negotiate between complicity with or dependence on global capital, and critical initiatives that foster transcultural modes of co-production and sustainability? How can art history enable us to view the historical present as a simultaneity of clashing and conjoining temporalities constituted by their prehistories? [10] How does it handle issues of commensurability or its absence among cultures? How can it translate intellectual resources and insights of regional experiences beyond Euro-America into globally intelligible analyses?

These are some among the many unresolved questions that confront the discipline today as it strives to respond to the challenge of globality. One of the difficulties stems from the slippery quality of the well-worn term ‘global’ that has been used in several and diverging ways, as for instance to characterize art history as a discipline to be practiced uniformly across the globe, one that would subsume ‘local’ art. Alternatively, the epithet ‘global’ signals towards an inclusive discipline – also labelled world art history – that would encompass different world cultures, or that searches for the lowest common denominator to hold together humans across time and space who have been making art for millennia “because our biological nature has led us to do so”. [11] The term is equated at times with conceptual imperialism, at others with multicultural eclecticism. Hans Belting’s definition of “global art” to characterize those contemporary artistic productions emanating from the non-Western world, which become publicly accessible through exhibitions and mega-shows, continues to inform the discussions on what could define the contours of a global art history, namely a focus on artworlds post 1989. [12]

A further source of disarray is the circumstance that the terms ‘global’ and ‘world’ are more often than not used as interchangeable, when conceptually they need to be distinguished from each other. Both terms are related to the ubiquitous phenomenon of globalization. ‘Global’ (from globe) is an abstraction to describe a space on which globalization plays itself out, imagined as a surface, a sphere, a zone of networks and mobility, whose potential could unfold anywhere. In contrast, the ‘world’ stands for an inhabited place, spells situatedness, is marked by lived features, memories, relationships that provide a context, while they undergo change, prompt mobility or restrict it and even produce exile. Worlds are something we carry while traversing the globe and negotiating its scales.

The notion of world-making that figures in the title of this essay has featured prominently in literary studies where it has at times been used to conceptualize language or signs, understood as autonomous structures upon which experience is founded and which therefore exist prior to the world. [13] While my use of the term as a tool of criticality departs from influential theories such as those of Nelson Goodman or Ansgar Nünning, it responds in part to the impulse that comes from the work of Pheng Cheah who, by conceptualizing the world as a “temporal” rather than an exclusively spatial category, endows it with a capacity to rethink the normativity of neo-liberal globalization. [14] “Literature’s worldly causality”, [15] as Cheah terms it, can plausibly be extended to art production that, like literary creations, makes alternative imaginations possible and accessible. More importantly, the idea of world-making needs to be anchored as a perspective with which to shape disciplinary practice – here the reference is to art history – where the relationship between “archive and vision” is itself an ethical responsibility. [16] Art history as a mode of world-making, I argue in the following, is both a site and an active participant in the production of knowledge, both historical as well as of the present, and works in tandem with other sites and institutional practices such as curating, collecting, displaying. Pheng Cheah’s move to connect the idea of the world to that of cosmopolitanism in view of its potential to “embrace the whole of deterritorialized humanity” overlooks two crucial questions. [17] First, it does not address the wider reality of a supposedly “deterritorialized” and increasingly networked world that at the same time is characterized by a proliferation of security fences, militarized borders, and barricades to seal mobility and migration – in other words: a world that undergoes a re-territorialization in the wake of dissolving borders and media connectivity. More fundamentally, to advocate cosmopolitanism as normative practice without questioning the understanding of culture it is premised on risks a decline into a de-historicized multiculturalism that liberal societies today put forward as a political imperative and a managerial mode to deal with diversity (as I discuss in a later section of this article). World-making as a critical, self-reflexive process as well as a practice of art history can only deliver its promise when based on an understanding of culture as unbounded by political and territorial formations of the modern nation-state and one that is capacious enough to encompass human and more-than-human worlds. The concept transculture/transculturation that forms the keystone of a critical globality enables such a disciplinary practice – its genealogy and ramifications will be discussed in the following sections.

The epithet ‘world’, when used to qualify art history, refers in most cases to an art history expansively charted to bring the ‘world’ in its fold within a framework of concepts that go back to Immanuel Kant and Latin Antiquity, and whose histories and underpinnings remain unquestioned. Such an orientation makes world art history merely one more variant of a master narrative. For expansion, as a methodological and pedagogical move, does not by its analytical intent undermine the frameworks it seeks to transgress, or at best does so only tangentially. [18] This is a lesson to be learnt from precedents of a century ago, when art history assumed a similar world-configuring function while seeking to produce authoritative knowledge about nations, cultures, and the world. A look at this particular genealogy of world-making in art history directs our attention to those epistemic foundations that continue to shape our scholarly practice: the exercise in unpacking these is an urgent one in contemporary times as the discipline strives once more to become ‘global’.

III Genealogical Routes

The intent to bring the ‘world’ into the purview of art history is not a new one. The transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, which coincided with the revitalisation of art history as a scientific discipline, was marked by similar moves to make art history inclusive of regions beyond the West. German art historical writings in particular had espoused a Weltkunstgeschichte as “a history of art of all times and peoples”, [19] a historiographical perspective that today is being upheld as an example of a cosmopolitan moment in art history, one that is claimed to have prefigured the present ‘global turn’ in the discipline and its institutions. [20] It is worth taking a closer, critical look at this current in art historiography in order to understand the founding premises of the discipline that continue to be largely unquestioned even as it seeks to expand its range of vision. As the nineteenth century transited to the twentieth, art history was confronted with the challenges posed by the globality of that particular moment, a challenge not dissimilar to that of our present. Art history’s effort to redefine itself as a scientific discipline – as a Kunstwissenschaft rather than Kunstgeschichte – was viewed as a new orientation that could offer a key to grappling with the ‘world’ as a category. [21] Weltkunstgeschichte , though it meant different things to different people, was intended to equip art history with a series of aesthetic categories and explanatory methods that would be able to encompass a new and ever-increasing diversity of objects the discipline was confronted with. The physical presence and continuous flow of objects and archaeological finds from other regions of the world into European contexts had brought forth a fresh challenge – to museums, curators, publics – and not least to a discipline fixated aesthetically on classical antiquity. Museums of different kinds functioned as a primary site where viewers in the West could encounter non-European objects of art, and from where persuasive narratives of sameness and difference could be constructed and disseminated. A further consideration animating the concern to write an art history as the story of all regions and peoples of the world, and going back in time to the beginnings of humanity, was to find a way in which art could work as a criterion to register the humanity of its creator – to be able to locate human beings on the evolutionary ladder beyond animals. In other words, the search for the origins of art was equally linked to the tangled question, whether the earliest forms of art were a biological or a cultural phenomenon.

For the proponents of Weltkunstgeschichte , art theory, by drawing on ethnology, would be able to transcend its Eurocentric bias, abandon its speculative character, and come closer to the spirit of the natural sciences – this would in fact lead up to a revitalization of the humanities. For the art historian Ernst Grosse (1862–1927), ethnology was an intrinsically comparative science as it investigated the world’s various “peoples” or “nations” in the totality of their environmental and socio-cultural settings. [22] While the prime purpose of Kunstwissenschaft , according to him, was to study the systematic relationship between “art and culture” crucial to the understanding of any art form – for which comparative studies of all cultures of the world were needed in order to avoid the trap of theorizing on the basis of a few selected examples from Western Europe – such comparisons were methodological contributions only ethnology could provide.

Proponents of Weltkunstgeschichte argue that all cultures or peoples produce ‘art’: objects earlier designated as curiosities, trophies, idols, are now all subsumed under the category of art and seen as scientific data requiring documentation according to taxonomic principles. In Anfänge der Kunst , Grosse recognizes art or aesthetic sensibility as a human universal, a criterion to distinguish humans from animals. Universalism goes hand in hand with cultural relativism, that is, the differences in taste, development and aesthetic feeling he observed and that required finding the way to explaining these. Both Grosse and, following him, the prolific though controversial Viennese art historian Josef Strzygowski (1862–1941) espoused an anti-humanist position that stemmed from a critique of classical philology, to privilege material objects as a subject for art history. [23] An emphasis on materiality was fully in keeping with archaeological findings and the collecting practices of the time. Based primarily in the new ethnological museums, the examination of objects was considered by an ethnographically informed art history to show the ‘objective’ route to the study of humanity. Collections like those of Berlin’s Museum of Ethnology (“Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde”, back then) were described as a laboratory for studying the world’s cultures through the objects these cultures produced. Here, factors of geography, climate, and customs came into play. They were meant to reveal ‘underlying principles’ that would then allow for the formulation of laws of artistic development – this included form, taste, and talent. To do so, Darwinian principles of evolution were harnessed to provide the explanatory framework for cultural difference. The terms used in the discussion of cultural differences and of attributes of different people across the world are instructive. Völker (peoples) is the most frequently used; the term subsumes both physical and cultural characteristics, and it is used interchangeably with ‘race’ and ‘nation’. [24] Together they add up to a concept of culture, enclosed within the territorial formation of the nation that subsumes race under cultural difference and ethnicity. Having to grapple with the complexity of humanity, in this context the idea of race went beyond skin colour and blood ties, to be conflated with climate, beliefs, habits, morals, and aesthetics. The nexus of race – nation – culture, of which art, the aesthetic domain, is an articulation and a marker, becomes one of the main planks of modern art history, a premise that underlies many of its ‘classics’, as those authored by Jacob Burckhardt, Gottfried Semper, or Heinrich Wölfflin. [25] Writings on world art abound with observations about “nationaler Geschmack” (national taste) or “nationale Geschmacksdifferenzen”: about Germans who are fonder of music while the French love form and colour, hence painting and sculpture, or that the drawings of the Aborigines of Australia owed their high artistic quality to the developed, sharp visual sense and finely tuned motoric capacities of peoples who lived by hunting and gathering. [26] In the discussion of such differences – as well as of the shifts within fields of artistic endeavour across time, that is, the study of national taste that undergoes transformation – it became important to find an explanatory paradigm adequate to comprehending stylistic change. Here a ‘developmental history of art’ comes into play, corresponding to evolutionary classificatory schemes that typologized the world’s cultures ranging from ‘savage’ to ‘civilized’ ( Naturvölker and Culturvölker ). Such an evolutionary model gets replicated in art history when elucidating the concept of style, which developed into a convenient tool to coordinate and stabilize mobility and metamorphoses of forms.

The discipline carried many of its founding premises as it migrated beyond Europe to the colonies and young post-colonial nations, where these values were appropriated, reconfigured, and reaffirmed, as each of these assiduously cultivated its own narrative of cultural uniqueness. Thus, the most globally prevalent form of art historical writing we have inherited is a narrative framed within discrete cultural units – be they national or civilizational – and one that subsumes experiences of cultural braidedness under the taxonomic categories of ‘influence’, ‘borrowing’, or ‘transfer’. The idea of stylistic development, now firmly anchored within art history, implies a scheme that is artificially maintained by attending to a geographic location as self-contained, and by suppressing the plurality of agency and the circulation of objects, forms, and practices.

Any move to ‘globalize’ the discipline needs to start by rethinking these epistemic moorings and the values they transport. An understanding of globality conceptualized as transcultural can serve as an enabling mode of criticality, by its virtue of questioning the definitions of culture that were formed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries within the contexts of empire and nation-building. A conceptualization of culture as both identifiable with and a mode to access a fixed and a priori national identity, shaped the formation of disciplines in the humanities, including the more inclusive shades of art history, together with the institutional structures – universities, museums, archives – that prescribed the frameworks of education, research, and the formation of citizens. More radically, culture conceived of as territorially bounded, monolingual and ethnically homogenous when conscripted to the cause of the nation, has informed extreme forms of nationalism, fascism, and racism that have left their scars on history, but are by no means a thing of the past, as their resurfaced avatars of the twenty-first century constantly remind us. When applied to societies of the past and present, the discursive category of ‘culture’ has invariably existed in tension with the unruly and contradictory trends generated by mobility and extended contacts that have characterized regions and social collectives across the globe since the earliest historical epochs. The terms ‘transculture’/‘transculturation’/‘transcultural ity’ are an explicit critique of this notion, as the prefix ‘trans-’ enables an emancipation from this concept.

IV Transculturation

The genealogy of the transcultural – or transculturation – also goes back to the political context of the mid-twentieth century. Politically this was a time when fascism and militarism had engulfed much of Europe and drew the world into its destructive fold, while in the colonized peripheries, anti-colonial movements – that saw the building of national cultures together with the fashioning of self-determining political structures – were already a source of ferment. More concretely, the year 1940 saw the publication of the book Contrapunteo Cubano del tabaco y el azúcar by the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz (1881 – 1969), who first coined the term ‘transculturation’ ( transculturación ). [27] In his study of sugar and tobacco cultures in post-colonial Cuba, Ortiz saw transculturation as a process with an explanatory potential that went beyond the existing term ‘acculturation’ in that it helped reconceptualize processes of adaptation as transformation, as long term processes that unfolded through extended contacts and relationships between cultures. The context in which this investigation was undertaken – one marked by the changing geo-politics of empires, the failure of liberal democracies across the world that coincided with the defeat of progressive forces in Cuba, together with the emergence of assertive voices in locations affected by colonialism – endowed the notion of transculturation from the start with a critical potential that, as I will argue, makes it particularly relevant for grappling with crises of the present. Oritz’s historical analysis of the creation of national identity in Cuba unfolds as a critique of the cultural representations of colonialism and its strategies of rule, as a dismantling of the superior claims of Western modernity that at the same time consciously eschews an idea of the nation as a site of ‘authenticity’ or a haven of purity. The anti-imperialist stance of the work has been developed within the framework of an emerging nation, a factor that accounts for the particularities of the book’s structure and its literary qualities that to a reader today might come across as an idiosyncratic use of allegory in a work of history; yet, the author remained very much in tune with his times when consciously deploying the literary modes that characterized writings on the nation in the mid-twentieth century. [28] A tension familiar to us today runs through the work that, on the one hand, sets out to recover the voices and agency of the disarticulated; and on the other, to uncover dynamic processes of transculturation that followed from migration, multilingualism, and ethnic plurality and were constitutive of the identities of those inhabiting the “imagined community”. [29] Ortiz confronts these processes with attempts to stabilize their unruliness through representations of an integrated cultural unit, cast as the bounded space of the nation and the ideological basis for all fixed identities. The invention of a past uncontaminated by cultural contact is analysed by him in terms that point to the workings of power within groups that cut across the colonizer-colonized divide, a perspective that avoids the trap of thinking in binaries that has characterized both nationalist positions and much of postcolonial analysis during the later decades of the twentieth century. In other words, Ortiz’s study is indeed imbued with a political rationale to challenge national frameworks, a dimension frequently overlooked in the reception of his work.

In his preface to the 1995 edition of Ortiz’s book, Fernando Coronil draws our attention to conditions in which the book circulated and that determined its reception – a world divided into capitalist and socialist blocs; to these a third group of ‘developing’ nations was appended, who negotiated either of the two paths to arrive at modernity. [30] Ortiz’s book, he writes, “did not quite fit the terms of this polarized debate. It was unconventional in form and content … and it proposed neither unambiguous solutions nor a blueprint for the future”. [31] The world today presents us with new conditions for an engagement with the core concepts developed by Ortiz: the dissolution of older polarities, coupled with fresh tensions within national formations following globalization, intensified migration, and a backlash of xenophobic nationalism and transnational fundamentalisms. In the recent years, the transcultural has become a buzzword of sorts, adopted by a range of scholars in different, at times loose and not always consistent ways, and framed by different disciplinary contexts. Not all of them respond to or even acknowledge the ground-breaking relevance of the reflections proffered by Ortiz. [32]

Ortiz’s narrative of Cuban history is that of a nation composed of an array of human groups, from Indians to migrants “from the four quarters of the globe”, enslaved and voluntary, who lived in conditions marked by instability, violence as well as creativity. Its content resonates with many of the upheavals of the present world, ensuing from the crisis of liberal democracies and the crumbling of those structures of modernity that had convincingly postulated a firm nexus between concepts of the nation and culture. More than a quarter of a century following the end of the Cold War, earlier polarities have now been overwritten by urgent contemporary ones: migration from West Asia and Africa has breached even recent divisions between the Global North and the Global South, while the move to firm up the boundaries of the West – the European Union and the United States – echoes Oritz’s analysis of political and cultural boundaries as artifices of power. The presence of large immigrant communities in the midst of Western societies has generated discussions on citizenship and its nexus with culture: the meanings of citizenship as a juridical category that secures rights within a national framework while at the same time working as a tool for the bio-political regulation of illegality, have been declared to be insufficiently theorized. [33] In contemporary post-colonial societies too – India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Iran, and most recently, Israel – narratives of citizenship and belonging are ceaselessly being debated, reconstituted, and endangered, as they take on majoritarian hues and punitive forms, while forcing allegiance to an officially fabricated cultural past and a synoptic vision of the future. These issues assume an urgency for art that can function as a domain of symbolic action, as an arena of political and creative practices, of affirmative, performative citizenship rather than a simply reactive aesthetic. By constructing imaginative possibilities that await potential realization, by envisaging a political horizon for the subject and community that challenges the monologic exclusivity, effectively unpacked in Cuban Counterpoint , on which dominant versions of collective belonging are based, artistic practice can “open up transformative potential of dislocation that decenters the very basis of national identity”. [34] A transcultural understanding of cultural belonging thus from its outset it functioned as a lens and an analytical frame that, as it enters the space of present, has the potential of being adjusted, expanded, and recalibrated.

The opening section of Cuban Counterpoint introduces the reader to the “most important figures of the history of Cuba”: sugar and tobacco; in the following section, we are then told that the “real history” of Cuba is constituted by the “intermeshed transmigrations of peoples”. [35] The insistence on the nexus between objects and practices that constitute reference points on a field where a constellation of relationalities unfolds, was alleged to have created a “strange effect” on the readers of the book. We encounter sugar and tobacco as both objects and subjects of history, as products of human activity but also as agents in their own right that empower and constrain humans. Coronil describes Oritz’s method as a form of “counterfetishism” that reins in the “fetish power” of material commodities as a poetic means to appreciate the force it exercises over the imagination, much in the same way as Walter Benjamin did. [36] A close reading of this dense narrative that playfully oscillates between literary and empirical modes does reveal an underlying “counterhumanism” that underpins Ortiz’s critique of modernity, a current that breaks down the ontological distinction between subjects and objects in favour of a distributive agency across persons and things. It anticipates by decades Bruno Latour’s arguments challenging a post-Enlightenment naturalization of the ontological separation of humans and nonhumans – and with it shows the way to an expansive notion of ‘trans-culture’ that can breathe life into those categories reified by strategies of purification.

By bringing materiality to the heart of any investigation of culture, transculturation in this expanded sense takes us to ongoing discussions within art history, caught since its disciplinary formation in an uneasy relationship between the intransigent materiality of its objects and the dematerialization of meaning that in turn has effected different kinds of fragmentation cutting through the field. [37] Systems of value built into the discipline since its inception classify its objects as ‘fine’ or ‘decorative art’, ethnological object, craft, curiosities, or articles of mass consumption. Following from these taxonomies, that are also hierarchies, the objects of art historical investigation are relegated to different sites of display and storage, according to the often not very consistent logic of genres and regional labels. Is Delft chinaware art or an object of everyday use? Does a Fatimid rock crystal, mounted and transformed into a Venetian reliquary, qualify as Islamic or Christian art? Why is a painting by Cézanne a more privileged subject of analysis, considered to possess a greater iconological and semantic complexity, than an ivory box? The category of style mentioned earlier prevents, through its stabilizing function, an engagement with the endless metamorphoses of objects and forms. And finally, institutions that house and display these objects are confronted with the challenge of how to translate transcultural lives of things into a curatorial and pedagogical practice that can effectively make a polyphonous object narrate its many stories, or how to find ways of naming and locating that avoid freezing its identity within a myth of origins. An important plank of an emergent transculturally framed art history is to use connected material cultures to unsettle many narratives of style and civilizational uniqueness, in scholarship as well as in the expanding world of curation and display. The instability introduced by the transcultural object within the ordered world of museum labels that once sought to allow a visitor, for instance, to read a ‘culture’ off a thing in a glass case, has already begun to suggest pathways for scholarship and curating, with a view to tackling the question of how matter shapes aesthetics and culture.

V Agenda for a Transcultural Art History

Transculturation as a perspective for art history builds upon – and this might seem to be a truism – the groundwork of theoretical approaches of the past few decades, such as the linguistic-cum-cultural turn, gender studies, and postcolonial studies, whose critical insights it responds to, refines, and takes in different directions. Transcultural approaches owe a significant debt to the critical edge of such post-colonial studies that questioned master-narratives, claims to universality and diffusionist paradigms wherein culture is seen to flow from metropolitan centres to absorptive peripheries. Yet, a transcultural approach also moves beyond certain strains within postcolonial studies that, through a flattening of Saidian and Foucauldian arguments, postulate epistemic violence as an absolute principle. By eschewing the use of overly generalized concepts – notably the overused notion of hybridity – that have become straightjackets into which every mode of relationality gets forced, transculturation has worked to find a more precise and differentiated conceptual apparatus to plausibly describe and grasp the specificity and dynamics of global relationships. More importantly, by placing the opposition of the colonizer and the colonized within a larger matrix of encounters, the transcultural perspective does not adhere to a national framing of its objects of investigation. [38] And yet, the critical edges of a number of finely tuned postcolonial approaches continue to dynamize transcultural analyses, such as the urge to ‘decolonize’ disciplines and institutions by questioning the assumptions on which they were founded, practised, and continue to function; [39] or to move beyond critiques of representation and to look for the fragility and fractures within Eurocentric constellations, to read representations against the grain. [40] That a self-reflexive combination of the two perspectives can be a creative process, has been established by the work of Christian Kravagna, whose concept of a Transmoderne joins the early beginnings of the notion of transculturation to modernist art practices, whose connections he brings to light. [41]

Today the agenda of writing a transcultural history of art has grown in complexity as it faces constellations of the present: this has brought forth its set of routine orthodoxies in thinking about cultural difference, following the logic of economic globalization and multicultural inclusiveness. Today we experience multiculturalism as a progressive political imperative in liberal democracies, one that is characterized by an affirmation of cultural diversity as value per se. It celebrates cultural difference as a form of plenitude in which diversity exists side by side, with little interaction or dynamism among the diverse elements. Multicultural inclusion frequently results in an extended horizontal breadth that tends to de-historicize and flatten out contradictory relationships amongst those brought together in the name of tolerance and inclusiveness. In the final section of this essay, I will return to the question of multiculturalism and its implications for art production and curation, and to distinguishing the multicultural from the transcultural.

Here I wish to draw attention to the methodological implications of prevailing positions that celebrate the assimilation of cultural diversity in contemporary art as a novel feature, held to belong to the present alone. Responding to the generally elated mood engendered by the vision of a borderless and shared art world, Okwui Enwezor speaks of an “intense proximity” specific to the contemporary art world that has over the past two and a half decades made sites and mechanisms available for exploring the diversity of post-identitarian discourses. [42] Elaborating on what he termed the “poetics of ethnography”, Enwezor argued that ethnography of the last century, marked as it was by a “voracious appetite for radical alterity”, presupposed a measure of distance between near and far – a distance that was both spatial and temporal between the modern societies and the objects that came under its ethnographic lens. Contemporary globalization has now brought us to a historic moment where “there are arguably no more outside cultures to discover or faraway places to explore”. This collapse of distance – “intense proximity” – allows you to shift from the idea of national space, enclosed by borders that constitute it as physical location, to “frontier space” that constantly assumes new morphologies – the local, national, transnational, geo-political, denominational, contaminated etc. [43]

There are several variants of such a form of presentism, some more ahistorical than the others, yet each one works in insidious ways to reaffirm earlier canons, such as those of modernism, whose monocultural authority continues to be accepted as given. Instead of positing a progression from the modern to the contemporary in terms of collapsing distance, a transcultural perspective could be more usefully deployed to examine the specific dynamic between distance and proximity that operates within individual and different historical periods and at different sites across the globe. Further, it urges us to ask what the collapsing of difference that is induced by contemporary conditions of migration, travel, and media connectivity entails in terms of transactions with cultural difference? What are the new hierarchical modes that are created to deal with these? Where can we observe continuities within disciplinary and institutional hierarchical principles of the last century and this one, and which new boundaries are created following the dissolution of older ones? Underlying these questions is the assumption that negotiating cultural difference is not an aberrant or incidental feature of artistic production in earlier historical periods; rather we need to test the hypothesis that takes it to be a structural, even normative characteristic for any period we investigate.

Postcolonial analyses have paid intensive attention to questions of modernity as well as artistic and literary modernism in colonial contexts. Transcultural Studies builds on much of this groundwork, yet it also seeks to avoid an overemphasis on polarities and oppositional structures by paying greater attention to multiple relationalities that unfold beyond the colonizer-colony divide; this involves finding ways of remapping experiences and experiments of the art world, by attending to scale, to multiple sites of knowledge, and to shifting perspectives. [44] Examining a generative agonism between power and resistance that often formed a driving force behind much modernist art also helps in highlighting the often highly ambivalent character of modernity under the aegis of colonialism.

In the following section, I hope to show how a transculturally framed art history can help uncover synchronicity or coevalness, where belatedness or derivative practices were assumed. By looking beyond linear explanatory models, the concept of transculturation involves more than simply adding missing artists to an existing canon. Looking at modernism as a global, transcultural process also urges us to take a closer look at regional singularities, to underline that transcultural interaction did not follow a straight, single, or foreseeable path. Instead, we become aware of different approaches to or modalities of transcultural interaction, so that we need to study a combination of comparison and entanglement.

VI Transcultural Modernism – Connections and Comparisons

In an earlier attempt to take stock of what a transcultural art history might address, I had sketched a view of artistic modernism ‘from the peripheries’ as part of a move to question its monolithic nature and to argue for an expanded definition that would include the artistic experiments of modernist artists in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. [45] The engagement with visual practices beyond the metropolitan centres of the West meant asking: How is our understanding of modernist and avant-garde art practices reconfigured if viewed as emanating from networks of multiple centres across the globe, adding Bombay, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, Tehran, Seoul, or Tokyo to Paris, Berlin, and New York? To what extent can we explore transcultural fields of artistic production as emerging from a multi-polar and yet entangled modernism that was generated in Europe and beyond, often cutting across the colonizer/colony divide to connect with critical currents that were pan-Asian, too? [46] Recasting artistic modernism as a transcultural process involves more than bringing neglected currents into an existing canon; it means questioning the foundations upon which the notion of the modern has been constructed and to undermine the narrative that hinges upon a dichotomy between the West and the non-West and makes the latter as necessarily derivative, or views it as a series of distant, peripheral, or ‘alternative’ modernisms. Instead of coining a host of modernisms – Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Tibetan –, all understood as parallel streams that never meet and bring in national or ethnic units through the back door, a transcultural view of modernism regards these as enmeshed with the others, which allows us to begin asking to what extent such entanglement was constitutive for a Western avant-garde. The recent years have seen burgeoning research from several regional perspectives that have uncovered vast amounts of material from sites across the globe – Cairo, Tehran, Ljubljana, Mexico City, Rio, Mumbai – undermining once and for all a story of belatedness, of centres and peripheries. [47] The task that remains – admittedly no easy one – is to draw these individual stories out of their isolated ‘areas’ and plot them on a common matrix that would show connections, uncover synchronicity and coevalness, refusal and rejection, and not least, rewrite the story of European modernism by situating it within the larger, complex political and cultural determinations of colonialism and global connections that made its emergence possible.

The following paragraphs outline – in necessarily condensed form – a direction towards framing the study of artistic modernism as a field of transculturation, composed of many histories that connect and diverge, where connections and comparisons both serve as useful tools, and perhaps a safeguard against flattening regional experiments, strategies, and subject-positions. Let us take as our starting point the narratives of European artistic modernism. Art historical accounts of modernism refer consensually to those experiments of the early twentieth century driven by movements such as Cubism, Surrealism, or Abstract Expressionism – the concept of the Avant-Garde – as having effected a radical breakthrough by undermining established systems and languages of representation, while they reined these movements to an institutional critique of academies and entrenched art practices. Even as a large number of writings in recent years have critically reviewed the claims to universality built into existing accounts of modernist art, questioning their eurocentrism, teleological structures, and gender ideologies, the critical discussion of artistic modernism has remained confined within a bounded domain of ‘art’ and individual artists, or at best has forged links with related movements in literature or music. Uncovering the transcultural foundations of artistic modernism calls for overcoming this taxonomic principle of separation, itself a product of modernist ideology, and for a plotting of art production onto a historical field that it shared with related phenomena, all engaged in producing artistic knowledge about the world, and in doing so through close material relationships with migrant objects. In other words, modernist experiments of the Avant-Garde were a nodal-point in an Ariadne-like web, to borrow from Bruno Latour, making up a shared matrix of transactions through which art and art historical knowledge about the world and about the sites of display were produced. This means that the modernist artistic revolution was coterminous and entangled with at least two other phenomena that have been relegated to distinct institutional and scholarly spaces: the building of ethnological collections and the writing of an art history of the world, Weltkunstgeschichte , discussed earlier in this article. What are the fresh insights that could be gained by bringing these strands together in a shared, braided history? Artistic movements such as Cubism or Surrealism have been frequently brought in conjunction with ethnological objects, collected by artists or that they viewed in museums: such encounters between artists and objects have been singled out to produce a discourse about the “affinities” between the “tribal and the modern” that became the pivot of the exhibition at the MoMA curated by William Rubin in 1984. [48] The scathing critique of the exhibition’s curatorial concept from different quarters brought with it a hardening of a modern institutional separation of the spaces where ‘high art’ and ‘ethnological objects’ were conserved, displayed, and thereby vested with signification and value: the two rarely met, apart from the one brief, notorious moment at the MoMA in 1984.

One among the many faces of modernity is the acquisitive quality of collecting – by colonial administrators, archaeologists, anthropologists, missionaries, travellers, scholars – that has meant that since the Renaissance hordes of objects from all over the world filled the repositories of ethnographic collections and museums. Travelling, buying, and collecting acquired a particularly feverish character in the wake of colonialism, driven by the concern that modernization was leading to a rapid disappearance of remnants of the past that needed to be safeguarded and preserved. In its delineation of a ‘developmental history of art’ corresponding to evolutionary classification schemes to characterize the world’s cultures from the ‘savage’ to the ‘civilized’, as discussed above, the practitioners of a Weltkunstgeschichte provided the world of art with a conceptual language to describe these objects. It is in this context that the concept of the ‘primitive’ was coined, a term that became a key concept of modernist culture at the turn of the century – artistic modernism’s alter-ego as Kobena Mercer put it. [49]

The primitive was deployed in the ethnology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – and subsequently appropriated by world art histories – to designate the Naturvölker of the present, that is, those who were still living through a stage of the past in the full light of the present and could serve as an available model to understand humanity’s phased cultural development. These included the Aborigines of Australia, peoples of Africa and Oceania, or of native America – living societies of the present, colonized by Western powers, yet said to be frozen in an immemorial past: “living fossils” was how they were described by Grosse, whose Anfänge der Kunst is entirely devoted to this group. Selectively applying the label to living societies meant, for instance, that objects from Mexico or Central America were excluded from the category of the primitive, even though they were present in European collections long before those of Africa and Oceania. A likely explanation might be that the Inca and Aztec societies had long been destroyed and could no longer serve as living symbols of primitive simplicity that was subject to ethnological enquiry into humanity’s past or aesthetic idealization. The mobile materiality of the objects made their reframing as objects of knowledge possible – of knowledge produced by scholars, curators, and artists. They also figured in a central way within foundation myths of modernist creativity.

Among the most well-known and firmly anchored foundational myths about modern art – without which no art history survey book is complete – is that which tells the story of how creative energies were generated through the encounter between artists and the primitive, about how objects – particularly masks and statues, a category of objects often brought together under the label of ‘fetish’ – have been catalytic in releasing those energies that then effected a radical breakthrough in the language of form. [50] Foundation myths of this kind encapsulate the double-edged quality of primitivism: they transmit an expression of fear, ugliness, and terror that then gets purified by the facture of the modernist artist. This meant that the primitive could function as a source of new energies; this double-edged quality makes it open to transculturation and accounts for the global resonance it acquired.

A transcultural approach to such inherited narratives cannot stop at simply debunking them as Eurocentric constructs. It might be more productive to uncover the paths through which knowledge about the objects and their producers and collectors actually travelled. The authorities – anthropologists, art historians, curators, or artists – who read these objects as articulations of a mystical, preconscious mentality depended in turn for their knowledge on another group of border crossers or cultural brokers, such as missionaries or colonial administrators located in Africa – or ethnologists such as Leo Frobenius – with whom they were in contact and whose information carried the authority of being first hand information. [51] The attitudes of these different actors to colonial practices might have varied, in that some of these information brokers had adopted critical stances to overt acts of colonial appropriation or violence, yet they did so without questioning the epistemological foundations of the knowledge they were complicit in generating. What they shared in common was the concern to overlook the transformatory effects of colonialism on the societies through which they travelled. Instead they were determined to search for that which was still untouched by the ‘foreign’; from here ensued narratives about the native mind, a mentality that was outside of rationality, entrenched in myth. [52] The fetish came to serve as a code to access the musealized object in Western collections, as its meanings and uses disseminated and were picked up by academic anthropology, psychology, and world art history. [53] Such interweaving of bodies of knowledge is seminal to the production and subsequent readings of art works.

The intense discussions provoked by the 1984 exhibition at the MoMA that postulated certain ‘affinities’ between ‘primitive’ objects and a modern aesthetic, hinged largely on a critique of the ‘primitive’ as a Western construct and of its separation and abstraction of objects from their context. Denial of history, of “coevalness” to that context, following from Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other , was the most frequently heard critical argument, as the curators of the display did not bother to provide information about the provenience and historical situatedness of the objects classified as primitive; they were therefore abstracted from time and history. [54] Indeed, the notion of coevalness can now take another dramatic turn that emanates from the following paradox: while information brokers like those mentioned above set out to search for those aspects of ‘primitive’ cultures that could be construed as immemorial or unchanging, the vast numbers of objects that we associate with modernism were in fact – as recent research has brought forth – participants within intricate commercialized collection networks that connected the French and Belgian colonies with art dealers and gallerists in Europe and from there to New York in the first two decades of the twentieth century. This is a long and tortuous story involving collectors, dealers, theoreticians, and critics – parts of which were narrated by Yaëlle Biro in the exhibition African Art. New York and the Avant-Garde at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2013–2014). It can now be affirmed that so much of ‘primitive’ art was commissioned and produced in the colonies during the early twentieth century for Western markets, whose thirst for it appeared unquenchable, making these various elements part of a single nexus of modernity and commodification; rather than survivals of a disappearing past to be salvaged, they were actors in a shared and entangled historical present. [55]

A further dimension that restores coevalness to the connections between Europe and other continents, and relativizes the narrative of the primitive and the modern from a non-European perspective, is the emergence – in the wake of colonialism – of a prolific domain of art production in the colonies of Africa and Oceania that specialized not in recreating the primitive, but in more modern genres. Here too, a growing market for such genres as well as the spread of European images through media such as newspapers, journals, and popular literary productions, were decisive factors in this transcultural enterprise. The Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in Cologne possesses a collection of such objects that had been assembled by its director, the anthropologist Julius Lips and author of the book The Savage hits back . [56] Mainly drawings and carved wood figurines, these objects – at an immediate, superficial level – can be read as a response of the oppressed native to his colonial master using the weapon of caricature. A longue durée investigation can help place such a genre of art objects within a longer history of transcultural contacts between Portuguese traders and the inhabitants of West Africa. [57] From the perspective of modernism, it is of interest to explore both the multiple sites as well as the different local strategies of image production. The objects collected by Lips still await a transcultural exploration – many of their caricatural forms, for example a figurine of Queen Victoria or one of a young couple walking their dog, speak of an interaction with genres and materials, especially caricature or photographs, that had most likely migrated to the colonies accompanying colonial modernity. [58] In the early twentieth century, such artistic production was institutionalized at its site as ‘modern’ art, made identifiable through the oeuvre of individual artists, such as, to name one example, Thomas Onajeje Odulate, whose works too can be seen in the Rautenstrauch-Joest collection. [59] These, however, do not figure in discussions on modernist art, but have come instead to be labelled ‘tourist art’, after a market of buyers to which many of the artists initially responded.

Modernist art and art history, two faces of the same coin, crossed many borders as they migrated across the globe, including to those sites beyond the modern West that were cast as locations of the primitive, or placed on different stages of the civilizational scala. Frequently, colonialism was the channel through which the encounter with modernity unfolded, as was in the case of the Indian subcontinent. This encounter unleashed many creative energies, even in highly asymmetrical relationships of power. So when we strive to write a history of modernism as a global, multi-sited process, as a story of migration, intersection, reconfiguration, and refusal, we confront the primitive as a phenomenon that undergoes transculturation. Our attention is directed to how actors on these sites, caught in the throes of modernity with all its paradoxical tensions, ironically appropriated the primitive in different ways, and even sought to make its civilizational aspect serve as a critique of colonialism. This has been an argument made by Partha Mitter, who reads “the Indian discourse of Primitivism” as a critique of “Western progress”. [60] Mitter discusses different variants of the primitive – that include artists, such as Amrita Sher Gil, statesmen like Gandhi, and institutions such as Rabindranath Tagore’s university at Santiniketan – in what ends up as a romanticized, somewhat indiscriminating use of the concept. The argument proffered here is that the concept was adopted as a mode of civilizational critique of the modern West and so functioned as an act of resistance to colonialism, an appealing position echoed by Mercer. [61] Here, a more fine-tuned method indebted to transcultural analysis, that seeks to investigate the morphologies of relationalities and their often paradoxical or contradictory workings, can suggest more possibilities of reconfiguring a concept beyond the poles of colonial pejoration and subaltern resistance. A close look at the ways in which artists since the early twentieth century have been drawing on the concept of the primitive does point to an attempt at reconfiguration, though not entirely an unequivocal act of resistance, even as the primitive is being turned on its head. Artists – for instance the modernist Ram Kinkar Baij, trained at Santiniketan – discover the primitive at home in the form of the Santhal tribals, who were branded by colonial administrators with all the markers of a terrifying primitive. In his work, Baij uses his proximity to the group to infuse coevalness into the concept of the primitive by locating its actors in the transformations of the present, such as the economy of the market or as factory workers living according to new temporal regulations. But while bringing coevalness, he also replicates some of the asymmetries of power built into modernity when framed by the idea of the nation. [62] For here, another transformation intervenes to shape the artist’s relationship to his subjects, one that is also a product of colonial modernity and needs to be brought back into the matrix. This relates to the emergence of the artist as framed in the context of modern art history – the “absolute artist”, a concept whose genealogy Catherine Soussloff has studied. [63] In the Indian context, pre-colonial art production had been linked to patronage, first by ruling principalities, to be later joined by prosperous trading communities, officials of different East India Companies. The artist had the status of an artisan, was defined by his work and caste, and not always named. Modernity in the form of colonial art schools and universities brought with it both the formation of the artist as professional and the teaching of art history. (The first art history department was established in 1919 in Kala Bhavana, Tagore’s university by the art historian Stella Kramrisch as an adjunct to the ancient Indian history and archaeology department.) The artist aspired to become a member of a literate elite at a remove from subalternity; his status was now defined by creativity, as one who brings his gaze to the objects that are transformed into art.

For all the sympathies that Ram Kinkar Baij expresses towards his subjects, who are also the objects of representations, and the intention to infuse temporal coevalness into the concept of the primitive notwithstanding, otherness/distance is drawn into a national – anti-colonial – project through the issue of class. The modernist agenda with all its enchantments, accessories – and exclusions – was harnessed to the cause of the nation, making it a double edged tool: while anti-colonial, it at the same time replicates homogenizing narratives of nation building, which see the nation as a transcendent whole, flattening the stories of its many ‘fragments’ that survive on the margins. Dipesh Chakrabarty has drawn our attention to the paradoxes that are characteristic of critical moments of decolonization, located on an extended cusp of empire and nation. He points in particular to the deliberations that marked the 1950s and 1960s in India and fostered what he calls a “pedagogical style of politics” wherein the precise performance of politics re-enacts civilizational and cultural hierarchies. [64] It is in such processes that art history came to be centrally implicated; it actively participate in the exoticization and musealization of identities, such as those of the tribal groups discussed above, during the early postcolonial years.

A transcultural perspective must therefore navigate multiple paradoxes and challenges – in contexts beyond Europe its tool box must first help to dislodge the epistemic frontiers of the discipline, grounded in a conception of nationally framed culture. This is particularly urgent as so much of art history still has to find a way of dealing with distributed agency that might then generate a dismantling of its evolutionist logic, wherein the single artist creating masterpieces stands for a pinnacle of achievement. At the same time, art historians still have to find a modality of rethinking the nation within a transcultural frame before it can be transcended.

The ability to navigate multiple scales, to avoid simple binaries between the global and the local, gives the transcultural approach an explanatory edge over concepts such as transnationalism, translocality, or methods used in global history. Yet, denominations of scale assume a further complexity that is a challenge to be addressed. On the level of scale, viewed from a geo-political standpoint, the nation stands between the global, the regional, and the local. However, the issue of subjectivity and self-positioning comes into play here. Scale frequently forms a field of tension between the perspective of actors and the processes in which they are involved. A region or even a nation can be perceived as a ‘locality’ from the viewpoint of the agents, for whom it may be a site to be recuperated, for instance from a larger constellation such as an empire, as was the perception of a large number of modernist artists in South Asia. The nation was the frame within which modernism’s critical edge was appropriated, its potential energized anti-colonial resistance, and its metropolitan meanings were inflected and translated within the frame of an emergent national culture. A similar argument can be made for places designated as ‘centres’ or ‘peripheries’: they can be reconceived within individual narratives and re-imagined geographies that urge us to read the use of such terms as forms of self-positioning, and therefore, as one more factor to be woven into the web of transcultural relationalities.

VII Beyond the Horizon [65]

Transculturation, conceptualized in the work of Fernando Ortiz, described the agency of disarticulated groups as they selected and recreated from materials they appropriated from metropolitan sources, to form identities and negotiate power relations. The theoretical import of this concept provided a starting point and a foundation for research, which had the potential to be extended and refined into a complex framework to study the dynamics of cultural formations at every level, by traversing multiple scales and making place for varying subjectivities. Revisiting modernism through a transcultural lens and at different sites across the globe, as I just argued, allows us to move towards a view of art as a world-making practice, always already transcultured. The transition from the ‘modern’ to the ‘contemporary’ that takes place during what Stuart Hall labels the “fourth phase of globalization”, [66] is characterized by the growth of transnational corporations, neoliberal economics, the heightened role of accelerated information technologies, and the culture industries; their workings bring fresh challenges that can serve to test the efficacy of available methodological tools and propel them towards further sharpening.

Any attempt to fix a signpost for contemporary art ends up as a dysfunctional exercise in view of differing, often conflicting standpoints, as indicated at the beginning of this essay. For Peter Osborne the “contemporary” is therefore a discursive category, an “operative fiction” through which we attribute a sense of unity to the present that encompasses disjunctive temporalities that we can never fully grasp. [67] Boris Groys ascribes a similar stasis to the contemporary that, as opposed to modernity that nurtured utopian visions of the future, “is interested primarily in itself”. [68] Given its ambitions to encompass the world, contemporary art, it would seem, can no longer denote a style, or a period, or even an ideological position other than a commitment to the present. Can the transcultural as a mode of thought become the basis for a new political imaginary that transcends presentism and enables artists, institutions, and scholarship to envisage the contours of a project to rethink the world?

A ubiquitous apparatus of liberal democracies today, to both compensate for past exclusions and respond to the challenge of inner diversity, is the principle of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism introduces a relativist pluralism of the current moment wherein all styles and beliefs are considered equally valid and where the prerogative of judgment is frequently ceded to the art market. Together with other kinds of cultural media, such as music, cuisine, or festivals, art too is called upon to provide the visible ‘evidence’ of a given society’s multiculturalism. The burden this places on artists is the expectation, emanating from curators or the art market, that their art would function as a surface from which a clear national, ethnic, or religious identity could be read off. The nexus between the power of an expanding art market and the influential authority of a select “curatoriate” [69] has admittedly promoted a tendency to self-orientalization among artists of the non-West.

Yet, capitulation to spectacles of exotic difference built into the visual culture of global capitalism and multiculturalism has not been the only, not even the overwhelming response among artists. Rather they have seized this opportunity to appropriate for their art a function of refusal or resistance, to produce subversive meanings that would make transparent the terms on which inclusion in multicultural contexts takes place. Art becomes a generator of particular knowledge, as for example in the work of Yinka Shonibare [70] who draws upon expressive devices, that include both materiality and irony to scramble codes and in the process provide an eloquent commentary on closed concepts such as the nation or culture as identifying marks. One feature that runs through the artist’s entire production is the use of brightly colored batik fabrics, long associated in public perception with ‘Africa’; from here the link between Shonibare’s art and his ethnicity followed automatically. Material that ostensibly works as a guarantee of his art’s authenticity is actually used in an ironic twist to disrupt precisely such a notion of the authentic African. The story of the material speaks of another geography, one of trade and global commercial relationships, that connected the continents and belie any notion of pure origins. The artist explained that he buys the cloth at the local Brixton market. It is designed by Asians living in North Manchester for export to Africa; the batik wax technique was not African but brought from Indonesia by the Dutch and from there it travelled to Manchester, where it was produced in the textile mills, designed by local Asians. The machine-made Manchester fabric was then exported to African countries, where it was worn by members of an urban populace who welcomed it as a product of advanced technology, to then be re-exported to Britain, where it sold as ‘African’ material. [71] This elaborate story of the fabric’s geographic circulations not only challenges all notions of origins and authenticity built into a present notion of multiculturalism, but is used by the artist to show how such ascriptions of identity are an artificial construct, that these are as transcultured as the fabric he uses for his work. This example of a specific artist’s intervention sensitizes us to the conscious undermining of boundaries between different domains of knowledge production effected by contemporary art practices that strive towards criticality. Such visual thinking has an “undisciplined” texture, in that it can spawn forms of knowing not conflatable with mainstream disciplines, even as it draws upon their resources such as texts, writing, archives, and oral traditions. [72] Such knowledge acquires a force of its own, unpredictable and incipient in any space – urban or rural, derelict or wasteland. The search for methods that enable us to productively explore its dynamics is still at an initial stage.

“If contemporary art is the answer, the question is ‘How can capitalism be made more beautiful?’” [73] The artist Hito Steyerl’s voice joins a small but vocal critical stream that draws attention to the increased proximity of global capital to the institutions of art – notably museums and biennials – and the dominant logic of privatization that impinges on their content, programs, and curatorial practices. One striking tendency is the way the encounter with art today is subordinated to the overwhelming spatial and material force generated by the spectacular architecture of museums of contemporary art that carry the signature of star architects: Frank Gehry (Guggenheim Bilbao; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris), Shigeru Ban (Pompidou Metz), I.M. Pei (Louvre Pyramid; Museum of Islamic Art, Qatar). Add to this list the upcoming super-sized buildings on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island, intended to house art and performance, or the prominently showcased architectural plans for the KMOMA (Kolkata), the global panorama of emerging art museums suggests that the frame required for art must be first and foremost boldly designed, photogenic, and affluent. Are those institutions of art, once endowed with civic and pedagogical functions within emergent nation states, now being transformed into populist sites of leisure and entertainment? The main demand placed by corporate capital on the art institutions dependent on it, so the argument goes, is not only to sustain audience numbers, but to constantly strive to increase them, mainly through blockbuster exhibitions. This in turn raises further questions about issues of spectatorship – if we move beyond the modernist notion of spectatorship or audience as made up of the individual flâneur , or groups of viewers or consumers, to conceiving of publics as participants, co-producers or citizens, what does this imply for art and its institutions? [74]

Among several speculative trajectories heading towards a critical reorientation of the world of art and its institutions, I will cite a few examples of how a concept of globality that is animated by transcultural thinking might show the way to more experimental modes of engagement with the dilemmas of the contemporary: this could apply to the museum, to the category of art it enshrines, and the modalities of spectatorship it produces. The global proliferation of art institutions – museums, biennials, but also collectives, curatorial-cum-research platforms, and micro-organizations [75] – has allowed a greater space to experiment with more radical models of museology and art production. A more politicized engagement with the historical moment informs these initiatives: they eschew presentism to define the contours of a future art world, do not discard history but look at artistic endeavour as a way of “standing on the right side of history”. [76] Transcultural approaches are now inspiring museums to devise new curatorial strategies to anchor their collections in global contexts, either through temporary exhibitions or through rethinking the parcours of their collection, to make it narrate a story in which the palimpsestic identities of its objects are unmasked, reconfigured, and re-anchored both within and beyond the national space. [77]

One such mode of critical curating that has already brought forth creative alternatives, disrupting existing taxonomies and disciplinary protocols, can be observed at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid. This is an interesting example, not least because this is a national museum of modern and contemporary art in the heart of the Spanish capital, flanked by two canonical art institutions, the Prado and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. It is not a museum that needs to suffer anxiety over visitor numbers; this allows its curatorial policy to focus more on the how to steer the visitors through an array of works. It is in the presentation of its permanent collection that we observe a number of radical experiments. Most rooms – be they thematic (“Art in a Divided World 1945– 1968”), devoted to a style (“Cubism”), or to a single, iconic work (“Guernica”) – present constellations of works that scramble genres and media, being driven more by conveying a message seen through different lenses, that conventional art history bypasses in its fidelity to genres or concern for ‘quality’. [78] The radical potential of this approach is most apparent in the treatment of Picasso’s Guernica that no longer stands as an isolated masterpiece occupying a ritualized place in a white-cube setting. Rather it is part of an assemblage of documents, sketches, posters, magazines, and a documentary film on the Spanish civil war, all of which partook of the same historical moment and make visible and tangible the networks of knowledge production and relationships in which the work was imbricated. Instead of viewing the artist as a single custodian of a modernist canon, the visitor has access to sites of meaning making and interactive moments, also highlighting transcultural connections with Latin America that this single work shares with others. [79]

In a similar manner, recursive interventions by individual curators in recurring institutional contexts – such as the Venice Biennale or the documenta – that have accumulated aura and authority through their longevity and periodicity, show another path to producing “a centrifugal diffusion of dissidence”. [80] Two different projects, both featured at the Venice Biennale, used this platform to reflect and debate on the nation-state in the context of the twenty-first century. Citizens and Subjects was a three-part project curated by Maria Hlavajova together with the artist Aernout Mik for the Dutch pavilion during the Biennale of 2007. Citizens and Subjects comprised of a multichannel video installation questioning the distinction between subjects and citizens in view of the challenges posed by immigration to the nation-state that responds with enforcement of security by deploying fear and anxiety. Reminding viewers of a field of ambiguity between subjection and possible liberation, the work of art created a space for discussions and interventions on related themes, making the pavilion less a representative of ‘art of the Netherlands’ and more a discursive space for artists, writers, scholars, and the public to engage in a discussion about the nation. [81] A similar impulse motivated the curator Ranjit Hoskote who, when he accepted the commission to curate the first ‘national’ Indian pavilion at the Venice Biennale of 2011, deployed this canonical site as a laboratory to deliberate on whether the “idea of India” [82] could be pushed beyond its existing limits. The intriguing title Everybody Agrees: It’s About to Explode makes one pause at the ambiguous “it” that might refer to the nation-state, to contemporary art, to the art market, or to myths about these entities. The transcultural history of the exhibition space at the Arsenale was drawn into a project, in which each of the four artistic positions presented could be opened up to explore whether national identity could be extended across plural anchors of belonging. [83]

This extensive survey has tried to delineate ways to coin a notion of globality informed by a transcultural perspective as a form of critical thinking about art production, its institutions, and the scholarly practice of art history. Art history as a form of world-making – of grappling with the past and of glimpsing the contours of emerging possibilities as embodied in art production – is dependent on the criticality of a transcultural approach to rethink its epistemic foundations. This also means that the transcultural approach has to be constantly sharpening its tools and refining its methods in response to ever-fresh challenges. It needs to move beyond studying connectivity or mobility or interaction per se, a characteristic of much of transcultural research till date, to be able to arrive at the transformative potential of transculturation that opens up from “behind the horizon”, [84] to grasp the intellectual gains that are secreted from the connectedness of cultures. A transcultural art history needs to find ways of theoretically incorporating new factors that impinge on the relationships it investigates: paying attention to scale, to “anachronic” temporalities, [85] to textures of affect, and to different modes of knowledge beyond that of our scholarship – the artistic, the everyday and non-professional – that might bring with them conflicting claims to authority.

For my esteemed colleague Rudolf Wagner, with whom I have had several stimulating conversations on the ideas presented here and who has generously shared references and materials with me.

This essay continues the discussion I initiated in an earlier article on defining the methodological contours of a transculturally framed global art history. Its substance draws from my forthcoming book, Can art history be made global? A discipline in transition . See Monica Juneja, Global art history and the ‘burden of representation’, in: Hans Belting, Jacob Birken, Andrea Buddensieg et al. (eds.), Global studies: Mapping contemporary art and culture , Ostfildern 2011, 274–297.

A considerably shorter and differently structured form of this essay – nonetheless retaining its core ideas – was delivered as a keynote address to the 34 th Kunsthistorikertag held in Dresden (March 8 – 12, 2017) carrying the motto: “Kunst global – Kunst lokal”. I would like to take this opportunity to thank once more the organizers of the event for honouring me with this invitation. I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers of this journal for their feedback. Thanks are equally due to Jennifer Pochodzalla for help with formatting.

© 2018 Monica Juneja, published by De Gruyter

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• ForewordSharing a Meaning: An Introduction, Kamal BoullataPart One: Critical PerspectivesHistory of my Face, Khaled MattawaBorders (and Boarders) of Art: Notes from a Foreign Land, Frederick N. BohrerThe Globalisation of Art, Achille Bonito OlivaBelonging and Not Belonging, Laymert Garcia dos SantosWhere Here is Elsewhere, Jean FisherIn Defence of Metaphor, Elias KhourySpheres, Cities, Transitions: International Perspectives on Art and Culture, Gerardo MosqueraProspectives for a New Classicality, Boris BrolloNotes on Globalisation, National Identities and the Production of Signs, Nicolas BourriaudStates of the Strait, Nadia TaziBeginning with Edward Said, Joseph A. MassadPart Two: The Sharjah ExperimentThe 7th Sharjah Biennial, Hoor Al QasimiA Place to Go, Jack PersekianUnfolding Identities, Ken LumMore than a Feeling: Issues of Curatorial Criteria, Tirdad ZolghadrContributorsBibliography.
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First Things First...

Globalization and transnationalism are often perceived as phenomena that have had their most apparent impact on art in the contemporary era. Several scholars such as Andreas Huyssen, however, have accurately and persuasively discussed globalization and transnationalism as historically relevant and pervasive topics that contest the belief that cultures can be or were ever actually “pure.”

Instead, cultures/nations/ethnicities/groups have always inevitably interacted, collided, and blended throughout time. In conjunction with this lecture, you might consider today’s digital advancements and increasingly post-neoliberal world from the historical perspective of the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent World Fairs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Background Readings

Ai Wei Wei, Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Label , 1994.

For instructors , I recommend:

Andreas Huyssen, ed., Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).

Jonathan Harris, ed., Globalisation and Contemporary Art (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).

Kobena Mercer, ed., Exiles, Diasporas, and Strangers (Boston: The MIT Press, 2008).

I also highly recommend downloading the Art21’s Season Six Educators’ Guide . It touches on some of the major relevant topics and themes of this lecture, including concepts of boundaries and change.

The guide here is also a simple overview of globalization and its impact on art by the Levin Institute of SUNY.

For students , I recommend:

Andreas Huyssen, ed., “Introduction,” Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 1–23.

“ Scenes from a Globalized Artworld ” is a strong Art21 blog post dealing with issues central to globalization and transnationalism.

Content Suggestions

The key ideas of this lecture can be explored in an hour and fifteen minutes through a variety of examples , including:

• William Marlow, View of the Wilderness at Kew , 1763
• Édouard Manet, Portrait of Émile Zola , 1868
• Jean-Léon Gerôme, The Snake Charmer , c. 1870
• Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles D’Avignon , 1907
• Aaron Douglas, Negro in an African Setting from Aspects of Negro Life , 1934
• Zhang Hongtu, Long Live Chairman Mao Series , 1989
• Alighiero e Boetti, Mappa del Mondo , 1989
• Ai Wei Wei, Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Label , 1994
• Yinka Shonibare, The Swing (After Fragonard) , 2001
• O Zhang, Daddy and I No. 18 , 2006
• Shelly Jyoti, An Ode to Neel Darpan , 2009
• Samson Young, Liquid Borders , 2012
• Laura Kina, Okinawa — All American Food , 2013

Diaspora : This term refers to the dispersal of a particular group of people from their homeland (see “Homeland”, below). Most specifically, it refers to the expelling of the Jews from their homeland, but has been co-opted by many other disciplines to refer to forced, or sometimes voluntary, migrations due to war, poverty, famine, or other traumatic circumstances.

Globalization : Globalization refers to increasing integration of different areas of the world and their respective worldviews, commercial products, ideas, money, and cultural productions. Inherent in this definition is the economic impact of changing borders and definitions of the nation-state (see “Nation-state”, below). In 2000, the International Monetary Fund defined four aspects that comprise globalization: trade and transactions, capital and investment movements, migration and movement of people, and exchange of knowledge. These increasing exchanges are fueled by advancements in transportation and telecommunications. Globalization is sometimes defined as primarily the economic side of transnationalism.

Homeland : the original (usually ethnic and cultural) nation-state and geographic land of a particular group of people.

Nation : people with a common identity that ideally includes shared culture, language, and feelings of belonging.

Nation-State : The modern nation-state generally emerged from the World War II era. Characteristic of the modern world, the concept of nation-states refers to particular types of states in which governments have sovereign power within defined territorial areas (hint: boundaries play a big role!), with populations that are made up of “citizens” who know themselves to be members of their nation-state. Members of nation-states maintain some political sovereignty over the land that is claimed to belong to a nation-state.

Transnationalism : Transnationalism refers to the movement of people, cultures, and ideas across borders and groups. Stemming from the concept of the nation-state (see below), transnationalism also refers to phenomena evident in flows of people, products, and knowledge from one nation to another. These flows are often difficult to define, unstable, and fluid by their very nature.

To get started, William Marlow is a wonderful example of an early world traveler who was interested in other cultures, and more specifically, interested in bringing aesthetics from “exotic” places back to Europe. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website offers this description of Marlow’s watercolor View of the Wilderness at Kew : “The magnificent Chinese Pagoda of Kew Gardens, designed in 1757 by William Chambers, has always attracted much attention. In the mid-eighteenth century, the pagoda fueled a rage for such buildings throughout Europe, and even today remains one of London’s main tourist attractions. This sheet forms part of an album with delicately rendered watercolor drawings made by William Marlow after Chambers’s designs, later published as Plans, Elevations, Sections and Perspective Views of the Gardens and Buildings of Kew in Surrey, the Seat of Her Royal Highness, the Princess Dowager of Wales (London, 1783). In addition to this general view, there are three other detailed and architecturally precise drawings of the pagoda, showing its design, construction, and decoration. At a time when a general vogue for chinoiserie was based on imaginative visions of the Orient rather than accurate information, Chambers, who visited China in the 1740s, was able to create stylistically accurate, authentic Chinese designs.”

Édouard Manet’s Portrait of Émile Zola exhibits the contemporaneous French zeal for Japanese aesthetics that would revolutionize French painting, especially in terms of perspective and color. Zola, a writer and contemporary of Manet, was an early defender of painters working outside of the constraints of the Academy. Manet’s portrait of Zola includes the writer sitting in Manet’s studio surrounded by objects that represent him. Hanging on the wall is a reproduction of Manet’s Olympia (1863), the artist’s most controversial work to date, which Zola ardently defended and held to be Manet’s best work. Behind Olympia is an engraving of Diego Velázquez’s The Triumph of Bacchus (1628–9). Both painter and writer highly admired Spanish aesthetics. Finally, a print of the famous Japanese wrestler Utagawa Kuniaki II and a Japanese print screen demonstrate the contemporary trend of Japonisme that helped shift French understanding of perspective and color.

The painting that launched Edward Said’s highly regarded analysis of postcolonialism and Orientalism, Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Snake Charmer is a well-known example of European perspectives of an exotic and unknown land. Painted in almost photorealistic detail, the painting suggests absolute authenticity in its depiction of a Middle Eastern scene of slumped men watching a nude snake charmer. The painting’s depiction of decrepit locals and glittering ornament as well as its sexualization of the young snake charmer have led critics, including Said, to see Gerôme’s work as an extreme exploitation of a land unknown to his Western audience, whose ideas and beliefs about the Middle East were formed more by stereotypes and fantasies than reality. (Gerôme himself had visited Egypt for the first time in 1856.) This painting is useful for discussing not just colonialism itself, but also the effects of a Western imaginary on colonial states and colonized peoples.

Aside from marking a seminal break from traditional perspectives and introducing a more complete formalistic Cubism, Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon significantly exhibits the artist’s interest in African masks and other materials imported into France at the time due to colonial expansion into Africa. As interest in African cultures grew, so did ethnographic institutions that displayed masks and other artifacts brought back by French settlers. Picasso’s interest in African aesthetics was sparked while viewing some of these masks at an ethnographic museum in Paris. The treatment of the two figures on the left of the painting, especially in their faces, is clearly influenced by the aesthetics of African masks. Scholars have questioned to what extent Picasso would have understood the symbolism and ritual uses of these masks, and to what extent his work was merely formal borrowing meant to subvert Western academic standards.

Negro in an African Setting , one of four panels in Aaron Douglas’s mural series Aspects of Negro Life is an example of what the artist called “Egyptian form,” which featured figures in profile with front-facing eyes like those seen in ancient Egyptian painting. The entire series is highly cinematic and features the same aesthetic style, which is primarily monochromatic with translucent colors and geometric edges. Douglas was a member of the Harlem Renaissance and, like many of his fellow artists, authors, poets, and musicians, was particularly interested in the history of African-Americans, Africans, and Africa itself. The subject of slavery—one sometimes addressed by artists like Douglas—is particularly interesting in the context of globalization and transnationalism. Globalization is defined by the economic channels of trade and exchange of objects and ideas; by definition, slavery is one of the earliest negative products of globalization, and its consequences continue to this day.

Born in 1943, Zhang Hongtu is one of many diasporic Asian artists based in New York City. He was born in China and came to the United States in 1980. His Long Live Chairman Mao series is considered one of Zhang’s first political Pop works where, with just a few simple brushstrokes, he converted the iconic Western face of the Quaker Oats man into the iconic Chinese face of Mao Zedong. As a child of the Communist Revolution in China, Zhang understood the political power of images that could be used to propagandize for political movements and ideas. The cross-pollination of American and Chinese iconography highlighted by Hongtu speaks to the capitalistic agenda that China holds despite its Communist proclamations and can be read as a statement critical of Chinese hypocrisy. However, in Long Live Chairman Mao, Hongtu replaced a benevolent figure of American consumerism with the face of a seemingly benevolent Chinese leader, potentially also revealing the artist’s homesickness for his homeland. Conflicting interpretations are at the heart of this artist’s work, which negotiates the constantly shifting experiences and emotions of transnational (and transplanted) individuals.

Alighiero e Boetti was an Italian artist who exhibited within the Arte Povera movement. He is well-known for incorporating everyday objects into his work as both tools and mediums. In each of the works in his Mappa del Mondo series (known as Mappe ), the artist traced a world map onto canvas and colored each country according to its national flag. Each canvas was then delivered to Afghan craftswomen who used it as the model for a tapestry. The first such project was delivered for production by Boetti on a 1971 trip to Afghanistan. For over twenty years, Boetti created over 150 different maps in this manner, which together illustrate shifting world politics and moving borders. Significantly, in the 1980s, Boetti changed from the Mercator map projection to the Robinson projection. The Robinson Projection translates the globe into a flat surface that more accurately reflects the actual size of land masses in relation to one another. The Mercator projection is a more widely used map which sizes land masses according to their historical importance to mapmakers. Alighiero e Boetti’s shift, then, must be seen as a political stance rejecting the Mercator’s unscientific prioritizing of certain places.

For a simple-looking object, Ai Wei Wei’s Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Label is a highly complicated site of contestation. One of China’s most famous artists, Ai Wei Wei is primarily known for his political dissent toward the Chinese government. Here, he has taken an urn (one of many) that he claims is from the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) and emblazoned it with an iconic Western commercial logo. At face value, the work is a palimpsest of eras and cultures mashed together. However, the work also evokes multiple questions and issues. First, is it problematic that an artist has taken a unique antique object and essentially defaced it? On the other hand, Ai Wei Wei’s commentary on the destruction of Chinese culture by the means of commercialism and capitalism can be read as a meta-critique of Chinese authorities, whose banishment of free expression has already destroyed centuries of a Chinese culture once renowned for its poetry, aesthetics, and literature. These issues were further complicated in early 2014 when an individual in Florida destroyed a similar vase that Ai Wei Wei was exhibiting, questioning why this international artist was getting exhibition space and time in a Florida museum rather than a local artist. Horrified, the press stated that an artist had destroyed a one-million-dollar object, but what was actually being destroyed? The original Han Dynasty vase, or the work of a famous international artist? How might we respond to either act? Ai Wei Wei himself destroyed Han Dynasty vases in a series of photographs ( Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn , 1995/2009), which was mimicked in 2012 by Swiss artist Manuel Salvisberg’s Fragments of History, which documented prominent collector Uli Sigg dropping a similar Ai Wei Wei work that he owned. The layers of this work are ripe for discussion and present multiple points for potential essays or response papers. For an in-depth consideration, one could read Chin-Chin Yap’s essay “ Devastating History ” in ArtAsiaPacific .

Yinka Shonibare, who was born in London and grew up in the UK and Nigeria, has described himself as “a postcolonial hybrid.” The Swing (After Fragonard) is an installation based on Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s iconic Rococo painting The Swing (1767), depicting a young girl playing flirtatiously in a garden containing two men. Fragonard paints the young woman as her shoe flies off her foot in a moment of abandon, while a titillated suitor looks on and encourages her. Shonibare’s work preserves the girl, her shoe, and the swing but omits the two men. Her figure is headless, perhaps referencing the guillotine of the French Revolution, which was impending at the time of the original painting, though amputation is also a signature of Shonibare’s work. The artist often removes a limb or a body part from his figures, introducing a disturbing and jolting element to otherwise exquisitely and seamlessly constructed objects.

Shonibare’s figure is likely not a young European woman like Fragonard’s young girl; her skin is darker. He has eschewed the frills and lace of the original girl’s pink gown and instead dressed his figure in vibrant batik fabric, characteristic of his other sculptures and paintings. Batik fabric itself has highly postcolonial characteristics and signifies the Western imagination of African identity by its completely “fabricated” African origin. Indeed, these textiles are also known as Dutch wax textiles, having been appropriated and then mass-industrialized from African designs by the Dutch during the colonial period. Later, English manufacturers copied the Dutch fabrics, using a predominantly Asian workforce to reproduce designs that were originally derived from African textiles, further complicating their chain of production. The fabrics were finally exported to West Africa, where they became popular during several African independence movements. Their bright colors and bold patterns became iconic of a struggle for political and cultural independence. Today they continue to be sold in Africa, but also New York and London, and are often adapted by high-end fashion designers who themselves are highly globalized.

Like Zhang Hongtu, O Zhang (born Zhang Ou) is a Chinese artist based in New York City. She grew up in the outskirts of Guangzhou where her family lived due to persecution during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Zhang is primarily known for her photographs of a new, emerging generation of Chinese youth who are representative of an increasingly capitalistic China. Her photographic series Daddy and I focuses on Chinese girls who have been adopted by American families, primarily during the period of China’s one-child policy, then after 1991 when it loosened its adoption rules. Since then, over 55,000 Chinese girls have been adopted by American parents, creating multiracial families that have changed the archetype of the traditional American nuclear family. Zhang’s project examines the bond between father and daughter despite or because of their different ethnicities and considers the unique interplay between skin color, ethnicity, and upbringing. She also considers gender issues, as the American concept of “Daddy’s girl” is a component of father/daughter relationships that does not necessarily play a significant role in Chinese society.

Shelly Jyoti, an artist based in Baroda, India who primarily works in textiles created a project called Indigo Narratives to trace the significance of indigo as a transnational and exploitative material. In the 1600s, indigo was brought to Bhuj, India, where colonial interest in the vibrant blue led to so much exploitation that—centuries later—Mahatma Gandhi intervened. To give form to her sculptural textiles, Jyoti traveled to contemporary Bhuj in 2009 to work with ninth-generation Azrak artisans and indigo masters. These artisans are descendants of migrants and represent a history of interchange between different communities. In An Ode to Neel Darpan , Jyoti conceptualized the literary play Neel Darpan in one panel of three that comprise a triptych. Hawks represent British colonizers who twist and manipulate lotuses in their beaks. The lotuses signify planters, British and Indian individuals who acted as intercessors and translators between the British colonizers and the indigo farmers, who are here represented as the hardworking and underappreciated worms. The artist likens Neel Darpan to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin , which was published in the United States in 1852, just a few years earlier than Neel Darpan. Jyoti’s work highlights the impact of migrations evoked by the spatial movements of artisans from Sindh and Baluchistan to Bhuj, the movement of British missionaries, the return of Gandhi to India from South Africa, and finally the artist’s own movement from Baroda to Bhuj to complete her project.

Samson Young, a young artist based in Hong Kong, is a classically trained musician and composer who creates multimedia projects using contemporary communication technologies. For Liquid Borders , the artist traces, in a sonic fashion, the border between Hong Kong and mainland China. The two are physically separated by both a wall of wired fencing and water. The areas south of the border are restricted and entry without an official permit is forbidden. Over the course of two years, after some of them were opened up, the artist visited zones along the border, collecting sounds that suggest the audio divide between the two spaces. Over time, the artist assembled a body of recordings that he then rearranged into sound compositions and transcribed into graphical notations. The project is multimedia in that it is composed of texts, sounds, and graphical notations. Young is a member of Tomato Grey, an artist collective based in Hong Kong and New York City. The group dances between identities of East and West, Asian and American, and aural/visual, crossing borders and rejecting binaries in favor of unearthing an increasingly complex globalized world. As artists become more and more global, binaries like diaspora/homeland become less divided and more complicated and difficult to define.

Laura Kina, a mixed-race artist based in Chicago, painted Okinawa — All American Food during a trip to Okinawa, a tiny island off the coast of Japan where her father’s family is based. Kina is acutely interested in matters of movement, migration, race, and identity. In this particular image, a local billboard in Okinawa juxtaposes an all-American image and icons of American commercialism with Japanese words. Like Kina herself, the ad is a mixture of multiple identities, histories, and agendas.

At the End of Class...

Biennials/Triennials and Art Fairs

This lecture allows for great potential in analyzing the state of the art world today. Students probably already have some idea of current trends in the art world, from rising auction prices to the Armory Show, from Bravo’s reality TV show Work of Art to Lady Gaga and her Marina Abramovic-inspired art pop. Recent years have also seen an uptick in the influence of celebrities like Jay-Z and James Franco in the contemporary art world. Utilizing pop culture as entry points, you can easily glide into conversations about global biennials/triennials and art fairs that have come to dominate the art world. The art world is a mirror and an agent of melting geographic borders and the boundaries between celebrity and art. This lecture is ripe with works that could serve as prompts for discussion.

Museum Paper

How do local museums address matters of globalization? Do they ignore them or focus on them? If they address such issues, do they do it sufficiently, or do they gloss over some matters? Visit a local museum and explore the galleries with these questions in mind. Consider the structure of the museum and how the art is laid out. If the museum is a very local museum (i.e., not an encyclopedic museum), consider how the museum balances issues of the local versus the global. Assign a response paper based on your students’ findings.

Artist Response Paper

Consider the concepts of globalization and aesthetics. Pick one artist and discuss how the artist’s work addresses concepts of globalization and/or functions as an agent of change. Consider the artist’s role in biennials, his or her gallery representation, or the subject and content of the work itself.

Michelle Yee (author) is a PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Jon Mann (editor) is an Adjunct Lecturer at Lehman College, a Senior Contributor at Artsy, and a lecture contributor and editor at Art History Teaching Resources and Art History Pedagogy and Practice.

Kaegan Sparks (editor) is a PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center and a Publication Associate in Critical Anthologies at the New Museum, New York.

Jon Mann, "Globalism and Transnationalism," in Art History Teaching Resources, September 19, 2014, accessed April 2, 2024, http://arthistoryteachingresources.org/lessons/globalism-and-transnationalism/.

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Art and Globalization: Then and Now

2007, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

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Globalization, Art and Capitalism Research Paper

Introduction, creative and rebellious, creative again, creative and profitable.

Bibliography

Globalization is a process known to be boundary-spanning, originated and designed through the centuries to create a multicultural world. From the time trade emerged between cultures, their boundaries were partially spanned. It would seem that the cultural legacy of humanity was an indispensable and logically integrated part of the process – and it was, up to a certain point in history.

When exactly culture became an object of business is difficult to pinpoint – but the inarguable reality is that ownership has firmly established itself within the domain of globalized culture and art. Globalization, as experts say, is an extended version of private (or collective) ownership, primarily because globalization relies on interconnected economic practices worldwide 1 . The main objective of such practices, obviously, is revenue; ever since humans realized objects of excellence could be traded, the fate of art worldwide was determined.

With respect to trade, creativity has become an integral part of business, considering the dynamic environment that makes up the global economy. However, it is implied that the spread of art is brought about by the urge for a multiculturalized global community – or so it seems. Indeed, any half-competent analyst can observe the demands that globalization puts on artists. The latter are urged to create – vigorously, prolifically, and independently, thus rejecting the culture they were born to 2 .

These processes that harness creativity seem to result solely from the sphere of marketing, not least because creative business practices encourage individuality and uniqueness regardless of cultural background. It seems that noble art, in the global context, functions as a mediator between cultures, enriching both the art and those who contemplate it. This paper is aimed at asserting that noble art – as opposed to mass art and business creativity – is actively incorporated into the global art canvas with corresponding capitalist practices. Because global culture is that of capitalism, it urges people to create, simultaneously making use of their creative energy and incorporating art through the media of replication (e.g., movies and remakes) and trade to make profits.

As mentioned, in its perpetual hunt for creative output, globalized business assures each individual creator of their uniqueness. When globalization is subject to the corporate world, originality, quirkiness, and general non-conformity become valuable assets. Similarly, universal culture urges creators of noble art to regard themselves as rebels. The inspiration of contemporary artists is fostered accordingly. In a similar vein, those who are long gone can only be popularized and romanticized as rebels.

A good example of such romanticization would be Jang Seung-eop, also known as Owon. His life and career fell within the Joseon Dynasty in Korea (1843-1897). He is notable for being just about the only painter of the time holding a position at court. He painted in the genre of abstract Chinese landscapes and went into animalistic painting, for instance, “Gunmado” (“Herd of Horses”).

His other works belong to a separate branch of Korean painting influenced by the downfall of the Ming and the formation of the Qing dynasty, wherein Korean artists were obliged to search for national artistic identity. In spite of his influence and achievements, Owon was widely known within Korean culture but not outside it – until his life was reconceptualized in “Chihwaseon” (“Painted Fire”). The movie that won an award in Cannes has brought him recognition.

Rebellion, at its core, is the instant when a creative soul is acting out its inner (darker) impulses and puts into practice thoughts that are taboo, stigmatized, forbidden. The film presents Owon’s life as the painful process of creation which is impulsive and, at times, repulsive. The love that is likely to lead to mésalliance, excessive alcohol consumption, and the artist’s self-destruction are depicted as forms of rebellion. Although it is not clear at times what exactly the artist rebels against, such a depiction both draws the public’s attention to the artist’s personality and assures the viewer that everyone, in spite of themselves, can be creative.

The search for creativity sometimes becomes frantic, although a savvy contemplator might just as well wonder which is more valuable: the result of creativity, or the sheer volume of it. With contemporary artists and ad makers, it is the bulk of creation that is valued. In other words, the ability to create quickly and (if possible) uniquely is an asset – which is the reason each individual artist is actively assured of their unsurpassed potential. If creative energy cannot be milked from the artist because they are deceased, the contemporary globalized culture refers to replication and reproduction.

Hishikawa Moronobu is mistakenly known in popular sources as “the father of ukiyo-e,” but, as a matter of fact, he was not 3 . He is, however, renowed for his contribution to and impact on the popularization of the genre. Partially, his (or the genre’s) influence is visible in the canvases of the Impressionists, including van Gogh. However, the artist’s works did not become truly globalized until the 1940s, when “Mikaeri Bijin” (“A Beauty Looking Back”) was issued in the form of postage stamps. The reproduction of the painting triggered viral stamp collection hype, but also gained the long-deceased painter and his “Beauty” worldwide recognition.

The painting and the motives hidden in it have been globalized and contemporized by various media to the present day. At that, the overarching principle of reconceptualization lies at the baseline. Before the overwhelming stamp hysteria of the 40s, the “Beauty” was recreated by Tadaoto Kainoshô under the same name in the late 1920s. The artist complimented the timeless work by Moronobu, but used the nationalistic nihonga style to recreate what was produced in ukiyo-e.

Another, and somewhat cruder retake on the “Beauty” came in the form of a video clip by the girl-band “Morning Musume.” The song in question is entitled “Mikaeri Bijin;” the lyrics feature the motifs of the floating world, and the female protagonist is wearing a red kimono with a green obi; she is also filmed looking over her shoulder. Incidentally, the clip was first streamed in 2014.

The replicas and copies can communicate hidden messages that would take some analysis (e.g., “the floating world” in the song lyrics can refer to the art and the world of show business). Their primary purpose, however, is to reveal the essence of an object of excellence 4 . Repin’s “Barge Haulers on Volga,” for example, was appraised by fellow artists and writers as the foundation of Russian realism, a switch of focus to the working class as subject matter, and a masterful rejection of academic standards.

To the broader public and the world outside Russia, the painting was made known in the form of Finnish political cartoons focusing on the idea of social inequality and the working class “hauling” the upper crust. Such is the purpose of replication: simplifying the myriad ideas embedded in the object to reveal its essence 5 . In the globalized capitalist culture, the wisdom of the human legacy is communicated in a simplified form, with a view to gaining a broader audience – and bigger revenues.

With this idea in mind, it does not take much introspection to see the main point in capitalist globalization – profit. Adaptations and reproductions (the postage stamps, cards, t-shirt prints, etc., featuring “Gunmado,” “Mikaeri Bijin,” and “Barge Haulers”) are profitable for those owning the copyrights. Apart from that, the original paintings are sold at auction, and the highest-quality digitalized copies of them are bought by – and from – digital galleries.

The question as to whether globalized culture really values the products of creativity or just the fact of it can be, thus, answered in simple terms. Creativity and creation lie in the realm of genius, and emerge essentially from the space-time in which they were produced. In turn, globalization, capitalism, and sometimes the artists themselves transform creations into objects of trade.

The geniuses mentioned above, namely Repin and Moronobu, both marked the emergence of new styles in painting: realism and ukiyo-e, respectively. As another example, the contemporary, and the most acknowledged, Chinese artist Qi Baishi developed a unique style based on traditional Chinese principles, adding a personal touch of playfulness. Repin’s and Moronobu’s works, as well as that of Owon, were subject to social and political changes they witnessed at varying times: the social injustice of czarist Russia, the harsh economic conditions in Japan, and the nationalist attitudes in Korea.

Baishi was witness to the rise of the Soviet-Chinese Communist alliance; although communist motives are not traceable in his works, they were immensely valued in the USSR. What capitalist globalization does is put creativity on the conveyor belt and reproduce it massively. Conceivably, this is done for the sake of mass enlightenment but, de facto, the power of creation is acknowledged insofar as it can be sold. Artists such as Moronobu sometimes facilitate the process of art trade by making use of printing and mass replication of paintings.

Other artists, e.g., Repin, have their masterpieces sold, exhibited, and resold. Still other creators – Baishi, for one – become best-selling painters in the US, and have their portraits issued in postage stamp formats across the USSR. The process of art globalization is indispensable from the globalization of the market; it is evident that global culture fosters the same hopes and imposes the same demands as global business.

One can argue that noble art, even globalized, does not lose its nobility for good. On the contrary, globalization lets the world contemplate what would otherwise fade into a single culture’s history. However, the globalized culture’s practices imply that, in the first instance, a non-creative person will succumb, like Owon, to the sins of flesh and mind, while a creator will flourish. In the second, the public mindlessly indulges itself in the timeless objects of excellence, while global capitalist culture stirs the hype in search of new creative output. Thus, art globalization overrates individualism and gauges creations by the profit they bring. While multiculturalism is essentially a good thing, the market-like nature of it hints at something utterly troubling.

• Jang Seung-eop
• Joseong Dynasty, ca. 1843-1897
• Ink on paper
• Literature: Yi, Pak, and Yun, 2005.

It is the paintings like Owon’s “Gunmado” that often go unnoticed in literature devoted to artistry – and yet leave the contemplator enchanted. The lines and texture of the painting convey the dynamics, the sensation of speed, and the sheer power of animals.

The painting is not frequently featured in popular sources; nor does the artist often come to light in literature or press. What is known about the painting is that the title can be translated as “A Herd of Horses” or “Men and Horses,” which is arguable 6 . Nevertheless, if the latter translation is accurate (and even if it is not), the speed, anger, and ferocity of the animals can be seen in parallel with the life of a person. One such person could be Owon himself.

The explicit drama and recklessness are vividly expressed in the painting: the lines of the horses’ bodies, the arch of the necks, and the flying manes are slightly smudged. The legs are outlined schematically, which also conveys speed. The drama causes an association with the movie “Chihwaseon” wherein Owon’s life is depicted as a maddening struggle. In the award-winning movie that has raised global awareness about the artist, his creative personality succumbs to the pleasures of the flesh, leading him to self-destruction. His downfall is similar to the flight of the horses: blind, disoriented, and unthinking.

Owon is best known for his landscapes and allegories common in Korean painting of the Joseon Dynasty: longevity, trickery, wisdom, etc. Paintings such as “Gunmado” are often overlooked – but on second thought, they just might implicitly depict the whole point of the artist’s work and life.

• Burlaki na Volge (Barge Haulers on the Volga)
• Ilya Yefimovich Repin
• Oil on canvas
• H 131 cm, W 281 cm
• State Russian Museum
• Literature: Parker and Parker, 1991.

“Barge Haulers” is a depiction of working men dragging a boat upstream, harnessed like Shire horses. A representation of Russian social reality of the time, the painting was extremely popular both within Russia and outside of it.

The postures and the colors of ragged clothing and sunburnt skin –dark, despite the fair weather – give the overall impression of weariness and exhaustion. The only splotch of light and the focus of the canvas is the young person in the center, who appears to rebel against the hard labor. He is trying to take off his harness – but tentatively; his fellow burlaks do not pay attention, which conveys a sense of hopelessness.

It is worth considering the discrepancy between the hard labor of the haulers and the peacefulness of the upper-class households on the Volga, to acknowledge that, at the time, the painting was quite groundbreaking. The conflict of the social atmosphere in which the painting was produced is expressed through the rejection of an academic standard (which is indicative of Itinerants) and the subject matter (attributable to the realist movement) 7 . At the same time, the painting shows no sign of pity or complaint, demonstrating reality as it is.

“Barge Haulers” drew public attention to the nagging social issues of the time and received much attention. The painting was widely exhibited in Europe. Apart from that, it was frequently reproduced in the original format and in the form of cartoons satirizing the socio-political atmosphere during Repin’s lifetime, and long afterwards.

• Mikaeri Bijin (Beauty Looking Back)
• Hishikawa Moronobu
• Edo period, 17th century
• Color on silk
• H 63 cm; W 31.2 cm.
• Tokyo National Museum
• Literature: “Hishikawa Moronobu.”

“Beauty Looking Back” tells a story of subtlety and discretion, which is preferred to outright, aggressive beauty in Japanese culture. The master and one of the early proponents of ukiyo-e (“floating world”) Hishikawa Moronobu produced an original drawing before he did his best to have woodblock printing popularized.

The “Beauty” is a depiction of an Edo girl in colored national clothing, caught at the moment of looking over her shoulder. The depiction of women’s beauty was one of the common motives in ukiyo-e, which sometimes concentrated on portrayed groups and erotica 8 . The style is attributable to that of early ukiyo-e, which, despite the texture and color, bears an almost elemental disposition. The lines of textile folds are schematic, and the position of the girl’s figure depicts the brevity of the moment the artist rendered her.

Among the plethora of Moronobu’s works, “Beauty” stands out as the one to have caused a sensation in the world in the aftermath of WWII. The postage stamps with the “Beauty” on them caused a massive fever of stamp collecting, and was dispersed all over the world. More importantly, the picture of Edo girl as a symbol of Japanese art legacy was reconceptualized in other art works through various media. The genre of ukiyo-e was previously known in Europe: the motives of the floating world can be traced in the works of the Impressionists. The mass production of stamps, however, triggered the extreme popularization of the genre, which is one of the mechanisms of art globalization.

• Fish and Shrimp
• H 101 cm; W 34 cm (hanging scroll)
• Orient Gallery, New York
• Literature: Gerwing, 2014.

Xu Beihong is known as the painter of horses, while Qi Baishi is most famous for his shrimps. One of the three best-selling painters in the US, Baishi is the epitome of how oriental, particularly Chinese painting, can become globalized.

Apart from other subjects, such as peaches and chickens, Master Baishi’s favorites were shrimps, crabs, and other marine fauna. He produced the bulk of his shrimp paintings during the later years of his life. He gravitated towards minimalistic painting and calligraphy, and it was during the 1940s that his brushwork ascended to genius. In several lines, he managed to convey the shrimp and fish so masterfully that the contemplator can see and almost feel the water around them.

His success could be attributed to his total avoidance of any influences of the West. Still more importantly, Baishi managed to refrain from becoming a political painter, despite the storm of praise from both the Soviet and Chinese Communist parties 9 . Surrounded by art where socio-political messages went primarily to aesthetic subject matter, he revived a multitude of traditional Chinese techniques and simple subjects and added a fair amount of personality to his painting.

The world’s search for authenticity was over when Baishi was discovered and instantly acknowledged – in his later years. The paintings such as “Fish and Shrimp” were often the objects of unfair trade and forgery – which is only to be expected, since a 35×35 cm album leaf with two shrimp paintings can be sold for $189, and more. His paintings convey the essence of Chinese tradition, and deviate from political messages, which might explain their immense value.

Carroll, Noël. “Art and Globalization: Then and Now.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 1 (2007): 131-143.

Gerwing, Jonas. Between Tradition and Modernity – The Influence of Western European and Russian Art on Revolutionary China . Stoughton, WI: Books on Demand, 2014.

Haiven, Max. “The Privatization of Creativity: The Ruse of ‘Creative Capitalism’.” Dissident Voice. 2012.

“ Hishikawa Moronobu .” New World Encyclopedia .

Laibman, David. “Editorial Perspectives: Art, Science and Globalization.” Science & Society 73, no. 4 (2009): 445-451.

Parker, Fan, and Stephen Jan Parker. Russia on Canvas: Ilya Repin . University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1991.

Yi, Hyon-Hui, Song-Su Pak, and Nae-Hyon Yun. New History of Korea . Seoul, Korea: Jimoondang, 2005.

Noël Carroll, “Art and Globalization: Then and Now,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 1 (2007): 131-143.

Max Haiven, The Privatization of Creativity: The Ruse of “Creative Capitalism’,” Dissident Voice.

“ Hishikawa Moronobu ,” New World Encyclopedia .

David Laibman, “Editorial Perspectives: Art, Science and Globalization,” Science & Society 73, no. 4 (2009): 445-451. Ibid., p. 448.

Hyon-Hui Yi, Song-Su Pak, and Nae-Hyon Yun, New History of Korea (Seoul, Korea: Jimoondang, 2005), 457.

Fan Parker and Stephen Jan Parker, Russia on Canvas: Ilya Repin , (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1991) page.

Jonas Gerwing, Between Tradition and Modernity – The Influence of Western European and Russian Art on Revolutionary China (Stoughton, WI: Books on Demand, 2014), 29-57.

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IvyPanda. (2020, August 6). Globalization, Art and Capitalism. https://ivypanda.com/essays/globalization-art-and-capitalism/

"Globalization, Art and Capitalism." IvyPanda , 6 Aug. 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/globalization-art-and-capitalism/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'Globalization, Art and Capitalism'. 6 August.

IvyPanda . 2020. "Globalization, Art and Capitalism." August 6, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/globalization-art-and-capitalism/.

1. IvyPanda . "Globalization, Art and Capitalism." August 6, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/globalization-art-and-capitalism/.

IvyPanda . "Globalization, Art and Capitalism." August 6, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/globalization-art-and-capitalism/.

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Globalisation was rife in the 16th century – clues from Renaissance paintings

Senior Lecturer in Art History, The Open University

Disclosure statement

Leah Clark receives funding from the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The research discussed in this article forms the topic of an exhibit at the British Academy's Summer Showcase, June 21-22 2019.

The Open University provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation UK.

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For many, the Renaissance was the revival or “rebirth” of Western classical antiquity, associated with great artists painting the Sistine Chapel and the invention of the printing press in Europe. These local, European phenomena seem rather parochial compared to today’s world, where a hashtag on Instagram connects pictures across the world in an instant and aeroplanes take off every second from airports around the globe. Globalisation means that we can purchase a Starbucks coffee almost anywhere in the world and an enormous amount of goods available in Europe are made in China.

I’m an art historian, and so my interest in all this may not seem all that obvious. What do famous paintings by Italian Renaissance artists have to do with China or global trade? Art of the Italian Renaissance is often seen as the product of one culture — Italy — but in fact Italian art was the result of interactions with cultures from around the world. Our own experience of globalisation has led scholars such as me to look twice at Renaissance paintings – and the objects they depict – to consider whether a global, connected world is indeed a new thing.

Take Bellini’s Feast of the Gods , 1514, which has long been recognised as a masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance. This is a painting that was produced by the Venetian artist for the Duke of Ferrara, Alfonso d’Este. It depicts a scene of feasting set in the classical world.

This painting is part of a series commissioned by d’Este in 1511 for a suite of rooms that displayed his collections. The humanist Mario Equicola set the intellectual programme for the paintings and it is the classical subject matter that is usually discussed in relation to this cycle. The Feast of the Gods depicts an episode recounted in the first book of Ovid’s Fasti where ancient gods and goddesses hold a banquet. This seems a fairly straightforward depiction of a classical subject. But look a little closer and you will spot three pieces of Chinese porcelain, which might seem out of place.

It is generally thought that Bellini may have painted specific bowls he saw in Venice or ones that he had himself received from the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II when he travelled to Constantinople. But archival documents, which I recently published , have revealed that d'Este’s mother, Eleonora d’Aragona, also had a large art collection , including a significant amount of Chinese porcelain, which her son likely inherited. It is this collection that could very well be represented in the painting. It is likely that she received much of her porcelain as diplomatic gifts, through her connections to the international court of Naples.

Chinese porcelain was a sought after item by European princes in the 15th and 16th centuries. In the 15th century, blue-and-white Chinese porcelain did not come directly to Italy from China, but through Persia. It was then gifted to Europeans by the Mamluk and Ottoman sultans (rulers of what is now Syria, Egypt and Turkey). Porcelain was transported along the silk roads accompanied by other precious items sought by European rulers such as diamonds, precious gems, silk and spices. The fact that it had come from afar was part of its value, as was its association with trade, travel, and diplomacy.

Porcelain diplomacy

The cross-cultural associations of gifts are also evident in paintings of the magi – the ultimate example of gift-givers. Andrea Mantegna’s Adoration of the Magi , likely painted for d'Este’s sister Isabella d’Este, allows the viewer to feel as if they are a privileged member of this intimate ceremony.

This perspective also provides an opportunity for a close-up depiction of these rare gifts, which resemble the types of highly prized foreign luxury goods that would have been exchanged between rulers and found in the collecting spaces of the elite. The blue-and-white porcelain cup full of coins corresponds to one in Isabella’s inventory, for example.

The increased interest in collecting luxury goods within a secular context in the Renaissance might have been novel for Europeans, but it was not for Eastern rulers. Indeed, the collections of foreign courts – from the Mamluks and Ottomans in the Mediterranean, to the Aqqoyunlu and the Timurids of central Asia and Persia, to the rich empires in India and China – paled in comparison to European courtly collections. Eastern courts’ access to raw goods such as diamonds and gems and to the manufacture of luxury objects such as ceramics and metalwork meant that they served as models worthy of emulation. Possession of these items reflected the power and prestige of their owners.

Renaissance collections

What did these Italian collecting spaces look like? The artist Domenico Ghirlandaio’s fresco of Saint Jerome from Florence is a quintessential illustration of the “Renaissance” studiolo – a sort of study or library – with its emphasis on learning and its reference to classical antiquity. But again, when looking more closely at the image, another story is told.

An oriental carpet adorns Jerome’s desk and glazed albarelli (drug jars) and crystal vases grace the shelves. These point to an international luxury trade that stretched from China through Persia and across the Mediterranean. This was a world where glass mosque lamps were produced in Venice for export to Syria, where ceramic drug jars made in Valencia used tin from Cornwall, incorporated motifs found on Chinese porcelain, held spices from India, and were shipped across the globe.

Of course this isn’t akin to today’s globalised world, in which you can order something on the internet and have it shipped from one hemisphere to another in a matter of days. But what it does tell us is that cultures — and the products that they produce – have never been “pure”. States have always relied on cross-cultural interactions to access raw goods, as well as luxury items. And it is important to underline that this intermixing of cultures gave rise to destructive outcomes too. Power dynamics were often unequal, resulting in forced conversions and colonial domination .

The presence of Chinese porcelain in Italian Renaissance paintings tells us that the world, has in some ways, always been global. And looking again at these famous paintings might hold lessons for our perspective on globalisation today.

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✍️Essay on Globalisation: Samples in 100, 150 and 200 Words

• Updated on  
• Oct 25, 2023

Globalisation means the combination of economies and societies with the help of information, ideas, technology, finance, goods, services, and people. It is a process where multinational companies work on their international standing and conduct operations internationally or overseas. Over the years, Globalisation has had a profound impact on various aspects of society. Today we will be discussing what globalisation is and how it came into existence with the essay on globalisation listed below.

This Blog Includes:

How globalisation came into existence, essay on globalisation in 100 words, essay on globalisation in 150 words, essay on globalisation in 200 words.

For all those unaware, the concepts of globalisation first emerged in the 20th century. Here are some of the key events which led to the development of globalisation in today’s digital world.

• The ancient Silk Route as well as the maritime routes led to the exchange of goods, ideas and culture in several countries. Although these were just trade routes, but later became important centres for cultural exchange.
• Other than this, the European colonial expansion which took place from the 15th to the 20th century led to the setting up of global markets where both knowledge and people were transferred to several developing countries. 
• The evolution and exchange of mass media, cinema and the internet further led to the widespread dissemination of cultures and ideas.

Also Read: Essay on the Importance of the English Language for Students

Globalization, the interconnectedness of nations through trade, technology, and cultural exchange, has reshaped the world. It has enabled the free flow of goods and information, fostering economic growth and cultural diversity. However, it also raises challenges such as income inequality and cultural homogenization. 

In a globalized world, businesses expand internationally, but local industries can suffer. Moreover, while globalization promotes shared knowledge, it can erode local traditions. Striking a balance between the benefits and drawbacks of globalization is essential to ensure a more equitable and culturally diverse global community, where economies thrive without leaving anyone behind.

Also Read: Essay on Save Environment: Samples in 100, 200, 300 Words

Globalization is the process of increasing interconnectedness and interdependence among countries, economies, and cultures. It has transformed the world in various ways.

Economically, globalization has facilitated the flow of goods, services, and capital across borders. This has boosted economic growth and reduced poverty in many developing nations. However, it has also led to income inequality and job displacement in some regions.

Culturally, globalization has resulted in the spread of ideas, values, and cultural products worldwide. While this fosters cultural exchange and diversity, it also raises concerns about cultural homogenization.

Technologically, globalization has been driven by advances in communication and transportation. The internet and smartphones have connected people across the globe, allowing for rapid information dissemination and collaboration.

In conclusion, globalization is a complex phenomenon with both benefits and challenges. It has reshaped the world, bringing people closer together, but also highlighting the need for responsible governance and policies to address its downsides.

Also Read: Essay on Unity in Diversity in 100 to 200 Words

Globalization, a multifaceted phenomenon, has reshaped the world over the past few decades. It involves the interconnectedness of economies, cultures, and societies across the globe. In this essay, we will briefly discuss its key aspects and impacts.

Economically, globalization has led to increased international trade and investment. It has allowed companies to expand operations globally, leading to economic growth in many countries. However, it has also resulted in income inequality and job displacement in some regions.

Culturally, globalization has facilitated the exchange of ideas, values, and traditions. This has led to a more diverse and interconnected world where cultures blend, but it can also challenge local traditions and languages.

Socially, globalization has improved access to information and technology. It has connected people across borders, enabling global activism and awareness of worldwide issues. Nonetheless, it has also created challenges like cybercrime and privacy concerns.

In conclusion, globalization is a double-edged sword. It offers economic opportunities, cultural exchange, and global connectivity, but it also brings about disparities, cultural tensions, and new global challenges. To navigate this complex landscape, the world must strive for responsible globalization that balances the interests of all stakeholders and promotes inclusivity and sustainability.

Related Articles

The movement of goods, technologies, information, and jobs between countries is referred to as globalisation. 

Globalization as a phenomenon began with the earliest human migratory routes, or with Genghis Khan’s invasions, or travel across the Silk Road.

Globalisation allows wealthy nations to access cheaper labour and resources, while also providing opportunity for developing and underdeveloped nations with the jobs and investment capital they require.

For more information on such interesting topics, visit our essay-writing page and follow Leverage Edu ! 

Malvika Chawla

Malvika is a content writer cum news freak who comes with a strong background in Journalism and has worked with renowned news websites such as News 9 and The Financial Express to name a few. When not writing, she can be found bringing life to the canvasses by painting on them.

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The Moscow Metro Museum of Art: 10 Must-See Stations

There are few times one can claim having been on the subway all afternoon and loving it, but the Moscow Metro provides just that opportunity.  While many cities boast famous public transport systems—New York’s subway, London’s underground, San Salvador’s chicken buses—few warrant hours of exploration.  Moscow is different: Take one ride on the Metro, and you’ll find out that this network of railways can be so much more than point A to B drudgery.

The Metro began operating in 1935 with just thirteen stations, covering less than seven miles, but it has since grown into the world’s third busiest transit system ( Tokyo is first ), spanning about 200 miles and offering over 180 stops along the way.  The construction of the Metro began under Joseph Stalin’s command, and being one of the USSR’s most ambitious building projects, the iron-fisted leader instructed designers to create a place full of svet (radiance) and svetloe budushchee (a radiant future), a palace for the people and a tribute to the Mother nation.

Consequently, the Metro is among the most memorable attractions in Moscow.  The stations provide a unique collection of public art, comparable to anything the city’s galleries have to offer and providing a sense of the Soviet era, which is absent from the State National History Museum.  Even better, touring the Metro delivers palpable, experiential moments, which many of us don’t get standing in front of painting or a case of coins.

Though tours are available , discovering the Moscow Metro on your own provides a much more comprehensive, truer experience, something much less sterile than following a guide.  What better place is there to see the “real” Moscow than on mass transit: A few hours will expose you to characters and caricatures you’ll be hard-pressed to find dining near the Bolshoi Theater.  You become part of the attraction, hear it in the screech of the train, feel it as hurried commuters brush by: The Metro sucks you beneath the city and churns you into the mix.

With the recommendations of our born-and-bred Muscovite students, my wife Emma and I have just taken a self-guided tour of what some locals consider the top ten stations of the Moscow Metro. What most satisfied me about our Metro tour was the sense of adventure .  I loved following our route on the maps of the wagon walls as we circled the city, plotting out the course to the subsequent stops; having the weird sensation of being underground for nearly four hours; and discovering the next cavern of treasures, playing Indiana Jones for the afternoon, piecing together fragments of Russia’s mysterious history.  It’s the ultimate interactive museum.

Top Ten Stations (In order of appearance)

Kievskaya station.

Kievskaya Station went public in March of 1937, the rails between it and Park Kultury Station being the first to cross the Moscow River.  Kievskaya is full of mosaics depicting aristocratic scenes of Russian life, with great cameo appearances by Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin.  Each work has a Cyrillic title/explanation etched in the marble beneath it; however, if your Russian is rusty, you can just appreciate seeing familiar revolutionary dates like 1905 ( the Russian Revolution ) and 1917 ( the October Revolution ).

Mayakovskaya Station

Mayakovskaya Station ranks in my top three most notable Metro stations. Mayakovskaya just feels right, done Art Deco but no sense of gaudiness or pretention.  The arches are adorned with rounded chrome piping and create feeling of being in a jukebox, but the roof’s expansive mosaics of the sky are the real showstopper.  Subjects cleverly range from looking up at a high jumper, workers atop a building, spires of Orthodox cathedrals, to nimble aircraft humming by, a fleet of prop planes spelling out CCCP in the bluest of skies.

Novoslobodskaya Station

Novoslobodskaya is the Metro’s unique stained glass station.  Each column has its own distinctive panels of colorful glass, most of them with a floral theme, some of them capturing the odd sailor, musician, artist, gardener, or stenographer in action.  The glass is framed in Art Deco metalwork, and there is the lovely aspect of discovering panels in the less frequented haunches of the hall (on the trackside, between the incoming staircases).  Novosblod is, I’ve been told, the favorite amongst out-of-town visitors.

Komsomolskaya Station

Komsomolskaya Station is one of palatial grandeur.  It seems both magnificent and obligatory, like the presidential palace of a colonial city.  The yellow ceiling has leafy, white concrete garland and a series of golden military mosaics accenting the tile mosaics of glorified Russian life.  Switching lines here, the hallway has an Alice-in-Wonderland feel, impossibly long with decorative tile walls, culminating in a very old station left in a remarkable state of disrepair, offering a really tangible glimpse behind the palace walls.

Dostoevskaya Station

Dostoevskaya is a tribute to the late, great hero of Russian literature .  The station at first glance seems bare and unimpressive, a stark marble platform without a whiff of reassembled chips of tile.  However, two columns have eerie stone inlay collages of scenes from Dostoevsky’s work, including The Idiot , The Brothers Karamazov , and Crime and Punishment.   Then, standing at the center of the platform, the marble creates a kaleidoscope of reflections.  At the entrance, there is a large, inlay portrait of the author.

Chkalovskaya Station

Chkalovskaya does space Art Deco style (yet again).  Chrome borders all.  Passageways with curvy overhangs create the illusion of walking through the belly of a chic, new-age spacecraft.  There are two (kos)mosaics, one at each end, with planetary subjects.  Transferring here brings you above ground, where some rather elaborate metalwork is on display.  By name similarity only, I’d expected Komsolskaya Station to deliver some kosmonaut décor; instead, it was Chkalovskaya that took us up to the space station.

Elektrozavodskaya Station

Elektrozavodskaya is full of marble reliefs of workers, men and women, laboring through the different stages of industry.  The superhuman figures are round with muscles, Hollywood fit, and seemingly undeterred by each Herculean task they respectively perform.  The station is chocked with brass, from hammer and sickle light fixtures to beautiful, angular framework up the innards of the columns.  The station’s art pieces are less clever or extravagant than others, but identifying the different stages of industry is entertaining.

Baumanskaya Statio

Baumanskaya Station is the only stop that wasn’t suggested by the students.  Pulling in, the network of statues was just too enticing: Out of half-circle depressions in the platform’s columns, the USSR’s proud and powerful labor force again flaunts its success.  Pilots, blacksmiths, politicians, and artists have all congregated, posing amongst more Art Deco framing.  At the far end, a massive Soviet flag dons the face of Lenin and banners for ’05, ’17, and ‘45.  Standing in front of the flag, you can play with the echoing roof.

Ploshchad Revolutsii Station

Novokuznetskaya Station

Novokuznetskaya Station finishes off this tour, more or less, where it started: beautiful mosaics.  This station recalls the skyward-facing pieces from Mayakovskaya (Station #2), only with a little larger pictures in a more cramped, very trafficked area.  Due to a line of street lamps in the center of the platform, it has the atmosphere of a bustling market.  The more inventive sky scenes include a man on a ladder, women picking fruit, and a tank-dozer being craned in.  The station’s also has a handsome black-and-white stone mural.

Here is a map and a brief description of our route:

Start at (1)Kievskaya on the “ring line” (look for the squares at the bottom of the platform signs to help you navigate—the ring line is #5, brown line) and go north to Belorusskaya, make a quick switch to the Dark Green/#2 line, and go south one stop to (2)Mayakovskaya.  Backtrack to the ring line—Brown/#5—and continue north, getting off at (3)Novosblodskaya and (4)Komsolskaya.  At Komsolskaya Station, transfer to the Red/#1 line, go south for two stops to Chistye Prudy, and get on the Light Green/#10 line going north.  Take a look at (5)Dostoevskaya Station on the northern segment of Light Green/#10 line then change directions and head south to (6)Chkalovskaya, which offers a transfer to the Dark Blue/#3 line, going west, away from the city center.  Have a look (7)Elektroskaya Station before backtracking into the center of Moscow, stopping off at (8)Baumskaya, getting off the Dark Blue/#3 line at (9)Ploschad Revolyutsii.  Change to the Dark Green/#2 line and go south one stop to see (10)Novokuznetskaya Station.

Check out our new Moscow Indie Travel Guide , book a flight to Moscow and read 10 Bars with Views Worth Blowing the Budget For

Jonathon Engels, formerly a patron saint of misadventure, has been stumbling his way across cultural borders since 2005 and is currently volunteering in the mountains outside of Antigua, Guatemala.  For more of his work, visit his website and blog .

Photo credits:   SergeyRod , all others courtesy of the author and may not be used without permission

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I was born and raised in a working-class city, Elektrostal, Moscow region. I received a higher education in television in Moscow. I studied to be a documentary photographer. My vision of the aesthetics of the frame was significantly influenced by the aesthetics of my city – the endless forests and swamps of the Moscow region with endless factories, typical architecture and a meagre color palette. In this harsh world, people live and work, raise children, grow geranium, throw parties and live trouble, run a ski cross. They are the main characters of my photo projects.

I study a person in a variety of circumstances. We blog with friends with stories of such people. We are citizen journalists. In my works, I touch upon the topics of homelessness, people’s attitude to their bodies, sexual objectification, women’s work, alienation and living conditions of different people. The opportunity to communicate with my characters gives me a sense of belonging and modernity of life.

My photos create the effect of presence, invisible observation of people. I don’t interfere with what’s going on, I’m taking the place of an outside observer. I’m a participant in exhibitions in Rome (Loosenart Gallery), Collaborated with the Russian Geographical Community.

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• --> --> Mame-Diarra Niang: Self As A Forgotten Monument Nov 16, 2023 – Jul 7, 2024 Zeitz MOCAA Cape Town, South Africa Self as a Forgotten Monument is the first museum solo exhibition by Mame-Diarra Niang presented by Zeitz MOCAA . Organised as a survey of the artist’s practice over the past decade, the project brings together significant bodies of work in dialogue in a spatial choreography. Niang’s prolific practice is characterised by an exploratory, abstract and subversive approach to lens-based media working across photography, moving image and immersive audio-visual installation. (more…) Show Post >
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• --> --> Grey Crawford. Chroma, 1978–85, Vol 1 Publication Beam Editions International In 1978 Grey Crawford created a body of colour photographic work that was so radical in its aesthetic and technique that few people to this day understand how it was made. Chroma documents late 70s Los Angeles in a period of radical urban transformation. Scenes of vernacular architecture, demolition sites and everyday places are contrasted with graphic forms that float on the surface and sit within the image. (more…) Show Post >
• --> --> Nasan Tur: Hunted May 26, 2023 – Apr 1, 2024 Berlinische Galerie Berlin, Germany Nasan Tur explores the political and social conditions that define our times. His works are experimental arrangements that draw attention to ideologies, social norms and behavioural codes and expand our options for individual action. To this end, he examines statements, gestures and images found in the media or in the public space and distils them into miniatures reflecting current social crises and discourse. (more…) Show Post >
• --> --> Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning Mar 17 – Jul 6, 2024 MoMA New York, USA “I didn’t see a major difference between a poem, a sculpture, a film, or a dance,” Joan Jonas has said. For more than five decades, Jonas’s multidisciplinary work has bridged and redefined boundaries between performance, video, drawing, sculpture, and installation. The most comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s work in the United States, Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning traces the full breadth of her career (more…) Show Post >
• --> --> Dorothea Lange Photographer Featured Profile Born Dorothea Nutzhorn on May 26, 1895 in Hoboken, New Jersey, Lange had a difficult childhood, contracting polio when she was seven. The illness left her right leg and foot weakened and she walked with a noticeable limp for the rest of her life. (more…) Show Post > See Full Profile >
• --> --> Boros Collection / Bunker Berlin #4 Ongoing Sammlung Boros / Boros Collection Berlin, Germany We have rarely been as aware of the vulnerability of our physical bodies as in recent years. As a society, we are constantly upgrading our bodies through artificial enhancements to immunize ourselves against infections and maximize our performance. (more…) Show Post > See Full Article >
• --> --> Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Art Grants Deadline Apr 16, 2024 New York Foundation for the Arts / NYFA New York, USA The AWAW EAG will support environmental art projects that inspire thought, action, and ethical engagement. Projects should not only point at problems, but aim to engage an environmental issue at some scale. Proposals should illustrate thorough consideration of a project’s ecological and social ethics. Projects that explore interdependence, relationships, and systems through Indigenous and ancestral practices are encouraged to apply. (more…) Show Post >

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40 facts about elektrostal.

Written by Lanette Mayes

Modified & Updated: 02 Mar 2024

Reviewed by Jessica Corbett

Elektrostal is a vibrant city located in the Moscow Oblast region of Russia. With a rich history, stunning architecture, and a thriving community, Elektrostal is a city that has much to offer. Whether you are a history buff, nature enthusiast, or simply curious about different cultures, Elektrostal is sure to captivate you.

This article will provide you with 40 fascinating facts about Elektrostal, giving you a better understanding of why this city is worth exploring. From its origins as an industrial hub to its modern-day charm, we will delve into the various aspects that make Elektrostal a unique and must-visit destination.

So, join us as we uncover the hidden treasures of Elektrostal and discover what makes this city a true gem in the heart of Russia.

Key Takeaways:

• Elektrostal, known as the “Motor City of Russia,” is a vibrant and growing city with a rich industrial history, offering diverse cultural experiences and a strong commitment to environmental sustainability.
• With its convenient location near Moscow, Elektrostal provides a picturesque landscape, vibrant nightlife, and a range of recreational activities, making it an ideal destination for residents and visitors alike.

Known as the “Motor City of Russia.”

Elektrostal, a city located in the Moscow Oblast region of Russia, earned the nickname “Motor City” due to its significant involvement in the automotive industry.

Home to the Elektrostal Metallurgical Plant.

Elektrostal is renowned for its metallurgical plant, which has been producing high-quality steel and alloys since its establishment in 1916.

Boasts a rich industrial heritage.

Elektrostal has a long history of industrial development, contributing to the growth and progress of the region.

Founded in 1916.

The city of Elektrostal was founded in 1916 as a result of the construction of the Elektrostal Metallurgical Plant.

Located approximately 50 kilometers east of Moscow.

Elektrostal is situated in close proximity to the Russian capital, making it easily accessible for both residents and visitors.

Known for its vibrant cultural scene.

Elektrostal is home to several cultural institutions, including museums, theaters, and art galleries that showcase the city’s rich artistic heritage.

A popular destination for nature lovers.

Surrounded by picturesque landscapes and forests, Elektrostal offers ample opportunities for outdoor activities such as hiking, camping, and birdwatching.

Hosts the annual Elektrostal City Day celebrations.

Every year, Elektrostal organizes festive events and activities to celebrate its founding, bringing together residents and visitors in a spirit of unity and joy.

Has a population of approximately 160,000 people.

Elektrostal is home to a diverse and vibrant community of around 160,000 residents, contributing to its dynamic atmosphere.

Boasts excellent education facilities.

The city is known for its well-established educational institutions, providing quality education to students of all ages.

A center for scientific research and innovation.

Elektrostal serves as an important hub for scientific research, particularly in the fields of metallurgy, materials science, and engineering.

Surrounded by picturesque lakes.

The city is blessed with numerous beautiful lakes, offering scenic views and recreational opportunities for locals and visitors alike.

Well-connected transportation system.

Elektrostal benefits from an efficient transportation network, including highways, railways, and public transportation options, ensuring convenient travel within and beyond the city.

Famous for its traditional Russian cuisine.

Food enthusiasts can indulge in authentic Russian dishes at numerous restaurants and cafes scattered throughout Elektrostal.

Home to notable architectural landmarks.

Elektrostal boasts impressive architecture, including the Church of the Transfiguration of the Lord and the Elektrostal Palace of Culture.

Offers a wide range of recreational facilities.

Residents and visitors can enjoy various recreational activities, such as sports complexes, swimming pools, and fitness centers, enhancing the overall quality of life.

Provides a high standard of healthcare.

Elektrostal is equipped with modern medical facilities, ensuring residents have access to quality healthcare services.

Home to the Elektrostal History Museum.

The Elektrostal History Museum showcases the city’s fascinating past through exhibitions and displays.

A hub for sports enthusiasts.

Elektrostal is passionate about sports, with numerous stadiums, arenas, and sports clubs offering opportunities for athletes and spectators.

Celebrates diverse cultural festivals.

Throughout the year, Elektrostal hosts a variety of cultural festivals, celebrating different ethnicities, traditions, and art forms.

Electric power played a significant role in its early development.

Elektrostal owes its name and initial growth to the establishment of electric power stations and the utilization of electricity in the industrial sector.

Boasts a thriving economy.

The city’s strong industrial base, coupled with its strategic location near Moscow, has contributed to Elektrostal’s prosperous economic status.

Houses the Elektrostal Drama Theater.

The Elektrostal Drama Theater is a cultural centerpiece, attracting theater enthusiasts from far and wide.

Popular destination for winter sports.

Elektrostal’s proximity to ski resorts and winter sport facilities makes it a favorite destination for skiing, snowboarding, and other winter activities.

Promotes environmental sustainability.

Elektrostal prioritizes environmental protection and sustainability, implementing initiatives to reduce pollution and preserve natural resources.

Home to renowned educational institutions.

Elektrostal is known for its prestigious schools and universities, offering a wide range of academic programs to students.

Committed to cultural preservation.

The city values its cultural heritage and takes active steps to preserve and promote traditional customs, crafts, and arts.

Hosts an annual International Film Festival.

The Elektrostal International Film Festival attracts filmmakers and cinema enthusiasts from around the world, showcasing a diverse range of films.

Encourages entrepreneurship and innovation.

Elektrostal supports aspiring entrepreneurs and fosters a culture of innovation, providing opportunities for startups and business development.

Offers a range of housing options.

Elektrostal provides diverse housing options, including apartments, houses, and residential complexes, catering to different lifestyles and budgets.

Home to notable sports teams.

Elektrostal is proud of its sports legacy, with several successful sports teams competing at regional and national levels.

Boasts a vibrant nightlife scene.

Residents and visitors can enjoy a lively nightlife in Elektrostal, with numerous bars, clubs, and entertainment venues.

Promotes cultural exchange and international relations.

Elektrostal actively engages in international partnerships, cultural exchanges, and diplomatic collaborations to foster global connections.

Surrounded by beautiful nature reserves.

Nearby nature reserves, such as the Barybino Forest and Luchinskoye Lake, offer opportunities for nature enthusiasts to explore and appreciate the region’s biodiversity.

Commemorates historical events.

The city pays tribute to significant historical events through memorials, monuments, and exhibitions, ensuring the preservation of collective memory.

Promotes sports and youth development.

Elektrostal invests in sports infrastructure and programs to encourage youth participation, health, and physical fitness.

Hosts annual cultural and artistic festivals.

Throughout the year, Elektrostal celebrates its cultural diversity through festivals dedicated to music, dance, art, and theater.

Provides a picturesque landscape for photography enthusiasts.

The city’s scenic beauty, architectural landmarks, and natural surroundings make it a paradise for photographers.

Connects to Moscow via a direct train line.

The convenient train connection between Elektrostal and Moscow makes commuting between the two cities effortless.

A city with a bright future.

Elektrostal continues to grow and develop, aiming to become a model city in terms of infrastructure, sustainability, and quality of life for its residents.

In conclusion, Elektrostal is a fascinating city with a rich history and a vibrant present. From its origins as a center of steel production to its modern-day status as a hub for education and industry, Elektrostal has plenty to offer both residents and visitors. With its beautiful parks, cultural attractions, and proximity to Moscow, there is no shortage of things to see and do in this dynamic city. Whether you’re interested in exploring its historical landmarks, enjoying outdoor activities, or immersing yourself in the local culture, Elektrostal has something for everyone. So, next time you find yourself in the Moscow region, don’t miss the opportunity to discover the hidden gems of Elektrostal.

Q: What is the population of Elektrostal?

A: As of the latest data, the population of Elektrostal is approximately XXXX.

Q: How far is Elektrostal from Moscow?

A: Elektrostal is located approximately XX kilometers away from Moscow.

Q: Are there any famous landmarks in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal is home to several notable landmarks, including XXXX and XXXX.

Q: What industries are prominent in Elektrostal?

A: Elektrostal is known for its steel production industry and is also a center for engineering and manufacturing.

Q: Are there any universities or educational institutions in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal is home to XXXX University and several other educational institutions.

Q: What are some popular outdoor activities in Elektrostal?

A: Elektrostal offers several outdoor activities, such as hiking, cycling, and picnicking in its beautiful parks.

Q: Is Elektrostal well-connected in terms of transportation?

A: Yes, Elektrostal has good transportation links, including trains and buses, making it easily accessible from nearby cities.

Q: Are there any annual events or festivals in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal hosts various events and festivals throughout the year, including XXXX and XXXX.

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Farah Stockman

Is This the Silicon Valley of Latin America?

By Farah Stockman

Ms. Stockman is a member of the editorial board and the author of “American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears .” She reported from San José, Costa Rica, for this essay.

Americans used to think of China as a place to do business and Latin America as a place to vacation. More recently, our neighbors to the south are seen as the source of desperate migrants. That mind-set led us to the mess that we are in now. Today the American economy is far too dependent on China for critical supplies while imports from countries in our hemisphere, aside from Canada and Mexico, are lagging, experts say. Our influence in our own neighborhood is waning.

It doesn’t have to be this way. I saw evidence of that in Costa Rica, a stable democracy that is vying to become the Silicon Valley of Latin America — with active support from the United States.

Costa Rica is crucial to the gargantuan U.S. effort to reduce dependence on microchips from China, which plays an outsize role in packaging and testing the tiny gadgets that run everything from smartphones to fighter jets. More than 40 percent of the chips the U.S. Department of Defense uses for weapons systems and infrastructure rely on Chinese suppliers. More than 90 percent of advanced chips are produced in Taiwan, a self-governing island claimed by China.

Now Costa Rica is positioning itself to become a major hub outside Asia for packaging and testing microchips. In the 1990s, Intel built a factory near San José to do just that. That opened the door to more factories and industries and, as a result, an increasingly tech-oriented work force. Today Costa Rica’s biggest category of exports is no longer coffee or bananas but medical devices.

On a recent Thursday afternoon, in a hotel ballroom outside the capital, San José, President Rodrigo Chaves touted tax incentives, regulatory reforms and a 99 percent-renewable-energy grid as he rolled out a national strategy to expand the industry. “Welcome to Costa Rica, a country where thou shall not face red tape,” he boomed.

His audience — which included the U.S. commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo; Gen. Laura Richardson, the four-star who leads the U.S. Southern Command; and top executives from Intel — enthusiastically applauded.

“We need allies closer to home,” Ms. Raimondo told me. She is in charge of doling out tens of billions in subsidies to bring the industry closer to home, an effort that is crucial to ensuring that Americans stay on the cutting edge of A.I. and other critical technologies in the future.

This great reshuffling of the U.S. supply chain could be the key to building better relationships in Latin America at a time of rising isolationism in the United States, when both parties have grown skeptical of free trade and frustrated by record numbers of migrant arrivals.

While the CHIPS and Science Act is best known for its billion-dollar subsidies to build facilities on U.S. soil, it also provides modest funding for our allies. Costa Rica and Panama have received money to beef up their work forces and their infrastructure. The Dominican Republic looks poised to be next in line.

It’s no accident that building resiliency for supply chains is a main goal of the Americas Act , the new bipartisan bill that would revamp relations with friendly neighbors and put them on a path to join the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the trade agreement that replaced NAFTA.

I was a vocal critic of NAFTA, a view I came to while writing about American factory workers who lost their jobs when their plant moved to Mexico. Exporting our industrial base hurt American workers and U.S. national security. But the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which passed overwhelmingly in Congress a few years ago , has gone a long way toward addressing workers’ concerns . It’s popular. Why not expand it? And if more trade with Latin America will build up an industrial base that would have otherwise gone to Asia, it could make our region stronger, not weaker.

Nations that trade the most with their nearest neighbors get the biggest benefits from trade while minimizing the dislocating job loss that can come with it, as Shannon O’Neil argues in the recent book “The Globalization Myth.” Europe and Asia are mastering that. America is not.

When America turned to Asia for low-cost labor, that left a void in our own backyard, as Karina Fernandez-Stark and Penny Bamber noted in a recent article in The Wilson Quarterly. China is filling it, becoming the most important trade partner and investor in much of Latin America. Twenty-two countries in the Western Hemisphere have signed onto China’s Belt and Road initiative. Chinese companies are building a deepwater port in Peru, a bridge across the Panama Canal and a deep space ground station in Argentina .

We can’t blame our Latin American friends for turning to China to make investments that we won’t provide. While we’ve been off trying to run the world, we’ve been elbowed out of our own hemisphere.

Supply chain diplomacy can help. Until now, Costa Rica has hedged its bets, signing onto Belt and Road while lobbying for the chance to join the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. But the chance to be a microchip hub seems to have tipped the balance. Mr. Chaves abruptly excluded the Chinese vendor Huawei — alongside others — from building the country’s 5G network, angering China.

“Sometimes you need to make difficult decisions,” Mr. Chaves told his audience. “We’re not imagining the future; we are building it, with those with whom we share values.”

It’s smart, both geopolitically and economically, to nurture that sense of shared destiny. It won’t be a quick fix to the region’s many problems, but it can help turn the tide over time. Costa Rica, Panama and the Dominican Republic are relatively small countries with limited influence. But if their economies are booming, they can provide more opportunities to those fleeing crisis-ridden places like Haiti and Nicaragua. Fewer migrants will arrive at our doorstep.

Like any policy, supply chain diplomacy has its risks. We could be building up our future competitors. I couldn’t help but notice that San José seems better poised for the digital age than rural Ohio. Some technical high schools already teach an artificial intelligence curriculum , a senior Intel executive in Costa Rica told me. The industry attracts top talent and fierce loyalty. At Intel’s plant near San José, one factory manager told me that he “bleeds blue” — the color of the company logo.

But this factory wouldn’t be competitive in the United States. Even in Costa Rica, it has struggled to compete with the low labor costs of Asia. Intel closed the plant in 2014 and sent its work to Malaysia, leaving a skeleton crew doing research and development. The factory reopened in 2020 , after the pandemic set off a chip shortage. Intel has been expanding ever since, gobbling up space that used to be a cafeteria. Demand for chips will only increase with the rise of artificial intelligence.

How we navigate the challenges posed by A.I. — and a far more powerful China — will determine our future. We have a choice: face those challenges by ourselves or with friendly neighbors.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Farah Stockman joined the Times editorial board in 2020. For four years, she was a reporter for The Times, covering politics, social movements and race. She previously worked at The Boston Globe, where she won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2016. @ fstockman