A rt a nd Glob a liz ation

The S t on e A rt T h e ory I nstitutes

Edited by James Elkins

vol. 1
Art and Globalization

The Stone Art Theory This series is dedicated to

Institutes is a series of Howard and Donna Stone,
books on five of the long-time friends of the
principal unresolved School of the Art Institute
problems in contemporary of Chicago.
art theory. The series
attempts to be as
international, inclusive,
and conversational as
possible, in order to give
a comprehensive sense of
the state of thinking on
each issue. All together,
the series involves over
three hundred scholars
from over sixty countries.
Art a nd
Globalization

edited by james elkins , zhivka valiavicharska , and alice kim

the pennsylvania state university press, university park, pennsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-
Publication Data
Art and globalization / edited by
James Elkins,
Zhivka Valiavicharska,
and Alice Kim.
p. cm. — (The Stone
Art Theory Institutes)
Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Summary: “Brings together
historians, philosophers, critics,
postcolonial theorists, and cura-
tors to ask how contemporary
global art is conceptualized.
Issues discussed include globalism
and globalization, internationalism
and nationality, empire and capi-
talism”—Provided by publisher.
isbn 978-0-271-03716-5 (cloth :
alk. paper)
1. Art and globalization.
I. Elkins, James, 1955– .
II. Valiavicharska, Zhivka.
III. Kim, Alice.
N72.G55A76 2010
701’.03—dc22
2009053930
Copyright © 2010
The Pennsylvania State University
All rights reserved
Printed in the
United States of America
Published by The Pennsylvania
State University Press,
University Park, PA 16802-1003
The Pennsylvania State University
Press is a member of the Associa-
tion of American University Presses.
It is the policy of The Pennsylva-
nia State University Press to use
acid-free paper. Publications on un-
coated stock satisfy the minimum
requirements of American National
Standard for Information Sciences—
Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Material, ansi Z39.48–1992.
This book is printed on Natures
Natural, which contains 50% post-
consumer waste.
 contents

Series Preface assessments Chris Berry

vii 214
Caroline A. Jones
first introduction 129 Hyungmin Pai
218
James Elkins Karl Eric Leitzel
1 Partha Mitter
138
222
second introduction Rasheed Araeen
Zhivka Valiavicharska 140 Carolyn Loeb
5 226
Néstor García Canclini
142 Suman Gupta
229
Blake Gopnik
146 Saskia Sassen
the seminars 237
Marina Grzinic
1. The National Situation 148 Charles Green
13 241
Jonathan Harris
2. Translation 152 Joaquín Barriendos
23 245
Anthony D. King
3. The Prehistory 158
of Globalization Nina Möntmann
37 161
afterword
4. Hybridity Ming Tiampo
51
James Elkins
166 251
5. Temporality Reiko Tomii Notes on the Contributors
63 171 285
6. Postcolonial Narratives C. J. W.-L. Wee Index
73 176 291
7. Neoliberalism John Clark
85 181

8. Four Failures of Iftikhar Dadi

the Seminars 183
97 Mark Jarzombek
188
9. Universality
109 Tani Barlow
195
Esther Gabara
200
Ján Bakos̆
205
T. J. Demos
209
series preface

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 justi-
fications 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 infor-
mally 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, trans-
lation, 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 visual-
ity. 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
viii series preface

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 2008.1 Like The Art Seminar, the Stone Art Theory
Institutes are an attempt to record a new kind of art theory, one that is more in-
clusive 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 partici-
pate in the books. Some conversations are genuinely dialectic, others are abrupt
encounters, and still others are unaccountable misunderstandings. All those spe-
cies of communication are recorded as faithfully as possible, because they are
evidence of the state of understanding of each field.2
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 neces-
sarily 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

1. The topics of the seven volumes of The Art
Seminar: Art History Versus Aesthetics (2006),
Photography Theory (2007), Is Art History
Global? (2007), The State of Art Criticism, coed-
ited with Michael Newman (2008), Renaissance
Theory, coedited with Robert Williams (2008),
Landscape Theory, coedited with Rachael DeLue
(2008), and Re-enchantment, coedited with
David Morgan (2008). All are published by Rout-
ledge (Taylor and Francis), New York.
2. One function of these two series is to
demonstrate that different fields have different
kinds of incoherence. The particular disunities
of art criticism are discussed in an exchange
at the end of The State of Art Criticism. The
incoherence of theorizing on the Renaissance
is the subject of another exchange at the end
of Renaissance Theory. My own thoughts about
the very strange second volume of that series,
Photography Theory, are in “Is Anyone
ix series preface

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 dif-
ficult. 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 prac-
ticed 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.

a special acknowledgment
This is the kind of project that is not normally possible in academic life, because
it requires an unusual outlay of time and effort: a month of preparatory reading,
a concerted week without the distractions of papers being read or lectures that
are off topic.
The originating events at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago were
called the Stone Summer Theory Institute, after Howard and Donna Stone,
whose gift made this series possible. What is remarkable about their support is
that it is directed to content and not infrastructure or display. In the art world,
there is no end to the patronage of display: corporate sponsors can be found
for most every art project, and galleries traditionally depend on individuals
and corporations for much of their programming. In that ocean of public
patronage there is virtually nothing directed at the question of what art means.
The Stones’ gift is extremely unusual. Their own collecting interests, which
include serious, ambitious postminimal art, are in line with the subjects of
this series: the theories addressed by this series are only important issues if
it is granted that the history of art theory exerts a pressure on the dissipated
present, just as postminimalism is crucial mainly, and possibly only, for those
who experience the modernist past as a challenge and not merely an attractive
backdrop.
So this series is dedicated to Howard and Donna Stone: if more patrons
supported art history, theory, and criticism, the art world might well make
more sense.

Listening?” Photofile 80 (Winter 2007): 80. And

I have ended the Art Seminar series with a look
back at the different incoherences of all seven
subjects: “Envoi to the Art Seminar Series,” in
Re-enchantment, 305–10. (A similar Envoi will
conclude this series.)
x series preface

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 dissemina-
tion of art assumes nationalism and ethnic identity, but rarely analyzes it. At the
same time there is extensive theorizing about globalization in politics, postcolo-
nial 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 way to the PhD
in art practice. Meanwhile, conversations on freshman courses in studio art con-
tinue 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.
first introduction

James Elkins

This introduction was read on the opening day of the event, July 16, 2007.

I would like to propose two subjects to begin our conversations, but before I do
that, I want to mention three of the concerns that got me involved in these issues
and generated this event. These may be mainly my own interests, and I don’t ex-
pect that they will correspond to subjects we discuss over the course of the week.
First: the art world produces an avalanche of literature—glossy art maga-
zines, Internet blogs, catalogues and brochures, newspaper reviews—that is basi-
cally not read. Here at the School of the Art Institute, for example, we subscribe
to about a hundred art journals and magazines, and across the street in the mu-
seum library there are another hundred; in my experience the majority go un-
read—unseen—even by students and artists most interested in the art world.1 In
the world of art fairs, as opposed to biennales, there is virtually no writing that
has any conceptual ambitions, or any ambitions to offer more rigorous analyses.2
The absence of critical readers—or, often, any readers—for these literatures of
contemporary art is sometimes chalked up to the fact that such writing is an
instrument of the market. That seems to me to be only a partial explanation. So
I would be delighted if this event might function, in the end, to make life harder
for people who write about contemporary art, and also for people who aim to
account for the contemporary art world but do not address that wider nonaca-
demic literature.3

1. The Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at the
Art Institute of Chicago subscribe to approxi-
mately one hundred contemporary art journals,
out of a print subscription of fifteen hundred.
The John M. Flaxman Library at the School of
the Art Institute, the companion library across
the street—the one most used by art students—
has 108 contemporary art journals. The list
begins: Abitare, Adbusters, African Arts, Afterall,
Afterimage, American Ceramics, American Craft,
American Indian Art Magazine, Aperture, Area,
Art and AsiaPacific, Art Calendar, Art Chronika,
Art in America, Art India, Art Journal, Art Link,
Art Monthly, Art Newspaper, Art News, Art
Nexus, Art Now Gallery Guide, Art on Paper, Art
Papers, Art Press, Art Review, Art Therapy, Artes
de Mexico, Artforum International, Arts of Asia,
Artus, Artweek, Asian Art News, Bidoun, Bomb,
Cabinet, Calyx . . . The titles at that end of the
alphabet include the few that are seen by a fair
number of readers (Artforum, Art in America).
Although there is no way to measure readership,
I think the majority of journals go unopened.
This is what I mean by unread. Thanks to Susan
Augustine, Pam Cipkowski, and Holly Dankert
for this information.
2. Reviewing Basel Miami in 2007, Peter
Schjeldahl says, “Talent counts; ideas are im-
material . . . A decade ago, much new art was
eyebrow-deep in critical theory. Now it seems
as carefree as a summertime schoolboy, while
far better dressed.” I didn’t quote that at the
round table, because Schjeldahl is typically
hedging his bets: he isn’t for “critical theory,”
but his piece complains about a condition that
could—in theory as it were—be meliorated by
an infusion of “critical theory.” Nevertheless, he
is right about the absence of readable literature,
“critical theory” or not. Schjeldahl, “Temptations
of the Fair,” New Yorker, December 25, 2006/
January 1, 2007, 148–49, quotation at 148.
3. This is one of the arguments of my What
Happened to Art Criticism? (Chicago: Prickly
Paradigm Press, 2003), and it is explored by a
number of the contributors to The State of Art
Criticism, edited by James Elkins and Michael
2 first introduction

Second, biennales and other international art events are sometimes analyzed
as dichotomies of two different kinds of art, and I would like to problematize
that. On the one hand, so it is said, there are artists interested in aesthetics—of-
ten, or normatively, painters—who want to continue various twentieth-century
practices. On the other hand, there are artists interested in resisting globaliza-
tion, commodification, or the machinery of the art market. That dichotomy is
a trope in the literature on contemporary art, and I would like to find a way to
say something interesting about the conditions under which it appears to be the
most interesting way of describing the art world. There are, as a start, categories
beyond those two. For example, there are artists who are taken as barometers
of the zeitgeist, as Jeff Koons was; artists who are watched as market indicators,
like Damien Hirst; and artists who transparently exemplify particular traditions,
genres, or subjects, even when those traditions have long been exhausted. In
other words, there’s an entire fauna of practices beyond the dichotomy of belated
aesthetic practice and problematic antiaesthetic resistance.
There is an intransigent essay by Benjamin Buchloh on the 2005 Venice Bi-
ennale, in which he castigates the German pavilion, curated by Julian Heynen.
The German pavilion had two artists: Thomas Scheibitz, who was doing recher-
ché paintings in a faux–social realist style; and Tino Sehgal, whose work was op-
positional and antiaesthetic. For Buchloh, Scheibitz’s work is “desperate conven-
tionalization” and Sehgal’s radicalism is “pointless,” but even so, they represent
a characteristic desire on Heynen’s part to have both a “renewed . . . aesthetic
convention” and the “radicality of the anti-aesthetic.” Buchloh says Heynen’s
strategy “was to occupy two mutually exclusive positions simultaneously with-
out having a real commitment to either one,” and he adds that this contrast is
“typical of the founding contrast of the biennale, between propagandistic in-
terests of the nation-state and critical projects of the avant-garde.”4 That two-
part reading—in terms of aesthetic practice versus antiaesthetic resistance—is
a strong but typical instance of the reading of biennales, which I would like to
understand (to see what makes it seem plausible, makes it the optimal reading)
and think beyond. (In that I’m in agreement with Buchloh.5)
Thus, instead of being interested exclusively in art projects engaged in re-
sistance, critique, and subversion, we might want to find ways to describe these
inbuilt oppositions, and the entire dynamic of biennale culture in its totality of
practices and discourses. We could spend equal time with contemporary interna-
tional art that is unreconstructed, celebratory, nostalgic, “amnesiac,” as Buchloh
calls it, aestheticizing, retrospective.6 For me, this is the function of an economic

Newman, The Art Seminar 4 (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2008).
4. Buchloh, “The Curse of Empire,” Artforum
44 (2005): 254–58, quotation at 254.
5.The operation of the dialectic here, as
a field that comprises contradictions and is
comprised by them, is one I am assigning to my
own exposition of Buchloh’s text. I do not see
it in the text itself, which proposes a vitiated or
overdetermined dichotomy.
6. “Amnesiac” appears as part of Buchloh’s
invective against Scheibitz, which turns on
the historical demands that make the sympa-
thetic study of work like Scheibitz’s impossible.
“Scheibitz’s shambles, paraded like the spoils
of the former utopian aspirations of abstraction,
shift uneasily between décor for a Dresden disco
and the window display of a cutting-edge Swiss
department store in 1959. Ranging in its picto-
rial vocabulary from Auguste Herbin and Victor
3 first introduction

or sociological analysis; otherwise we are mining phenomena of globalization in

order to create the strongest possible resistance, rather than trying to understand
the generative conditions, the current states and processes of globalization. I am
just as interested in what happens when Sehgal and Scheibitz are juxtaposed as I
am in the way every serious art writer finds it unproblematic to ignore a painter
like Howard Behrens: he is among the top three artists on the Princess and Cu-
nard cruise lines, and has a global market comparable to any artist better known
in the “serious” art world.7
Third, there is the question of the literature on artists who are understood
as representatives of some local practice. I find that writing on them is often
incomplete, even coy, when it comes to describing what comprises their local
character.8 The art world needs signifiers of the local and national, but it is also
coy about those same signifiers. The notion would be that visual art can some-
how express cultures, places, nationalities, and communities, but that because it
is visual those cultures, places, nationalities, and communities do not need to be
articulated. It’s an enabling obfuscation, I think, and it permits some contempo-
rary art to seem international, to seem to be about differences.
So much for the concerns that got me interested in this subject. On to our
event: the fundamental strategy is to bring together people from disciplines that
do not ordinarily have much contact in order to do some serious work on the
ways in which what is often called contemporary “international” art is conceptu-
alized. In preparing the event, I was especially concerned with two phenomena:
first, the huge amount of theoretical and empirical work that has been done on
globalization in political theory and related disciplines, and the absence of seri-
ous dialogues with those bodies of knowledge when it comes to contemporary
art writing; and second, the equally enormous literature of “premodern” forms
of regionalism and globalism in art history, and the amnesia about that prehis-
tory on the part of contemporary art writers.
We have two art historians on our Faculty, Shigemi Inaga and Tom
Kaufmann, who have an exemplary—I’m tempted to say unparalleled—depth
of knowledge about certain elements of the history of the discipline of art his-
tory, and we have Fred Jameson and Harry Harootunian, whose analyses of the
temporal conditions of modernity and its different experiences are among the
most productive of any writers. My notion is to bring these discourses to bear on
writing about international or global contemporary art.
(In addition, we have an astonishingly high level of Fellows here. Five of
the fifteen Fellows are either writing books on the globalization of art or already

Vasarely to Klein, the installation amounts to a
sum of the worst efforts of German and English
painters of the ’60’s . . . all of whom tried to
preserve the dilapidated remnants of European
abstraction while buttressing their work against
an onslaught of logic and lucidity from American
Minimalism” (Buchloh, “Curse of Empire,” 255).
7. I thank Judi Behrens for this information.
Howard Behrens is one of the world’s leading
palette-knife artists; his circle includes Alexandra
Nechita, Martiros Meuchian, and Bill Mack, all
(I am guessing) unknown to the participants in
the Stone Summer Theory Institute. See www.
howardbehrens.com.
8. An example of coyness is Francesco Bon-
ami’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Agenda,” an es-
say for the New York Times on the current state
of Chinese art. “The word on Chinese art right
now,” Bonami writers, “is ‘Buy!’ but I’m not con-
vinced we Westerners really understand what is
4 first introduction

have written books—that’s more than the Faculty has written!9 Several are senior
scholars, attending as “students.” We represent, on a rough count, five or six
disciplines with investments in these questions.)
By the nature of things, this will be an uneven week: sometimes, I imagine,
we will find useful things in social and political theory or in the history of glo-
balization before modernism, and sometimes we’ll be listening politely to people
in other fields—as one does in interdisciplinary conferences—wondering what
in the world their work has to do with contemporary art. I think that is more
than just an interesting risk; I think it is a necessary risk. Without it, the ocean
of mediocre writing on contemporary international art will continue to swell,
as oblivious of its deeper history as it is of debates over its fundamental terms,
unchecked and uninformed by the astonishingly well-articulated discourses in
neighboring fields.

going on there.” He remarks on the market, but
when it comes to saying what Chinese artists
are doing, he says only, “Their capacity to de-
vour and digest global ideas in order to create
their own new aesthetic is simply astonishing.”
Young Chinese artists, he says, work in several
media at once—he says a typical artist might be
“working on painting, sculpture, photography,
video and (why not?) performance all at the
same time.” But other than those two observa-
tions, both of which might be applied to artists
in many other countries, and neither of which
get near the question of what “their own new
aesthetic” might be, he says absolutely nothing
to answer his own question about the Chinese-
ness of contemporary Chinese art. “Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Agenda,” New York Times Style
supplement, February 25, 2007, 71–78.
9. Among the Fellows, Bhaskar Mukhopad-
hyay was working on a manuscript with the title
“The Rumor of Globalization: Decentering the
Global from the Vernacular Margins”; Charlotte
Bydler had published The Global Art World,
Inc.: On the Globalization of Contemporary Art
(Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2004); Pamela
Lee was at work on a project titled “Forgetting
the Art World”; Joyce Brodsky was working on
a manuscript called “Transnational Art in the
Age of Globalization”; and Shelly Errington had
written The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and
Other Tales of Progress (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998).
second introduction

Zhivka Valiavicharska

This introduction was also read on the opening day of the event, July 16, 2007.

I would like to emphasize the need to bridge the studies of globalization with
our attempts to analyze the “global” aspects of contemporary art. I am approach-
ing the problems of globalization here from a materialist perspective broadly
construed. Recently, we have seen a number of really interesting and carefully
researched ethnographies of globalization, coming out of the interdisciplin-
ary endeavors of departments such as geography, anthropology, and sociology.
Such ethnographies employ different theoretical approaches to study the ways
in which the advance of transnational capital in various communities changes
their social structures, their class relations, and the meaning of their cultur-
al heritage and cultural experiences.1 From looking at how state-owned food-
processing factories in postsocialist Poland are privatized and reorganized, to
how electronics factories in the Guangdong province of southern China bring
into existence a female proletarian class for transient labor—these studies insist
that the development of global capitalisms dramatically alters our subjectivities
while also impacting our lives in very tangible, material ways.2 However, these are
not simple arguments: it has been the role of some Marxist-historical and post-
structuralist critical approaches, together with some careful ethnographic work, to
argue against teleological accounts of capitalist development, and against claims
about its homogenizing effects. In other words, we already know that the histori-

1. The following are some of my more recent
encounters with some interesting collected
volumes on globalization and global neoliberal-
isms; this is not an exhaustive list. On various
cases of the global reorganization of labor
and production, see Michael Burawoy, ed.,
Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and
Imaginations in a Postmodern World (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000). On the ge-
ographies of global material reorganizations, see
R. J. Johnston, Peter Taylor, and Michael Watts,
eds., Geographies of Global Change: Remap-
ping the World (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002);
David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism:
Towards a Geography of Uneven Development
(London: Verso, 2006). On globalization, gender,
and labor, see Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Rus-
sell Hochschild, eds., Global Woman: Nannies,
Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002). For
inquiries into some cultural aspects of globaliza-
tion, see Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi,
eds., The Cultures of Globalization (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1998). An insightful col-
lective anthropological inquiry is Arjun Appadu-
rai’s edited volume Globalization, Public Culture
12, no. 1 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
On governmentality and biopolitics from global
anthropological perspectives, see Aihwa Ong
and Stephen Collier, eds., Global Assemblages:
Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropo-
logical Problems (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005).
See also Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Excep-
tion: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). On
global governmentality and institutional critique,
see Wendy Larner and William Walters, eds.,
Global Governmentality: Governing International
Spaces (London: Routledge, 2004).
2. Examples are from anthropological
research projects by Elizabeth Dunn, Privatiz-
ing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the
Remaking of Labor (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2004), and Pun Ngai, Made in China:
Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
6 second introduction

cal outcomes of developing global capitalism by no means follow inevitable or

predictable trajectories. Rather, what actually happens is fully contingent upon
specific cultural, social, and political conditions in any given moment and place,
and the function and meaning of the institutions, practices, and discourses re-
lated to global capitalism are actively being transformed and reconfigured in
everyday practice, producing new and unpredictable realities.
In these critical discourses on globalization, the question of art is crucially
and interestingly absent. So like Jim, but from the perspective of social and po-
litical theory, I would like to point to the disjuncture between various discourses
on art (especially art-historical ones) and the critical discourses on globalization.
And I would like to posit this gap as a central concern for our seminar. What I
mean is that, with all the abundance of critical work on globalization, very few
venture to study concrete instances of how contemporary art production, art
display, and the production of various historical knowledges of art participate in,
say, the neoliberal reforms taking place in postsocialist Russia, or the formation
of a transnational business class in Hong Kong, or how cultural policy projects
have employed the arts towards an eastward expansion of the European Union.
Concerning the conceptual and analytic categories we’ll be using during the
seminar: I am very eager to be a part of our discussions on alternative histories
and alternative modernities—I am sure all of our Faculty will have much to
say about this. Since most of the Fellows are also historians of some kind, I am
hoping the following will be questions of central concern: How can we think of
possibilities to write art history through events, through alternative experiences
of time, and through the ambiguities of the everyday? Aren’t precisely these acts
of radical rereading of history—the courage to tell a different story, and a true
one, needless to say—what enable the present politically? I find these questions
absolutely crucial when it comes to the pervasiveness, the ubiquity, and the im-
mense institutional and discursive force that master narratives of art have.
During the seminars, however, I will be also interested in juxtaposing these
sets of concerns with another mode of interrogation coming from critical space
studies. Critical geography has made the claim that social and material relations
manifest themselves geographically, that material inequalities inevitably acquire
spatial or geographical dimensions. The development of transnational material
relations, they say, is a historically contested process, which manifests itself in
highly uneven global geographies, in these so-called geographies of power. Since
so much of the art market and international art practices have to do with global
travel, global art display, and global markets, I would be interested to see how
we might link them to the unequal global spaces that transnational capitalisms
carve out, what kinds of inclusions and exclusions are at stake there, and how
these practices impact the lives of people.
I am also hoping to bring to the forefront another major concern: that of art
and culture’s stakes in neoliberal subject-formations. Perhaps we would have to
revisit critically the autonomy, often taken for granted, of categories such as the
7 second introduction

cultural, the political, and the economic, in light of some newly mushroomed
practices and concepts such as “cultural policy” and “cultural capital,” which
have taken on a very instrumental approach to culture to implement neoliberal
economic reforms and to produce particular subjective effects.
And one final point—perhaps I should have started with this—about our
“gap.” It might be obvious to most of you here; for me it certainly has to do
with the particular modes of interrogation that a discipline such as art history
grounds itself upon; or in other words, how we can look at this gap as a symptom
or a legacy of a particular modernity, examine it epistemologically, and study
the conditions of possibility that enabled it—a genealogical approach would
certainly yield interesting ways to understand how art-historical knowledge, its
methods of analysis, and its set of assumptions were made possible within West-
ern bourgeois sociopolitical conditions. Moreover, the very fact that this gap is
visible and identifiable means that certain metadiscourses that can give us a way
of approaching it do exist. In other words, what kinds of new discourses do we
have that structure the gap’s visibility and its meanings? I’ll leave all these ques-
tions to the art historians and the historians of the discipline.
the seminars
the participants:
The 2007 Stone Summer Theory
Institute had seven Faculty,
fifteen Fellows, and ten graduate
students from the School of the
Art Institute. They are shown in
the panorama on these pages.
the faculty:
Susan Buck-Morss (Cornell Uni-
versity), James Elkins (School of
the Art Institute), Harry Haroo-
tunian (New York University),
Shigemi Inaga (International
Research Center for Japanese
Studies, Kyoto), Fredric Jameson
(Duke University), Thomas
DaCosta Kaufmann (Princeton
University), and Zhivka Valiavi-
charska (Berkeley).
the fellows:
Simon Baier (PhD candidate,
Staatliche Hochschule für
Gestaltung, Karlsruhe), Joyce
Brodsky (Professor Emeritus,
Art Department, University of
California, Santa Cruz), Charlotte
Bydler (Södertörn University
College and Stockholm Univer-
sity), Darby English (University
of Chicago), Pedro Erber (PhD
candidate, Cornell University),
Shelly Errington (Department
of Anthropology, University of
California at Santa Cruz), Michele
Greet (George Mason University),
Michael Holly (Director of the
Research and Academic Program,
Sterling and Francine Clark Art
Institute), Isla Leaver-Yap (MSc by
Research candidate, University of
Edinburgh), Pamela Lee (Stanford
University), Angela Miller (Wash-
ington University), Keith Moxey
(Barnard College and Columbia
University), Suzana Milevska
(Visual and Cultural Research
Centre, “Euro-Balkan” Institute,
Skopje), Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay
(Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies,
Centre for Cultural Studies, Gold-
smiths), and Andrzej Szczerski
(Institute of Art History, Jagiel-
lonian University, Kraków).
the school of the art
institute graduate class:
Jessica Cochran, Erik Dell, Max-
well Graham, Amanda Gutierrez,
Karl Hakken, Megan Hyde, Roman
Petruniak, Abigail Satinsky, Sue
Shon, and Allison White.

The panorama was taken by James

Elkins and Shigemi Inaga, who took
turns standing inside the rectangu-
lar seminar table. The photo-stitch-
ing software, DoubleTake, insisted
that Zhivka Valiavicharska appear
twice; Michael Holly is shown
twice to complete the 360 degree
sequence. Susan Buck-Morss also
appears twice (once in the door-
way, returning with coffee). On this
occasion Fred Jameson and Thomas
DaCosta Kaufmann were absent.
 1. t h e n a t i o n a l s i t u a t i o n

Fredric Jameson led the first seminar. We began with a reading of his texts, includ-
ing “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” 1 and circled around issues of
the nation, the nation-state, and the national situation. In the end the conversation
turned to the place of the aesthetic in his analyses. In the seminar, he presented visual
material including slides of work by Yin Xiuzhen, Jeff Wall, Pierre Bonnard, Martha
Schwartz’s Village of Yorkville Park in Toronto, Greek geometric vase painting, and
works by Leipzig school painters including Neo Rauch, Matthias Weischler, Tim Ei-
tel, Christoph Rückaberle, and Tilo Baumgarten. The texts and the visual examples
served as models for thinking about how the dialectic might yield—or is constituted
so as not to yield—viable intermediate spaces, the ones that many artists and partici-
pants in the contemporary art world uneasily inhabit or desire.

thomas dacosta kaufmann: My general question is: To what extent is what we refer
to as globalization a new phenomenon? While I know most people here are
interested in contemporary art, there are issues of the extent to which our con-
cerns are just those of the present, and also of how thinking about previous times
might illuminate our discussion.2
fredric jameson: I happen to think that although all sorts of international, non-
national, transnational relations existed before 1980, it is less interesting to
say that those international movements were just like globalization, and more
interesting to see how they are different from each other. I think the question
always has to be: how are these things going on now different from what hap-
pened before? I would want to insist on the difference between the old impe-
rialisms, which involve colonies, armies, and so forth, and whatever you want
to call these forms of influence that take place after decolonization. “Cultural
imperialism” is not enough; I think we need wholly new words. “Globaliza-
tion” replaced “cultural imperialism” and other terms, and I think that’s very

In these seminars, the notes have been
added by the speakers, except in the italicized
introduction to each seminar, where the notes
are the editor’s, or where otherwise indicated.
1. Fredric Jameson, “Notes on Globalization
as a Philosophical Issue,” in The Cultures of
Globalization, edited by Fredric Jameson and
Masao Miyoshi (Durham: Duke University Press,
1998), 54–77; the seminar also read several
unpublished manuscripts.
2. It is interesting to recall in this context
that two of the three U.S. presidents at the
beginning of the previous century, namely
Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, were
historians who had a “global” vision. For in-
stance, one of Roosevelt’s essays, which stems
from a lecture he gave at the University of Berlin
in 1910, was on the World Movement. Of course,
you could say it was limited by the concep-
tions of nationalism at the time, and that it was
Eurocentric, but it does address worldwide com-
munication, the transference of ideas, and the
fact that people in many places are aware when
a scientific advance is made in Germany. Thus,
even in the early years of the twentieth century,
people thought about our issues pertaining to
our topic in a broader scheme. In my mind, this
points out that debates about the periodiza-
tion of globalization are, like the phenomena
described by this concept, not new.
14 art and globalization

welcome, because it suggests not only different power and economic relations
but also a different politics.
The mediation of the nation is very important in this. Everybody says the
nation is disappearing. On the contrary, it is dialectical: on the one hand there
are places trying to be nations (the famous “failed states” that never make it);
and nations that seem to be in crisis, and are weaker than others, and so forth.
But then, on the other hand—and this is very important for our topic—there’s
this thing that we’re in that is not really a nation. In the dispersed world of re-
lationships, it remains a center, whether it is dispersed or not, and that throws
a monkey wrench into the question of the nation. When you have something
like the United States, which is not a nation in the traditional sense, which is
really central, and toward which everything moves, but which you are trying to
describe not in terms of imperialism or power but in some new way, you have a
real problem, which I would call dialectical in nature: it is not easy to solve.
The reason there are still nation-states is that in this new system, govern-
ments have a function, and that is to ask their labor unions to take cuts, to ask
their nation to tighten its belt. Without a national government, or a sense of the
nation, nobody would be doing that. So the continued existence of nation-states
is tied to labor, as many other things are. But in any case I don’t think it does us
any good to talk about unities beyond the nation.
On the other hand, regarding the national: I think that artists work in the
situation of the national, so to say they are nationalist or antinational is to re-
main on a level of ideology, of personal opinion, and so on, which may not
be very useful. It may be better to see how they participate in the work of the
nation, how they undercut the nation’s ideologies. It is not just a matter of pa-
triotism: it’s a matter of deeper obligations. There is only the national situation.
People work in that, and what they can do they do in that. What they can’t do is
dictated by that. It’s a boundary that cannot really be transgressed.
So, how to discuss all this? There are some tried and true ways of talking
about things like art, which might be a starting point. They are economic cat-
egories: production, distribution, and consumption. We can go through each
and note differences from past processes.
In the realm of production, there are new technologies, and also new raw
materials. One of the characteristics of art in globalization is the use of new
materials; I think, for example, that the emergence of photography as a fine art
is a phenomenon specific to postmodernity or globalization (I don’t distinguish
here between those two terms). Whereas the great modernist photographers
were minor artists, and photography was a minor art, now all that has changed.
That’s just a sign of changes in production and raw materials. Such changes can
be profound: for example, I was in China for the first Rauschenberg show. The
Chinese had no idea what postmodernity was; their idea of art was modernism.
The Rauschenberg material made an enormous difference, and now there is a
Chinese postmodernism (not to say that the Rauschenberg show was the imme-
15 the national situation

diate cause). There have also been changes in the objects that are produced. Are
these objects? Are they texts, processes, installations? And if there is an object,
is it symptomatic of the changes, of the new realities? In what ways does the
work register symptoms of these underlying economic social realities? It has to,
but maybe it does so in new, unexpectedly complicated ways. What about when
the work tries itself to represent its new context, and the new processes? Are
there modes of representation of globalization that one might talk about? Can
they be successful? Would they be political, for example? (One would think that
once the object is isolated, it can be talked about in certain ways, and that is the
beginning of political consciousness.) Or is the new world system ineffable, and
therefore impossible to represent?
So those are some problems that arise with production. Concerning distri-
bution, there are new forms of communications (including conferences like this
one); the transformation of the museum; the coming-into-being of festivals, bi-
ennales, and so forth; the new art networks; and other phenomena. These various
forms of distribution are very much concerned with getting the product to the
United States: this is the center. Artists want their work to be looked at by us;
otherwise the work does not really exist. So one form of resistance is to do work
that doesn’t want to be looked at by Americans, that is indifferent to American
reception. As an example, there is the film by Wong Kar-wai, about two gay guys
who go to Buenos Aires.3 This is a movie with no American audience: it has Ar-
gentines, people from Hong Kong, and the gay community, but no one is look-
ing over their shoulder. There are no Americans in the audience. So we have the
possibility of objects that we can’t see, or that we are not meant to see.
As for consumption: I think an excellent way of talking about it is in terms
of constructing subjectivity. Art and culture program people to live in this new
world of globalization, and in particular in its new spaces. I think a work of art
might first and foremost have that function; it could also work on daily life, be-
cause that is the ultimate form taken by our existential reality. It can be worked
over, transformed, worked on. And finally there’s that old thing, ideology, which
is still around: the ideas people have about globalization and the free market
are certainly part of what the artwork works on, and it is very much involved in
consumption.
james elkins: The economic reading has wide resonance in contemporary art, but it
may be significant for our conversations that within art history, specifically
economic readings of art are a minority interest. (I am thinking, for example,
of macroeconomic work by Hans van Miegroet, Neil De Marchi, and Gary
Schwartz.4) So the connections you propose would produce an interesting col-
lision of discourses.
3. Chun gwong cha sit (1997), directed by 4. Hans J. van Miegroet and Neil De Marchi,
Wong Kar-wai; international English title: Bue- Mapping Markets for European Paintings in
nos Aires Affair; U.S. and Hong Kong release: Europe, 1450–1750 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols,
Happy Together. 2006).
16 art and globalization

I wonder, too, about the effect economic analyses might have on that end-
less ocean of art writing that I was vilifying. [See the Introduction, which was read
before this seminar.] I think that literature has a limitless capacity to absorb dis-
courses. I remember hearing that plastic garbage, thrown into the ocean, slowly
abrades, and that in some parts of the open ocean what appears as water is actu-
ally a soup of microscopic particles of plastic. That’s how I imagine that a serious
economic analysis would be received in the art world: it would be everywhere,
but never solid, never visible as an object that might provoke resistance, with
which someone might collide.5
fredric jameson: Well, these are not necessary economic categories: they are really
philosophic. But that kind of analysis always feels like debunking. You can see
it most clearly in Pierre Bourdieu’s work. Everybody thinks that when he’s done
with something, he’s torn it to pieces. We are talking about the law of value, and
how art criticism establishes the value of something. If you insist, as Bourdieu
does, that the gallery has the function of establishing these values, and that
makes the art market go around, then people think, “Oh, well, then, the work
is nothing; it’s just conspiracy and manipulation.” But it is important to know
that the work has its own value. Those two things are dialectically exclusive, not
exclusive in some either-or way. I think one has to be able to include a discourse
of intention, manipulation—what you’re calling the narrowly economic, mean-
ing the market and so forth—without allowing it to seem that it means the end
of the analysis of the work in terms of specifically aesthetic values.
james elkins: I agree, it is necessary, but extremely difficult. Bourdieu has that effect
on art history students, as if a switch is turned on, and the work is exposed as a
naked object.
shigemi inaga: Bourdieu was talking about cultural capital, capital culturel, and he was
trying to enlarge the concept. There is a fundamental ambiguity in his strategy:
was he trying to apply financial capital to other areas such as human relations
and culture? Or was he trying to modify the very notion of capital from its
Marxist definition? I wonder if people tend to interpret—wrongly—the cultural
capital in the former sense. But in my opinion what he tried cannot be reduced
to the simple application of the notion of economic capital to others areas, in-
cluding art. If it were the case, we would have to deny any specific value to art.
pedro erber: If I may return to art practices within a national framework: I remember
Fred’s comment yesterday that artists working in “smaller countries” must inter-
vene in their national contexts, which is where their works can find some kind of
political resonance. You contrasted this to the situation of American artists, who
are unlikely to intervene in something exclusively national. But, if that’s the case,
isn’t it due, to a large extent, to a generalized blindness among critics and schol-

5. See in this regard www.artfacts.net, which feature of the Web site. They have not, as far
provides a mathematically elaborate method as I am aware, been studied or used by any
of ranking artists’ performances in the market. academic historian or critic.
Those data are used primarily as a promotional
17 the national situation

ars in the United States and Europe to the international or transnational impli-
cations of the works of artists in those “smaller countries”?6 In this sense, maybe
one of our roles as scholars or critics would be precisely to recuperate these voices
into the international discussion, where they belong and can resonate.
fredric jameson: A national situation is always a failure. So these countries are busy
thinking: what went wrong? They ruminate about it, they argue about it, they
appeal to foreigners, they talk to their imaginary partners abroad. The artists are
working on that stuff: what is the matter with daily life, what is wrong with us,
why do we have so much disorder, or so much order—whatever the case may
be. I think you have to say that art takes place in the national situation. We have
been talking a lot about how, when a foreigner looks at the art, the content im-
mediately evaporates: this is a way of putting it back in.
Further, nationalism isn’t such a bad thing; as Deleuze once said, it’s fine
until they have founded their nation. A nation is something that has a flag and
an airline. Once the state is running, then they start oppressing other people.
But until then, the construction of the nation has very interesting moments: the
construction of collectivity, of subjectivity, and so forth. Indeed, Partha Chatter-
jee has pertinently analyzed the way in which any nationalism, to be productive,
has to be more than a mere nationalism and to have goals beyond any simple
national ethnic self-affirmation. The Cuban Revolution is an excellent example
of a unique nationalism that fulfilled itself in socialism.
When we talk about the United States, we always have to reckon in that differ-
ence. That is what would make a discussion of these problems dialectical. Because
otherwise, if all nations are the same, then we are the same as everybody else.
Michael Hardt and Tony Negri constantly got attacked for their book Em-
pire because, I think, everybody had read Wallerstein, and they knew that this
wasn’t an empire anymore, in the classical sense. But I told people, the authors
are thinking of the Roman Empire. America is like the Roman Empire in that in
Rome, everyone is a citizen, and everyone is equal, but in moments of crisis one
of them takes precedence over all the others. Then things subside, and everybody
is equal again. I think that’s the dynamic we’re facing here.
And one final point about leaning to read visually: one wants to avoid cul-
turalism. We don’t want to hear what’s culturally unique about the Japanese, or

6. In a historical key, the fate of the works
of the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica is a poignant
example. Although he lived, worked, and exhib-
ited abroad for short periods of time, Oiticica
was mostly inserted in the local context of art
in Brazil, and more specifically Rio de Janeiro.
However, despite the intimate ties of his works
to the national and even more so to the urban
social context of Rio, its implications go far
beyond those local specificities. Oiticica thought
and wrote of his work always in the broader
context of contemporary art history and repeat-
edly reflected on his place and that of other of
his Brazilian counterparts within that context.
In spite of critics such as Guy Brett who very
early on perceived the significance and radical
originality of Oiticica’s works, the history of his
delayed recognition in the international arena
tells much about a certain lag in the historical
perception of historians and critics in Europe
and North America concerning intellectual and
artistic developments in so-called peripheral
countries. The main reference for Oiticica’s texts
in Portuguese is the collection Aspiro ao grande
Labirinto (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1986). Two of
his texts were translated in Alberro and Stimson,
Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1999). See also the catalogue
Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color (London: Tate,
2007).
18 art and globalization

the Bengalis, or any group. That is really a dead end. But since the beginnings of
anthropology, culture has been the place where collective specificities have been
assigned. Those are very troublesome traps one wants to avoid.
harry harootunian: I like your conception of the national situation. But regardless
of what it is, or when it is, you really do get back to the problem of uniqueness,
even if in some inadvertent way. You are still obliged, or compelled, to index the
category of the nation as a unit: a unit of explanation, or analysis, or interpreta-
tion. That immediately opens the way for all those claims of irreducibility. Na-
tions are not alike. They all clamor they are different from everyone else. It seems
to me we have set up a paradox with the conception of the nation, or national
situation. What interests me is how we might get out of it. What other kinds of
units might be entertained?
keith moxey: Perhaps that speaks to the apparently intractable philosophical issue of
universality and particularity that seems to be haunting this conversation. The
stakes for art history are both historical and aesthetic. The discipline’s under-
standing of history has been operating on a vaguely Hegelian notion of teleol-
ogy, which has become harder and harder to sustain in the face of the incom-
mensurability of global cultures and the distinctiveness of their approaches to
the past. The other side of the coin, the aesthetic side, is also up for grabs because
of a new awareness of the vitality of contemporary artistic production in loca-
tions far removed from traditional centers of critical power. On the one hand,
you have a book like Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, which chal-
lenges some of the basic assumptions of Western historiography as completely
inadequate for dealing with other parts of the globe.7 On the other, some of the
basic strategies of aesthetic theory, the dissolution of the subject-object relation,
for example, have traditionally been based on Western models of subjectivity.
To return to the issue of universality and particularity: every theoretical at-
tempt to relate them to one another seems to get in trouble because there is no
negotiating the gulf that separates them. And yet, as Fred said this earlier, an
awareness of genders, classes, and so on need not dissolve the entire notion of
aesthetics; indeed, we may need art theory more than ever just to account for
different points of view.
suzana milevska: The issue of universality and particularity in terms of national iden-
tity and globalization in Europe is inevitably linked with the issues of belonging
and participation. There is still a contradiction, especially among the candidate
countries for accession, between the desire to acquire European citizenship (and
thus to belong to the European “family”) and the inherited belonging to a cer-
tain local cultural or ethnic community. The urgent question here would be
how to reconcile the historic belonging with participation that tends towards
belonging without belonging. The disposition of the expectance within these two

7. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe:

Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
19 the national situation

kinds of belonging radically differs: while the former, the belonging to a certain
national identity, can hardly be circumvented, the latter is in the realm of long-
ing for participation in democratic processes and is projected in future.
Most European cities are marked by multicultural heterogeneity: the society
built up on migration, deterritorialization, ethnic differences, and cultural diver-
sities. This self-aware resistance to fully immerse in the larger European “family”
by accepting of any proclaimed universal (read: Western) values gives way to a
call for tolerating and integrating differences and for societal tolerance towards
different cultural appearances. Different cultural insignia, ethnic dresses, hats
and caps, veils and scarves are seen in any European city today.
Nevertheless, all these “head coverings” also keep us apart, give way to a
certain tension between the cultural, ethnic, religious, or other particularities,
between already belonged and the not-yet-belonged.
keith moxey: Fred, one of the qualities of your essay on the philosophical implications
of globalization is its capacity to articulate several sides of the issue. On the one
hand, there is a rather critical account of Néstor García Canclini, who charac-
terizes the cultural implications of globalization in a positive light, and on the
other hand, you present your own apocalyptic account of the homogenization/
Americanization of the world by something known as “late capitalism.”8 So in
that essay, you come out the realist and he comes out the starry-eyed optimist—
so I was wondering if I could turn the tables for a moment, and ask whether or
not the prospect of the inevitable coming of predicted revolution might not also
be a utopian gesture. When labor is fully commodified, then presumably the
revolution will come about, and this ghastly process in which we find ourselves
will somehow come to an end. Wouldn’t that be a utopian view, one which
might balance your criticism of someone like García Canclini, who sees hope in
the process of hybridization?
fredric jameson: Well, Marx doesn’t really say “revolution,” but he says that the resil-
ience of the system will break down. That resilience is a lot more obvious today
than it was in his generation. What Marx says, very briefly, in the Grundrisse is
that the system does not run into its final crisis until economic expansion is no
longer possible.9
Utopian? Well, I have things to say on that in my book on the subject.10 I
think of utopia as politically useful today, when nobody believes in the future.
Utopia is an attempt to shake up the way in which we are completely submerged
in our own present, incapable of imagining that it might change, and even in-
capable of the sense of change that was possible in the modern period (ideas of
wonder-working chemicals, flying machines). Now that we have all that, it’s
harder to imagine a qualitative change, although we have many more gadgets.

8. Jameson, “Notes on Globalization,” 66. 10. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the

9. Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der Future: The Desire Called Utopias and Other
politischen Ökonomie (1857–61), English transla- Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005).
tion online at www.marxists.org/archive/marx/
works/1857/grundrisse/.
20 art and globalization

From a number of points of view, my diagnosis has been that people no lon-
ger think historically, and that does not only pertain to the past but also to the
future. My idea in the book was that utopian production is the attempt to break
through all that. What is important is not the shape of utopias (classic utopians
had different ideas, for example Fourier, who has an immense scheme of things,
very remarkable) but simply the attempt to break the hold of the imperious pres-
ent on our imaginations. So I would think that is the justification for utopian
politics. I don’t think I said anything about a revolutionary politics.
What I’d say about hybridity is that I think it is an ideology, or it’s a commodi-
fied slogan, and people have gotten tired of it and moved on to the next product.
We all have ideologies; I’m sure I have mine, but I don’t know what it is. García
Canclini has a different one, which I think was very powerful at its moment—but
it’s a market ideology, the idea that things will cross-fertilize one another.
The case of hybridity is a little like Peter Wollen’s interest in tourist art.11
After all, if structuralism and poststructuralism have taught us that authenticity
was an ideology, that the whole existential idea was bad, then why should tour-
ist art be inauthentic? Now—you would know better than I—this has become
a field of study; he has a chapter on it in Raiding the Icebox.12 For me that would
be a more interesting argument than hybridity.
michael holly: I am pushing here, trying to figure out what you mean by aesthetics.
In the typescript of “Globalization and Postmodernity” [circulated to the semi-
nar] you say that one of the “psychic and cultural symptoms” of globalization
“included a growing predominance of the spatial over the temporal (which had
been the dominant of an older high modernism) [and] a reorganization of the
hierarchy of the arts in such a way that the visual image became the central aes-
thetic phenomenon.” And then a page and a half later, you say “the classic ideas
of the autonomy of the aesthetic”—I love this image—“have vanished like the
snow and glaciers of the ice age.”
So when I put these two passages together, and think about your character-
ization of this generation as thinking more of ruptures than continuities, and
when I recall that classic neo-Kantian high modernist thinker Erwin Panofsky,
saying that from the wreckage of the old comes the new, I find myself wrestling
with the idea that the aesthetic can be dispensed with altogether in postmodern
ideas of what visual art is—or whether it returns in a completely new guise, and
how you would characterize that.
fredric jameson: I am not sure there is a right answer. First, I think classical aesthetics
was always a kind of contradiction in terms. You don’t write an aesthetic any-
more. They have tried to revive the theories of beauty, especially in France, but I
don’t think it works to go back to some theory of beauty. If you have a historical
idea of art, I don’t think you can have an aesthetics, which is almost by definition
ahistorical.
11. For example, Lynne Cooke and Peter 12. Peter Wollen, Raiding the Icebox: Reflec-
Wollen, eds., Visual Display: Culture Beyond tions on Twentieth-Century Culture (Blooming-
Appearances (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995). ton: Indiana University Press, 1993).
21 the national situation

But you are quite right to ask how I can use the word “aesthetics” and then
later argue that culture and economics have de-differentiated and become the
same. It’s a problem. I would rather say, and perhaps I should have said, “cultur-
al” in that first passage. However, I think that if aesthetics is the practice of art,
then there have been various attempts at emergent aesthetics in postmodernity.
One is what used to be called “postmodernism”; that was certainly an aesthetic.
I think there is a kind of artistic production that is specific to postmodernity
in general, that is somewhat different from postmodernism as a style. I mean,
if you can say that people doing modernist work today are really out of it, and
that postmodern writers or painters are better, then there clearly exists some
aesthetic-historical standard. But it is probably unwise to formulate that around
a determinate aesthetic.
Now, when I said that postmodernism is centered on the visual, I meant
that each system of the fine arts, historically, has had a kind of center, and that
of modernism was clearly poetic language; Greenberg says that. I think that was
displaced, and now I would rather say space is the place of that aesthetics, rather
than the purely visual, because I think that space has done things to visual art
and visual objects. So you did well to pick that up; it is probably not the best
formulation.
But I guess I do think, in terms of the images I will be showing later on, that
there are certain kinds and modes of art that are more interesting today, but as
you’ve seen it’s a real problem because postmodernity is supposed to be beyond
value. This is not supposed to involve value, in the older modernist sense, which
was both commercial and aesthetic. There was a rising ladder of forms, as people
up through Greenberg found new problems, and now, fortunately, we are in a
different position because art is no longer Eurocentric and so forth. But what
does one do with value in that case? It is an interesting contradiction as long as
art exists under capitalism, where the law of value continues to exist.
So Michael, you are right to think it’s my problem, but it is also a world
problem, an objective contradiction. I remember one time someone was press-
ing Tim Clark to say something about installation art, or some such thing, and
he wouldn’t do it. He said, My interest in all this has been with oil paint. Once
that’s over, I am not so interested.
michael holly: Farewell to an Idea.

fredric jameson: Yes, it wasn’t only farewell to a revolution, it was farewell to paint-
ing. And I think that is an interesting, an honest reflection on how much taste is
involved, in a material way, with history.
So one can always regret people aren’t producing paintings, and at any rate
I like installations and other kinds of work, but they are no longer autonomous
artworks.
22 art and globalization

simon baier: I would like to comment on two things. Adorno would say autonomy
comes into existence because of the commodification of art, and not the other
way around. I think it is clear from a historical point of view that there is no
concept of autonomy before the commodification of art. If one follows this line
of argumentation, which I think is very convincing, it is not so easy to designate
in turn the commodification of art as the very force which in turn destroys its
autonomy. It is a dialectical relation between the two. At the same time, it is I
think very problematic to assume that only certain artistic forms of production,
that is, painting, can aspire to an autonomous status, whereas other forms are
excluded out of principle. If one would do that, one would need to specify what
those principles are.
Second: I am curious about your account of modernism, and whether you
include the historical avant-gardes of the 1920s and ’30s, or whether you would
conceptualize them as something completely different.
fredric jameson: Well, Adorno doesn’t include them: he hates the avant-garde, so for
him that is not art. Art is the great modernists. And for him commodification
works homeopathically: the work feels the threat of commodification outside
of itself, so it produces itself as a thing, as a commodity—and I think he means
thingification, and not price. That thingification—in Baudelaire, for example,
the sonnet form—protects the work against the market, or tries to, because
nothing ever does.
And if that is how you read Adorno, then you have to say the virus got too
strong, and the defenses broke down. The artwork cannot turn itself into an
object any more. It’s gone, that’s all. I don’t think that’s too out of keeping with
Adorno’s pessimism. He was quite capable of thinking the end of everything,
because even critical theory would have an end in his vision of the commodified
society. What he would never have accepted is the idea of different kinds of art.
If we had the word art for the older stuff, what should we call this new work? It’s
a difficult question . . . At any rate, the one place that I recall in Adorno where
you suddenly see a different Adorno is some reflections on contemporary music.
It looks as though he was very tolerant of what Stockhausen and the others were
doing, and he is surprisingly open to this because those are the artists—but it is
very hard to find him reveling in the postmodern. He couldn’t have predicted it.
It’s as in Hegel, who predicted that art had ended in philosophy, but it turned
out that philosophy had fumbled the ball and modernism became the new ab-
solute. That was the beginning of art’s vocation, not the end of it.
 2. t r a n s l a t i o n

Shigemi Inaga spoke about historical misunderstandings between Japanese and West-
ern art historians, with special emphasis on misunderstandings that are unavoidable
because they are built into the structure of language. He opened with several examples
of cross-cultural misunderstandings, and conversation turned to the obliviousness of
the global art world to inbuilt problems of translation and understanding.
The following excerpt presupposes Shigemi Inaga’s essay in the book Is Art His-
tory Global?1

shigemi inaga: My work has always dealt with problems inherent in cultural cross-
ings. We tend to have the illusion that everything necessary for understanding
each other in a global market can be gotten from a translation, but there are
many reasons to doubt this. First of all, only very limited information can fil-
ter through cultural barriers. Among the papers I assigned for this seminar, for
example, there is one on the assassination of the Japanese translator of Salman
Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.2 Another paper which I have written on the same issue
was originally given at a seminar on “The Conditions of Reciprocal Understand-
ing” held at the University of Chicago in 1992, and I was invited to submit it to
Critical Inquiry, but it was rejected with the interesting note that it was “too eth-
nographic.” I wanted it to be theoretical, but it was regarded as ethnographic—
bhaskar mukhopadhyay: It did not appear to be universal in scope, that’s what the
judgment meant.
shigemi inaga: Thanks for the relevant comment. This is precisely the problem. A
simple reading of my paper would be enough to understand that the Japanese
translator, Igarashi Hitoshi (1947–1991), was not an innocent translator but was
one of the top Japanese Islamic scholars of the generation. As a translator of Ibun
Sînâ (Avicenna), he felt it necessary to intervene into the affair as a third party,
just like the case of a medical intervention. He took advantage of his solid philol-
ogy in Islamic studies, and tried to criticize both the Western claim to freedom

1. James Elkins, ed., Is Art History Global?
The Art Seminar 3 (New York: Routledge, 2006).
The book was a starting place for the discus-
sions throughout the 2007 Stone Summer
Theory Institute (it is presupposed in this book).
Six people in the seminar had contributed to
that book (Shigemi Inaga, Thomas DaCosta
Kaufmann, Suzana Milevska, Keith Moxey, Char-
lotte Bydler, and Shelly Errington).
2. Shigemi Inaga, “Negative Capability of Tol-
erance: The Assassination of Hitoshi Igarashi,”
in The Conditions of Reciprocal Understanding:
A Centennial Conference, International House,
the University of Chicago, September 12–17,
1992, edited by James W. Fernandez and Milton
B. Singer (Chicago: Center for International
Studies, University of Chicago, 1995), 304–36.
Further, Shigemi Inaga, “Freedom in Suffering
and Freedom of Suffering: The Case of Japanese
Translator of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses,”
paper delivered at First International Conference
of Literature and Religion, Chungnam National
University, Daejeon; published in Literature and
Religion 10, no. 2 (2005): 229–51.
24 art and globalization

of expression and the Islamist self-righteousness in the Rushdie affair so as to

serve as a mediator in the controversy.3 To take his case simply as ethnographic
and to reject it as irrelevant with regard to our global concerns is more than
symptomatic: it shows what “universal” means in North-American and English
scholarship in critical theory. The death of a Japanese scholar does not deserve
serious attention.
Here is one parable which will show the other side of the same coin: Harry
Harootunian talked about the Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsurô (1889–
1960), in connection with his comment that Japanese art occupies a kind of dou-
ble register. This reminds me of another philosopher, Karl Löwith (1897–1973),
who taught in Japan in the prewar period. He remarked that it was true that
Japanese students were seriously studying Western philosophy, but their life was
subdivided into two layers: it happened as if they studied Western philosophy in
the first-floor classroom, but when the class was over they went down to a lower
level, a lower floor, where they lived in a completely Japanese fashion—and it
was beyond the German professor’s comprehension. For him, the problem was
that there was no connecting ladder between the two floors. He couldn’t see any
connection between their two levels of activities.4
pedro erber: But is this really particular to Japanese? Can’t the same claim be made
about European or North American philosophy students? I know very few who
actually live, so to say, “on the same floor” of their studies.
shigemi inaga: You may be right, but Löwith himself saw a huge gap between Europe
and Japan. In the European intellectual tradition, the philosophical vocabulary
is closely connected with everyday life, and this is why Heidegger had to try so
hard to “sublimate” philosophical terms out of the yoke of everyday existence
(like Seiend and Fürsorge). Whereas the problem in Far Eastern cultural spheres
under Chinese influence is that the basic Western ideas remain so alien and
alienating that the translated philosophical terms circulate only on the “second
floor,” without any linkage with vernacular language. This is also the case in
Indonesia, as far as I know. Let me explicate further by taking the case of “litera-
ture.” The definition of “novel” as a literary genre seems to be self-evident, for
Westerners who look into only Western translations. But if you have access to
the original non-Western texts and compare it with the translation, many incon-
veniences become evident. It is well known that Tanizaki Jun’ichirô’s (1886–1965)
Makioka Sisters (1948)5 looked so disrupted and fragmentary that the famous
English translator, E. Seidensticker, had to re-create a coherent and continuous

3. Shigemi Inaga, “Additional Recommenda- Receptions of Western Ideas and Reactions

tions for a Dialogue Between Civilizations,”
paper delivered at International Conference on
the Dialogue of Civilizations, United Nations Uni-
versity, Tokyo, July 31–August 3, 2001, www.unu.
edu/HQ/japanese/dialogue/dialogue-programme-
j.html.
4. Shigemi Inaga, “Philosophia, Ethica, and
Aesthetica in the Far Eastern Cultural Sphere:
to the Western Cultural Hegemony,” paper
delivered at “Culture of Knowledge,” Interna-
tional Conference, Ranscultra, Pondicherry, 2005
(publication forthcoming).
5. Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters, translated
by Edward G. Seidensticker (New York: Knopf,
1957).
25 translation

narrative. Otherwise the Western readers could have lost patience. However, by
so doing, some of the key incidents of the novel evaporated as they had been
suggested by these chronological disruptions or left silent by way of discontinu-
ous narratives. The important “silence” was effaced by the continuous narrative.
A similar thing happens with the Nobel Prize winner Kawabata Yasunari
(1899–1972). Some Western literary critics continue to complain that Kawabata’s
novels, like Snow Country,6 are, even in their English versions, too incoherent
and incomplete to be entitled to be called finished novels.
I will give one more example (among many others) to clarify the question.
Consider Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s famous essay. His In Praise of Shadows (1933)7 is
regarded as the incarnation of Japanese aesthetics, but at the same time he was
mad about Hollywood films. His writings mention a number of Hollywood
stars, like Mary Pickford or Douglas Fairbanks, but according to a specialist,
the first English translation had to omit them: the names were erased, probably
by the clever judgment of the editor. These kinds of things (a sort of cultural
censorship) happen often, and as a result you may have an exaggerated, purified,
and “essentialistic” idea of what Japanese aesthetics is; the crucial elements in
the original may be erased as irrelevant in English and cannot always survive the
process of cross-cultural translation (which is no less technical than social), and
the reality is hidden to the readers of the target culture (at the expense of the
illusory communicability).
james elkins: In English that book comes across as very “Western” and romantic in
a nineteenth-century sense, especially, for me, the passages about the sensual
beauty of dark, wood-lined Japanese toilets! I suppose the names of Hollywood
stars would have ruined that for me.
shigemi inaga: And the irony is that the Japanese writer is said to have preferred a
Western toilet to the Japanese one. He seems to have hated the darkness that he
praised in his essay.
Here is an example closely connected with fine arts that we might discuss:
there was a huge show at the Centre Pompidou in 1986–87, with the title Le
Japon des avant-gardes. It was one of the first retrospectives of the avant-garde in
Japan, and I discuss my experiences of it in Is Art History Global? 8 That moment
is related to my current work on Japanese arts and crafts. Even today in most
of the Western countries, crafts are not categorized at the same level as fine arts.
But it was not the case in Japan, where the hierarchy was typically the product of
the Western Renaissance as it was reinterpreted by classicism, where the “artists”

6. Kawabata, Snow Country, translated by
Edward G. Seidensticker (New York: Knopf,
1956).
7. Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, translated
by Charles Moore (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island
Books, 1977), Naomi, translated by Anthony H.
Chambers (Tokyo: New York: Knopf, 1985), and
Diary of a Mad Old Man, translated by Howard
Hibbett (New York: Knopf, 1965) faithfully give
names of Hollywood movie stars.
8. Shigemi Inaga, “Is Art History Globaliz-
able,” in Elkins, Is Art History Global? 267. “By
systematically eliminating every domain of artis-
tic creation where no equivalent can be found
in Western avant-garde, this huge exhibition
helped the French public form a firm but tau-
tological conviction: everything recognizable as
partaking of the avant-garde in Japan is a West-
ern imitation; and everything original in Japan
does not fall into the category of avant-garde.
26 art and globalization

wished to be socially distinguished from craftsmen. And if you think about the
arts in a global context, the so-called fine arts turn out to be a modern Western
invention that occupies only a small portion of the entire map of art, and there
is an enormous “third world” of arts and crafts that is not treated seriously by
Western historians.9 The issue is closely connected to the discussions we have
been having regarding the possibility of a world art history.
shelly errington: Would you please say more about how “crafts are categorized at the
same level as fine arts”? By whom, and what are the hierarchies based on, and
what is at the bottom if crafts are not, in Japan? Since the eighteenth century,
arts and crafts were separated in the West, but apparently that doesn’t map onto
Japanese art categories and hierarchies. Please say more on that topic.
shigemi inaga: This is not so much a Japanese or non-Western issue as the specific
Western issue. In Japan, at least up until the mid-nineteenth century, no clear
hierarchy did exist according to genres (a modest ceramic ware by an unknown
Korean craftsman with special provenance could be more highly appreciated
than a decorative painting by a famous master), if not in each genre, where you
can of course distinguish pieces for aristocratic clients and pieces for ordinary
customers. I wrote a book on Manet, and I have studied the process of new
canon formation in the second half of the nineteenth century.10 At the mo-
ment of Manet’s studio auction sale in 1884, his etchings and drawings were
not yet as highly evaluated as the finished painting in the art market. But that
hierarchy was on its way to collapse. The new category of estampe originale was
introduced in the late 1860s so as to give to some etching or graving a higher
artistic status. By the 1880s they were no longer regarded as mere reproductions
and drawings were no longer categorized as preparatory state of the completed
painting. Manet’s auction sale was a touchstone for this “revolution” in artistic
appreciation. Hokusai’s evaluation and his high reputation in the second half of
the nineteenth century in Europe must be understood in this precise Western
context. His drawing model known as Hokusai Manga provided the Western
vanguard artists—Manet being one of the first—with a precious model so as to
invalidate academic criteria. It so happened that a Japanese print craftsman was
venerated by liberal republican French art amateurs and Manet’s friends as the
highest summit of Japanese art history, comparable to such Western masters as
Michelangelo, Rubens, or Rembrandt. In contrast, modern scholars in Japan,
equipped with newly introduced Western aesthetic value judgment and “en-

Only the group Gutai 具体 attracted the French
public’s interest because it had influenced
the Parisian art scene and had therefore been
authenticated a posteriori. The logical coherence
of the selection in Le Japon des avant-gardes
perfectly epitomized the grandeur and misery of
auto-intoxication. Applying one’s own prefabri-
cated category by force, to foreign realities, only
testifies to the cultures’ mutual incommensura-
bility.” For further theoretical reflection, see also
Shigemi Inaga, “The Impossible Avant-Garde in
Japan,” Year Book of Comparative and General
Literature 41 (1993): 67–75.
9. Shigemi Inaga, “Les traces d’une blessure
créatrice: Yagi Kazuo entre la tradition japonaise
et l’avant-garde occidentale,” Japan Review, no.
19 (2006):133–59.
10. Shigemi Inaga, Le crépuscule de la
peinture: La lutte posthume d’Édouard Manet
(in Japanese with French summary) (Nagoya:
Nagoya University Press,1997).
27 translation

lightened” by the Western Renaissance canon, began to repudiate Hokusai and

other popular ukiyo-e print craftsmen. The literati class in westernizing Japan
was literally ashamed of the success of Ukiyo-e prints in the West.11
To return to Shelly’s question, I should say that the Western valuation
of “high” fine art is very well studied, especially in connection with the idea
of “artist” as individual creator of original pieces of fine art. The idea was
elaborated in the siècle des lumières, and culminated in the formulation of The
Faculty of Judgment (1790) by Kant. What is the consequence? On the one
hand, the idea of fine art prevailed all over the world up until 1980s. And the
studies of Western fine art saturated the discipline of art history. The academic
market is now facing stagnation for lack of new material. On the other hand,
however, the idea had to confront the non-Western world for the last two
hundred years. Its exposure to the non-Western realities came to discredit its
validity. The Western aesthetic hierarchy has lost its competence, especially in
the current global situation. And yet the global art market still seems to remain
clinging to this outdated idea of fine art of the Enlightenment. So what should
be done about this triple imbalance? It is a rational choice to move to the “hid-
den” arena of fine art, or more precisely to see what has been hidden by the
notion of “fine arts.”
thomas dacosta kaufmann: Sotatsu is a good example of this problematic, because
he made calligraphy and paintings, but also objects, and there are people like
Zeshin who made objects—lacquer boxes. I am myself guilty of writing books
that don’t pay as much attention to Kunstgewerbe as they perhaps should.
I would propose it is not only the exhaustion of the study of fine art that
would lead to the study of these sorts of objects. Alois Riegl, Julius von Schlosser,
Ernst Kris, and others have dealt with such objects.12
It might be fruitful to consider the expanded sphere of what might comprise
works of art, such as the Japanese sense before it was narrowed by contact with
Western art history: porcelain, netsuke, many other kinds of objects—
michael holly: So many of the Viennese scholars who formed art history were inter-
ested in the minor arts. It wasn’t just Riegl, but Franz Wickhoff and others—but
the reason they turned to arts and crafts was because they could discern laws of
stylistic change more transparently in the minor arts than in the great traditions
of painting and sculpture. So really, it was an attempt to follow the Hegelian
story into the minor arts.

11. Shigemi Inaga, “The Making of Hokusai’s
Reputation in the Context of Japonisme,” Japan
Review, no. 15 (2003): 249–79.
12. It is worth recalling that Riegl worked
at K.K. Österreichisches Museum für Kunst und
Industrie, what is now the Österreichisches
Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna, and
that Schlosser was head of the Sammlung für
Plastik und Kunstgewerbe of the Kunsthisto-
risches Museum there. It is, however, perhaps
not well known that Kris was also a curator in
Schlosser’s department and that he wrote many
books and objects related to objects in the col-
lection of the museum.
28 art and globalization

thomas dacosta kaufmann: It’s true that it’s easier to find laws in such objects, but
there is more to it than that: Schlosser, who was a very great scholar of such
matters, including wax portraits, is behind the idea, made famous by Gombrich,
that there is no such thing as the history of art, there are only artists.13 Schlosser
could have said as much himself, and the idea itself comes from Croce, not
Hegel. Schlosser’s theory, then, was dissonant with his practice, but it is impor-
tant to keep the practice in mind as well, because it provided the focus from
which the Viennese developed their theories.14
keith moxey: It seems to me this turn to popular arts, folklore, and so forth had another
dimension as well: it was an attempt to trace unique national characteristics by
means of art. Art became the place where the passage of the spirit could be traced;
according to Riegl, Kunstwollen differed with each national/racial community.
shigemi inaga: In connection to the national/racial factor, let me add one more aspect
in terms of museum politics of classification. In the Louvre, the Département des
objets d’art was created as late as 1896: before that, the category did not exist. Un-
der the Third Republic, that department became as important as the Département
de la peinture because many precious treasures were transferred from the Catholic
churches to the museum. Beside the Département des antiquités, the two depart-
ments became concurrent in budgetary terms. It was in the Départment des objets
d’art that Gaston Migeon (1861–1930), for example, tried to enlarge the Japanese
collection. But the discovery of the Japanese Buddhist antiquities from the eighth
century at the Exposition universelle in 1900 inevitably made it impossible to
classify Japanese art solely in the category of objets d’art. It is selfevident that the
Japanese official side hoped to demonstrate that the Empire of the Rising Sun
as a nation-state possessed the national treasures which could be incontestably
classified in the category of “fine arts.” To be labeled as a not-civilized, barbarous
country producing only minor arts was so humiliating.
michael holly: This was apart from discerning any laws in stylistic change? It had to
do only with the objects themselves?
shigemi inaga: I think there is a tautological mechanism between objects and classifying
law (if not laws of stylistic change), and the argument is somewhat circular: The
framework of appreciation modifies the choice of the relevant objects, and the cho-
sen objects reflect the implicit law (or criteria) in stylistic and hierarchical judgment.
Let me add one more case to reply to Michael’s question. The first Brit-
ish Consul to Japan, Rutherford Alcock (1809–1897), published his first book
in 1863, The Capital of the Tycoon. There he said no higher art existed in Japan
and that the lack proved Japan’s delay. Later, in a book dated 1878, Art and Art
Industries in Japan, he borrowed an idea from William Morris, and completely
changed his idea—he said then that it is better that Japan has no higher art.

13. See E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, 14. And thus not necessarily from any a
11th ed. (London: Phaidon: 1970), 5, originally priori theories: this is quite clear, for example,
published 1950. in Riegl’s Spätrömische Kunstindustrie.
29 translation

thomas dacosta kaufmann: You mentioned art industry. That is also a key concept
in relation to the change from the premodern to the modern: it is marked by
the change from Kunstgewerbe to Kunstindustrie. It would be helpful to consider
what the “industrial” aspect of this development might be, and why the latter
word, or its equivalents, is used. It is found in Slavic-speaking countries, in
German-speaking countries, and elsewhere, where the transformation occurred
from craft to industrial production.15 So what you are saying is resonant with
what was happening outside Japan at the same time. The question from a global
point of view would be how much contact there was between these ideas.
james elkins: I would like to ask the same questions in a different kind of way. Your
initial anecdote about your reaction at the Pompidou is a very poignant one,
and for me it works on two levels: on one level it is about the fact that the
exhibition did not recognize or value art outside of Western categories. On
another level, it is about your own anxiety, unhappiness, and embarrassment:
you are suddenly required to be the expert, to speak for all Japanese art, and yet
it is impossible to do so. You don’t pursue the second level, but you do say a lot
about the first level.
This makes me wonder what you consider to be solvable: I assume that the
anxieties and discomfort of the person who must unexpectedly exemplify his or
her culture is endemic, and has no solution, but I notice that your very detailed
essay in Is Art History Global? (which I think is a truly exemplary essay, one of the
best texts on cross-cultural understanding in the visual arts) ends with a complex
“elliptical” model of the impossibilities of understanding. And I note that our
conversation here has been following a path that is largely complementary to the
path of your essay: we have been exposing some moments in Western historiog-
raphy when minor and decorative arts were valued differently, implying perhaps
that by understanding the past we might affect future developments. But it’s not
clear to me that a conversation like this one can solve the problem, and the other
register of your story—the personal one—seems irremediable. Both registers
are fraught with misunderstandings, and neither seems closer to resolution now
than before. So what might be solved here?
shigemi inaga: The simplest way to reply to your question may be the opposition be-
tween two kinds of heterogeneity. Cultural heterogeneity must be represented:
otherwise there is a flattened global market. But the heterogeneity must be an
acceptable one, and if it is accepted, then it will fit with a conception of hetero-
geneity that is already presupposed at a meta-level. The acceptable heterogene-
ity implicitly presupposes admissible homogeneity. In contrast, an unacceptable
heterogeneity is by definition discarded out of the playing ground.

15. This change seems to me to be reflected
not only in the choice of words used in such
books as Riegl’s, but in the nomenclature used
for museums, such as the Österreichisches Mu-
seum für Kunst und Industrie in Vienna, or the
Umeleckoprůmyslové Museum (Kunstindustrieles
Museum) in Prague, as well as in the response
to the transformation of modern forms of pro-
duction reflected in the reasons for the founding
of the South Kensington, now the Victoria and
Albert Museum in London.
30 art and globalization

So what is permitted in the art market is just the interplay between permis-
sible heterogeneity (as for items in circulation) and the admissible homogeneity
(as for market tolerance). Things advance within that zone, and if you are out-
side that zone, what you say is not communicable at all; you have to be literally
“ex-communicated.” That would be an abstract way of explaining the issue.16
As I mentioned in the opening roundtable, there are kinds of literature that
gain through translation—candidate of Goethe’s Weltliteratur—they get more
readers, and it is assumed that they have a universal message.17 But there are
also kinds that do not benefit from translation and do not easily cross linguistic
boundaries: they are in the excluded zone, not in the zone of permissible hetero-
geneity but in the zone of impermissible heterogeneity.
keith moxey: Permissible heterogeneity and acceptable heterogeneity are useful terms,
and I just want to make sure I understand them correctly—
shigemi inaga: Just one illustration to clarify my point. It seems that Western nation-
states showed quite divergent judgment in their admission policies when they
organized expositions universelles. Let me give a brief overview. It was in 1872
that the Japanese Meiji government officially took part in the Weltausstellung
for the first time. At that point the Japanese government could not establish
any clear distinction between “fine arts” and “arts and crafts” (or Kunstgewerbe)
and presented their items in such confusion that the Austrian adviser, Gottfried
Wagner (1831–1892), had to warn the Japanese that “fine arts” did not mean only
technical merit but also had to manifest spiritual aspect (Idee) with expression
de passion, if one may use the term from French classicism (1875). It was not
until 1890 that the Japanese could finally establish the distinction between “fine
arts” and “industrial art” or “artistic crafts” in the classification list at the third
domestic Industrial Fair. But in the following Chicago World Fair in 1893, the
Japanese delegation became nationalistic and insisted upon the specificities of
Japanese arts and industry, which they claimed had no clear distinction between
higher and lesser arts. They had a number of bronze wares with artistic merit
be accepted, not in the section of applied arts but in the section of fine arts, as
sculptures.18 The generosity of the American organizer allowed this exceptional
treatment. However, in the following Exposition universelle in Paris in 1900, the
Japanese delegation once again changed its mind and decided to faithfully fol-
low the French hierarchy of fine arts so as to make clear that Japan was capable
of presenting pieces of work worth being regarded as incontestably belonging to
the category of beaux-arts. By the way, it is well known that the French authority

16. For further reflection on this idea, see
Shigemi Inaga, “Between Revelation and Viola-
tion: Ethics of Intervention,” in Crossing Cultural
Borders: Toward an Ethics of Inter-Cultural Com-
munication—Beyond Reciprocal Anthropology,
edited by Shigemi Inaga (Kyoto: International
Research Center for Japanese Studies, 2001),
125–38.
17. David Damrosch, What Is World Literature?
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
18. Shigemi Inaga, “Cognitive Gaps in the
Recognition of Masters and Masterpieces in
the Formative Years of Japanese Art History,
1880–1900,” in Japanese Hermeneutics: Current
Debates on Aesthetics and Interpretations,
edited by Michael Marra (Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press, 2002), 115–26.
31 translation

at that moment was notoriously conservative in aesthetic judgment, compared

to the previous Parisian Exposition in 1889. Thus, the Japanese had difficulty in
accommodating themselves to the unstable “universal standard.” The typically
Japanese aesthetics, as they conceived and promoted it, was balanced on the
boundary of acceptable heterogeneity and unacceptable heterogeneity; and the
Japanese side was also measuring the limit of the acceptable homogeneity of the
“universal” marketplace in transition.19
keith moxey: There are all sorts of implications for the present. African photography,
for example, succeeds at the moment because it bears the marks of its African-
ness. If it didn’t, it would lose its appeal to the international market.
james elkins: And for me, this is a fruitful restatement of a problem I raised in the
opening roundtable, about how the international art market is “coy” about signs
of nationalism and ethnicity: it requires them—they are permissible—but not if
they appear overly articulated—beyond the admissible.
shelly errington: That’s a general problem with arts that are from outside the centers
of power, or anyway of art power, don’t you think? Painters want to be known
as great artists, not great artists with a qualifier like “a great Native American
painter” or “a wonderful woman artist.” But the unmarked category, the “univer-
sal” one, is the one that does not bear any marks of ethnicity except whiteness,
which is unacknowledged. Artists from the peripheries also develop a market of
collectors who want their art to have the mark of the peripheries.
thomas dacosta kaufmann: Or there is the retrogressive movement of museum dis-
play exemplified in Berlin, where, if you are a contemporary non-European artist,
your works may be shown in the center of the city, but the “traditional” non-Eu-
ropean works are now back in Dahlem, far from the center of the capital, where
non-European art, and especially what were regarded as ethnographic finds, had
been displayed in the early twentieth century. So they are together again with the
former ethnographic collections, in such a way that the East Asian collections
are displayed in the same building once again with pre-Columbian, African, and
Oceanic works of art. So there is a contemporary problem in museology as well.
shigemi inaga: Yes. German reunification and the master plans at the Museum Insel
completely dismantled the previous universal conception of the Dahlem com-
plex. What remains now in Grünewald in West Berlin is like the ruin of the
broken dream of the universal art museum. The reorganization of the British
Museum after the departure of the British Library is another example. When
the Museum of Mankind was dismantled the question was raised as to how to
relocate the ethnological collection. There was a planning of creating permanent
exhibition area for Asia at the Central Court of the British Museum, but the idea
was finally modified. Instead, temporal shows, such as the Chinese First Emperor

19. For a more detailed overview, see Japon à la controverse de l’esthétique orientale
Shigemi Inaga, “Images changeantes de l’art (1860–1940),” JITA 29–30 (2004–5): 73–93.
japonais: Depuis la vue impressionniste du
32 art and globalization

as well as the Crafting Beauty in Modern Japan show, are currently realized at the
Central Court exhibition halls in 2007.
In France, le Musée Quai Branly finally opened its doors in 2006. It is well
known that the original idea of reunifying l’art premier was abolished because
systematic reclassification was impossible, materially as well as administratively.
In the meanwhile, some ethnological objects which were judged worth being
exhibited at Quai Branly were transferred from the former Musée de l’homme
in Trocadero and the Musée des arts africains et océaniens in the Vincennes Park
(which was previously the Musée des colonies established at the international
Exposition coloniale in 1931).
The criteria of distinction between ethnological objects and pieces of fine
art in the selection process remain problematical, to say the least (the question
was already raised by Guillaume Apollinaire), and the political will which was
involved in the decision making inevitably affected the aesthetic criteria in a
complicated manner. Thus, the main European capitals are now facing dras-
tic modifications in museum politics in terms of presentation of non-Western
objects. Judging from these three cases, it seems to me that the global vision
of world art history is not easily materialized nor materializable in the gigantic
museum complexes at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
michele greet: I want to come back to Jim’s point about the history of reception. In
my work I look at the critical reception of paintings by Ecuadorian artists work-
ing in Paris in the 1920s. There is a huge contrast between what Parisian critics
praised and what Latin American expatriates living in Paris found admirable.
The Parisian critics praised what they perceived to be an innate expression of
primitivism, whereas the Latin American critics commended the artists’ bold
appropriation of European avant-garde styles.
I think the gap in this history of reception is extremely revealing because
it demonstrates the kinds of miscommunication that continue to plague our
understanding of cross-cultural exchanges.
shigemi inaga: Yes, I did have precisely the same impression when I saw the film Tan-
gos, l’exil de Gardel (1985) by Fernando Solanas with Marie Laforêt, in Paris about
twenty years ago.20 The subtle combination of primitive savageness and urban
refinement were carefully dosed so that it could be attractive enough to meet the
Parisian public expectation while not betraying the susceptibilities of Argentin-
ean immigrants. But the highly sophisticated artificial calculation was almost
completely overlooked not only by (slightly caricatured) Parisian promoters in
the film but also by most of the real film critics who commented on the film.
This double blindness is another case of practice between the search for admis-
sible heterogeneity and the compromise with acceptable homogeneity. And my
question would be: do the same issues persist in the so-called global market? Are
the problems I have been expositing still relevant in contemporary art?

20. Tangos, l’exil de Gardel, 1985, directed photography by Félix Monti, choreography by
by Fernando Solanas, music by Astor Piazzolla, Susana Tambutti.
script and realization by Fernando Solanas,
33 translation

james elkins: Definitely, yes. I don’t think anything we have been talking about has
been solved, and I don’t think anything has gone away: but it is massively ig-
nored—it’s invisible. I wonder if the international art market is not suffused
with an unanswerable optimism concerning the representation of cultures—an
optimism that is camouflaged by the notion that visuality can somehow help
communicate things that language cannot.
The very idea that there might be limits to understanding across cultural
practices is taken for granted in the humanities, but I think not as much in the
contemporary art world, where it seems to be an article of faith that because the
work is visual, it has the capacity to communicate immediately, without the bar-
riers we associate with literary or linguistic translations. With Shigemi’s help, we
have been considering such things as necessary misunderstandings, irreparable
differences, and “permissible” and “impermissible” heterogeneities: these things
are absent from the art world, except when they take the reductive form of rote
acknowledgment of Otherness. For example, in an exhibition of Wenda Gu,
there is no worrying about what cannot be understood of his Chineseness. It
doesn’t come up in that way, I think because the work’s visuality is thought to
permit it to simply be there, showing and not saying. Discourse can float above
the artwork, maybe making contact here and there, as Lacan would have said,
but it isn’t necessary to work hard on what cannot be understood. Shigemi, can
you say something to that?
shigemi inaga: For example, consider the problem of “revolution,” understood as a
discontinuity imposed on the stream of history. The notion is of course Western.
In Chinese there is the term gémìng, and in Japanese kakumei (using the same
combination of the Chinese characters). In Beijing, I had a interesting discus-
sion with Alain Rey, lexicologist and editor of the Dictionnaire Robert, shortly
after he had written a book on the notion of “revolution,” that is, “Révolution”:
Histoire d’un mot.21 He excluded the Chinese idea of gémìng from his considera-
tion because he understands the Chinese concept as a vocation that the emperor
received from heaven; according to him it has nothing to do with the West-
ern notion of revolution. But the Orientals in the Chinese cultural sphere use
gémìng or kakumei as a translation of the European notion of revolution. The
Chinese “Great Cultural Revolution” is nothing but Wěng-huà Da-Géumìng.
How, then, could it be possible to describe revolution at the global revel? This
kind of miscommunication happens easily and frequently, in many contexts,
without people who are relying upon translation noticing what is happening.
harry harootunian: Shigemi, your observation about revolutions is apposite. There is
also the concept of “state,” and its forms in Japanese and Chinese. The Japanese
translation of state was kokka, which took the ideographs for realm (kuni) or
country and family in Japanese; Chinese merely took this “translation” over and
enunciated it as guojia.

21. Alain Rey, “Révolution”: Histoire d’un

mot (Paris: Gallimard, 1989).
34 art and globalization

There is an interesting multiple meaning, in which “state” also has the meaning
“family.” In the West, nothing of the sort applies. You’re right, Shigemi, and it
would be possible to go on and on . . .
shigemi inaga: There is also the question of “society.” When one of the first Japanese
diplomatic delegations came to Washington, DC, in the middle of the nine-
teenth century, they tried to translate the American Constitution into Japanese.
They had difficulty, among many others, in finding out equivalent of “society”
in Chinese classics or in Japanese vocabulary. Nowadays the Western notion of
“society” is automatically translated as shakai in Japanese and shakai is made into
“society” in English. However, you need not be agnostic to question if a Chinese
or a Japanese person who is using the term is precisely thinking of the same
thing as “society” in English. Indeed, it took some twenty or so years before the
Japanese could understand the difference between “society” and “company” by
putting sha-kai for the former and kai-sha (reversed combination!) for the later,
so as to make the difference clear. Once socially accepted, these translated tech-
nical terms become social convention. These terms look as if they were transmit-
ting equivalent of Western ideas, but the implications are inevitably divergent
from the original context. Whenever conflict happens in cross-cultural negotia-
tions, the implicit gap becomes evident in a negative fashion.
Of course, it is a basic political maneuver to bestow the common and uni-
fying meaning on a term—like “society”—which, in reality, is endowed with
extremely divergent and even contradictory or antagonistic implications—even
within one language—according to political opinions. However, this is why we
must be extremely careful about the illusion of equivalence and communicabil-
ity which the translated terms tend to give us.
james elkins: All this applies just as much to the foundational terms of art history and
criticism. In Is Art History Global, there are thickets of confused lexica, involv-
ing such terms as “representation” and “picture.” The contemporary art world
seems to be oblivious to these problems. The problems of translating words like
“representation” are as immediate, as fundamental, as the problem of bowing at
the opening of a martial arts tournament, or using the word “revolution” in a
historical account.
Instead of pondering these issues, the global art world pays a great deal
of attention to local terms: if an artist refers to Sufism, the ninety-four tribes
of Kazakhstan, or kumys (those are examples from my trip to Central Asia), a
critic will want to explain them at length. Or if a Renaissance altar reminds a
critic of a Peruvian huaca, she’ll mention it. But enabling terms like “refer” and
“representation” go unnoticed—they are like commodities in the world of global
art discourse. There is a deluge of mistranslations, but contemporary critics pay
attention instead to these little evaporating droplets.
35 translation

harry harootunian: I think we in Euro-America have, by training and imperial dis-

position, always assumed that the conceptual language and cultural forms we’ve em-
ployed will always have transparent equivalents in the world outside, in Africa, Asia,
the Middle East, in the regions of the Third World and former colonies. This “impe-
rial” impulse has been an enabling condition of our area studies in the social sciences
and humanities. It is not simply or only art history and criticism that has overlooked
these fundamental problems and ignored the immense disparities between terms
and forms we take for granted and their presumed equivalents. The problem with
this kind of easy gesture to simply assimilate other cultural intensities is its putative
grounding in appeals to universalism over particularisms. While the fundamental
problem between translation and appropriation opens up a large gap interpreters in
the human sciences have scarcely engaged, the principal result has been to tyrannize
conceptions of chronology and periodization and the “authority” of the breaks each
new moment is supposed to represent. The most recent declaration of the change
from modernism to postmodernism is a case in point. Whether one is talking from
disciplines like art history, history, literary studies, and so on, we seem to be bonded
to forms of periodizing that have the force of natural dictations, even though they
have grown out of a specific cultural experience and made to mark time in the histo-
ries of societies outside of Euro-America.
 3. t h e p r e h i s t o r y o f g l o b a l i z a t i o n

Here the issue was the place of history and art history in conceptualizations of glo-
balization. In contemporary art-market literature, globalization is usually presented
as something that occurs exclusively in the present, that has no history beyond Docu-
menta or the biennales. Here we try to see how art history might be implicated in
globalization. In the first instance, there is the question of whether the globalization
of the art world is a late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century phenomenon, or
whether it repeats past formations. In that inquiry, art history plays the role of in-
formant, providing pertinent facts. Then there is the question of the writing about
globalization: Is art history itself a global enterprise and, if so, has it been so in the
past? Can art history help think through these problems, or is it symptomatic of them?
Do we understand how it implicated in nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and and
globalization?
The participants had read Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s essays “The Geography
of Art: Historiography, Issues, and Perspectives” and “Pintura de Reinos: A Global
View of the Cultural Field.1
thomas dacosta kaufmann: In Fred’s seminar, Keith Moxey brought up the question
of universality and particularity, and of course that is a central issue for art his-
tory and for what art history has to offer in response to questions concerning
periodization.2 The questions I would like to raise are: what can art history do
in regard to conceptions of globalization, and what are the possibilities within
art history for theorizing globalization itself? Historical considerations may help
place our concerns in a broader perspective, and art history may offer what we
call “objects” and “materials” as topics for discussion in reference to globaliza-
tion. It may also help to think of objects (and artists) as agents and not merely
as reflections of circumstances. To be sure, if we are going to be talking about
history, we can emphasize breaks and ruptures and discontinuities, and thus
consider issues of periods and periodization. But I would also like to stress con-
ditions of continuity.
I myself became interested in these sorts of questions when I started work-
ing on a Habsburg, Rudolf II, who happened to reign around 1600 in Prague. I
began research on this period during the 1970s, when access to areas in Central
Europe was rather difficult, and the time around 1600 in Prague was a period
and a place that was relatively neglected. What I thought would be a direct, im-

1. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, “The Identidades compartidas, edited by Juana

Geography of Art: Historiography, Issues, and Gutiérrez, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Fomento Cultural
Perspectives,” Leids Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek Banamex, 2008).
(2007); “Pintura de los reinos: A Global View 2. See Section 1 of the Seminars.
of the Cultural Field,” in Pintura de los reinos:
38 art and globalization

mediate question of research turned into much broader questions of periodiza-

tion, of valuation, of aesthetics and historiography—all having to deal with the
constrictions of the discipline. So I ended up having all these theoretical con-
cerns regarding the discipline of art history from what could have been strictly
empirical questions.
The problem that I sense is one of definition—and not just one of the “glob-
al” and “globalization.” What is the difference between global art or art history
versus world art or art history, versus globalization, versus global exchange or
cultural exchange? Of course, there is an old tradition of universal history. That
is the nineteenth-century conception of world history, which is broken down
into national and local distinctions.
When it comes to a single story of world art, this question is very crucial.
There have been efforts to write textbooks of world art and they have not been
successful, but at least they attempt to consider all parts of the world.3
In relation to this problem, I have one more general theoretical point to
make—about what might be said to be the ideographic versus the nomothetic
approach—the former implying that if we are dealing with historical questions,
we don’t have to pose laws, while the latter posits that there might be laws of
history and we might be able to trace general patterns of development.4
Now, the question is: what are the possible uses of all these sorts of consid-
erations for global art history, for global exchange, and so on? Fredric Jameson
criticizes the argument that there has always been globalism, and says that some-
thing special has occurred since 1980. But even within the definition of the his-
tory of capitalism and world commerce—there are a number of historians, such
as Immanuel Wallerstein, Andre Gunter Frank, and others, who have shown
that global exchange begins with the early modern period and that there is con-
tinuity from the sixteenth century onwards—the question might then still be
better posed, what is it about recent globalization that is different?
shelly errington: Actually, if we mean geographically far-ranging exchange and trade,
“globalization” begins much earlier than the sixteenth century, with the really
worldwide Muslim traders. It is only the European “globalization” that we are
heirs to now that begins then. But in any case, although a lot of historians, as
you point out, want to assert that there was always globalization in that sense, it
doesn’t really get to the problem, which seems to me much more about narrative
than about the facts.
michele greet: It seems to me there is a separation between art historians who focus
on the contemporary moment (post-1980s) and the impact of globalization on
artistic production, and those who focus on global exchange in more historical

3. To clarify: the distinction here is between
world art, the history of art of all parts of the
world, and global art history, an art history
which would treat all parts of the globe as
interconnected.
4. In Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Toward a
Geography of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2004), I argued for an ideographic ap-
proach, which I would also argue is more appro-
priate in general for questions of historiography.
This of course runs counter to the assumptions
of the traditions of Hegelian and Marxist writing
about history.
39 the prehistory of globalization

periods. Yesterday, in Fred’s seminar, it was presented as a break; but I wonder

if we could talk about how our current moment can inform the way we look at
these ideas of global exchange in historical periods and how these two levels of
analysis intersect.
thomas dacosta kaufmann: I think that art or art history is rather more in need of
a theory than capable of presenting one. If I may speak from the perspective of
art history—the discipline developed in the nineteenth century (as distinct from
other discourses in which I am also interested, which are the precursors of art
history)—it grew in a period which also saw the foundations of the nation-state.
In some instances you can see this connection rather directly: for Berlin, which
was the foundation of the Prussian state (and was also where Hegel worked for
a time), was one of the first places to have a chair of art history. Similar things
happened elsewhere, and so questions tended to be framed in national terms.
We can refer to the approach to history writing I have mentioned as a precur-
sor to globalization, because it is related to conceptions of universal history or
historiography. Particular kinds of works, such as histories of the art of all times
and places, could, however, also be related to national questions.5
It strikes me as peculiar that when you have practices that transcend nation-
al boundaries and address global issues, they end up being called “international
styles.” The style of the year 1400, for example, is often called the International
Gothic. I myself might have talked about “international mannerism,” another
term that is often used. These phenomena have not been adequately conceptual-
ized; the ways such practices work on a world scale and the phenomena related
to them have sometimes been addressed in the past but require much further
attention.
james elkins: The fact that art history grew up along with the rise of the modern
nation-state also raises questions about the limitations of current art-historical
practices, which may still be in thrall to the nationalist impulses that seem in
retrospect to have driven so much earlier scholarship. No one thinks of this
now!—I’d say as art historians, we all imagine that nationalist motivations are a
thing of the past. But at least I might say, speaking for myself, it does strike me
that my own interests in international modernism might themselves come from
the nationalist history of the discipline, unexpectedly inverted by the worldwide
spread of North American– or western European–style art-historical scholar-
ship, which now appears as “global” and therefore neutral in relation to the
question of nations.

5. See, for the general theme, Udo Kulter-
mann, “Histoire de l’art et identité nationale,”
in Histoire de l’histoire de l’art, vol. 2, XVIIIe et
XIXe siècles, edited by Edouard Pommier (Paris:
Klincksieck, 1997), 223–47. For the institution-
alization of the history of art during the time
of European nation-building, see Heinrich Dilly,
Kunstgeschichte als Institution: Studien zur
Geschichte einer Disziplin (Stuttgart: Suhrkamp,
1979). The approach of universal history carries
over into the “world art history” represented
by the handbooks of Franz Kugler, Handbuch
der Kunstgeschichte, 2nd ed., with additions by
Jacob Burckhardt (Stuttgart: Ebner and Seubert,
1848) (1st ed. 1842), and of Carl Schnaase,
Geschichte der bildenden Künste, 2nd ed. (Düs-
seldorf: Buddeus, 1866–79) (1st ed. 1843).
40 art and globalization

There is an unacknowledged, inbuilt limitation in the discipline, and to art

writing in general, on both these counts. The exemplary text for me is Hans
Belting’s little book, The Germans and Their Art: A Troublesome Relationship,
which demonstrates with unimpeachable clarity that generation after generation
of German art-historical scholarship was driven by ideas of Germany and Ger-
manness; but just at the end, when the lineage of German art historians comes
up to the present, Belting himself is mysteriously absent from the roster.6 It’s not
that he doesn’t grasp the history he means to tell; it’s that he does not feel he
needs to account for the epistemological break that has enabled him to tell the
history, and he feels no need to explore the conditions of his ability to remain
apart from that history, to expose the nationalism in the discipline without,
somehow, leaving the discipline. It is a wonderful lacuna.
michael holly: I do take it as axiomatic that narratives speak us and we don’t speak the
narratives. And I would like to hear what ideological function this fascination
with globalism—current or historical—is serving for art history. Is it just chance
that at the moment when, to invoke Hegel, art history became philosophy, when
theory raised its hoary head, that there is a return to something of a different reg-
ister—the global register? There is a return to the archive, to local knowledges, to
writing catalogues, to the empirical stuff. In other words, is there some kind of
explanation why these ideas occur now in the span of art history?
bhaskar mukhopadhyay: It is quite clear now that the rise of art history as a discipline
in the nineteenth century is part of the formation of the larger discourse called
the human sciences, whose origin Foucault traces to Kant’s epochal question:
Was ist der Mensch?7 The discovery of Man and his finitude led Kant to posit a
philosophical anthropology8—understood as the analytic of Man—whose vari-
ous branches are political economy, biology, linguistics, history, ethnology, aes-
thetics, and so on. In other words, Man qua Subject becomes both the subject
and object of knowledge. Neo-Kantians like Panofsky and Cassirer merely re-
newed the Kantian question to study this transcendental Man, understood as an
autonomous consciousness, and widened and broadened its reach. Art historians
like Riegl (with the concept of Kunstwollen) gave it a historicist twist.
The problem with this concern with Man is that, to cite Foucault again, it
produces the confusion of the empirical and the transcendental.9 What we are
witnessing today is an exhaustion of this problematic of Man. The rise of reflex-
ivity, whose symptoms manifest itself increasingly with a certain concern with
the history of various disciplines, including art, is a sure sign that it is no longer
possible to think in our time other than in the void left by Man’s disappearance.
And to those who are still under the thrall of Man and his putatively most splen-
did achievement, art, we can only answer with a philosophical laughter.

6. Hans Belting, The Germans and Their Art:
A Troublesome Relationship, translated by Scott
Kleager (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
7. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An
Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London:
Routledge, 2006), 371.
8. Etienne Balibar, “Subjection and Subjec-
tivation,” in Supposing the Subject, edited by
Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1994), 1–15.
9. Foucault, Order of Things, 371–72.
41 the prehistory of globalization

However, the void created by the disappearance of Man (leading to a certain

deontologization of the very category of “art”) has not created a deficiency, as is
clear from Michael’s comment. It has led to a proliferation of empirical works,
often microstudies, to a resurgence of local knowledges, and finally, to the writ-
ing of philosophical genealogies which show that far from being an attribute of
some mythical Man, “art” is, at its best, a convention.10
Overcoming the anthropological sleep has resulted in a radical empiricism,
to use Isabelle Stenger’s phrase, and in opening up a space in which it is once
more possible, after two centuries of “art,” to think again what artifacts mean.11
Today, no art theorist or art historian worth his tenure would tell his student
that art has to do with the beautiful or the aesthetic.
thomas dacosta kaufmann: There are obviously a couple of larger questions to be
asked. The first one is if there has been some reflection about the origin of the
discipline, and the answer is: yes, increasingly, in the last twenty-five years. “I
am a historian of the discipline” would have been a very unusual claim to have
made in the past. The number of books published on figures like Warburg, for
example, in the last decade, is astonishing. There exists a real interest in earlier
practitioners of art history.
As far as the idea of art is concerned: I do think there are a couple of arguments
that have been raised that need to be discussed further, one of which I would have
contested. Jameson commented yesterday that the historical idea of art excludes
aesthetics. I think that this is actually wrong, and it is certainly factually wrong
in terms of the historiography of the discipline, and in terms of the discourse on
art—as revealed in the origins of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline in the writ-
ings of Baumgarten himself and his immediate successors, and also of art history
as a historical discipline. I think, first, that Baumgarten says somewhere explicitly
that aesthetics can be demonstrated by the history of the various arts;12 and, sec-
ond, that Winckelmann’s history of art obviously has aesthetics built into it.13 That
is to say, in Winckelmann the history of art reveals the creation of the beautiful
and the decline from it. Furthermore, the thesis that aesthetics should necessarily
be involved with the conception of the autonomy of art is certainly another idea
that comes out of the eighteenth century.14 In addition, if we think of objects made
not for any particular use and not necessarily treated as commodities, but for ex-

10. Howard Caygill, The Art of Judgment
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Terry Eagleton, The
Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell,
1990).
11. Thierry de Duve, Kant After Duchamp
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).
12. This comment was made in Baumgar-
ten’s Halle lectures, known from a publication
of 1750, printed in Bernhard Poppe, Alexander
Gottlieb Baumgarten: Seine Bedeutung und
stellung in der Leibniz-Wolffischen Philosophie
und seine Beziehungen zu Kant: Nebst einer
bisher unbekannten Handschrift der Ästhetik
Baumgartens, PhD diss., Universität Münster
(Borna-Leipzig: R. Noske, 1907), 67: “Es wird
nicht undienlich sein, eine kleine Einleitung in
die Geschichte der Ästhetik zu geben. Die ganze
Geschichte der Maler, Bildhauer, Musikverstän-
digen, Dichter wird hierher gehören, denn alle
diese verschiedenen Teile haben ihre allgemei-
nen Regeln in der Ästhetik.”
13. Most conveniently available now in Jo-
hann Joachim Winckelmann, History of the Art of
Antiquity, translated by Harry Francis Mallgrave
(Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2006).
In earlier writings (Vasari, Bellori et al.) the
aesthetic bias is also obvious.
14. See further for these issues Regine
Prange, Die Geburt der Kunstgeschichte: Philos-
ophische Ästhetik und empirische Wissenschaft
42 art and globalization

ample as objects made to be collected, which many objects were at that time—for
instance, much porcelain was made to be collected during the eighteenth century
rather than to be used—yes, there is already a conception of aesthetics, and of art,
and of objects produced clearly for their aesthetic value.
harry harootunian: I have an example in mind from a recent exhibition devoted to
the Other I saw at the ethnographic museum at Branly in Paris. What interested
me most was the instance of earlier collections in the seventeenth century, house
collections or protomuseums, called cabinets, I think, filled with things from
voyages, some good, in time, others curiosities and junk. So I was wondering
if we could look at the problem of art as a processual one—some of it collected
with a randomly distinguished value. It seems to me there was a certain kind
of materiality rather than aesthetic randomly articulated in some vision of the
exotic or the different.
keith moxey: In the context of globalization, we have become increasingly aware of
the massive scale of collecting during the age of nationalism that was ushered in
by postcolonialism. Every emergent nation had to have its own museum of art,
in order to compete with those of the colonizing powers. The current situation
points to the productivity of the very fluidity of the concept of “art”—from the
collection of naturalia and artificialia, to collections that consist of only paint-
ings and sculpture, to contemporary collections that include installations, situ-
ations, contexts, ideas, and so on. The concept seems to be forever in flux, and
one of the useful things about the emergent field of visual studies is that, instead
of dissolving the aesthetic, it actually puts a spotlight on it, by enabling us to
understand what allows people to isolate certain things from the mass of visual
culture in order to grant them status and prestige.
thomas dacosta kaufmann: Thinking in terms of material culture might actually be a
bit better than thinking in terms of visual culture. I am not sure what the visual
aspect is in this particular case of collecting and exchange. The notion of visual
culture takes in so much more—and that might be the difference between the
twenty-first century and the collecting and exchange practices of the sixteenth
century. Paintings and sculpture are after all objects, and we need to consider
their material presence. Even reproductions are themselves objects that present
their own material reality.
joyce brodsky: If I may go back to Tom’s first question about continuities and breaks:
I am interested in that contrast between the trade of these objects you were
talking about and the present realities of globalization. How does that affect
the daily lives of people? It seems to me this might be a crucial question: where-
as trade went on historically for a long time, how were people affected when
someone acquired an object such as a piece of porcelain or a painting, in rela-
tion to the way it happens now, when every act of trade is touching every part

(Cologne: Deubner, 2004), and for the autonomy “The Critique of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
thesis in the eighteenth century, Thomas Crow, Century Art,” Art Criticism 3 (1987): 17–31.
43 the prehistory of globalization

of the world? Nowadays there seems to be no place that doesn’t receive the
impact of globalization.
shelly errington: Joyce, what I like about what you said is that you are pointing us
away from grand narratives and to lived life to understand what “globalization”
means. That is, instead of talking about globalization as an event or a stream of
events that either did or did not happen, or when “it” began, or whether “it”
is continuous or ruptured, as if it were a thing that could be pointed to in the
world like a table or a chair, Joyce is asking what it means to a person or a collec-
tion of associated people in a particular place and time that people are connected
in certain material ways instead of others, or that images are flowing around us
constantly, or whatever? That’s a very different way to ask the question than ask-
ing what the phases of capitalism are and when they started.
If I could say just one more thing about narrative here: I feel as if we are talk-
ing about history and globalization and narrative as if the only way to deal with
telling a story of continuity were with the same-old same-old master narrative,
and that if we abandon it then we are left with a mess of shards and shreds and
patches. But Foucault talked about “genealogies,” which to my mind is a kind
of way of talking about continuities without giving them either an essentialized
content or a forward thrust.
michele greet: We have been talking about these theories of globalization, but then
we return to the institutions in which we teach art history, and the structures
in which we teach, say, Latin American art, or European art, or African art. I
wonder if anyone has encountered an institutional model that has been able to
break down these geographic categories. How do we counteract resistance on the
bureaucratic level, an insistence on labeling and categorizing courses in a certain
way, to bring a more theoretical or cross-cultural approach to our teaching? I am
interested in larger structural models and not just a single “global” course that
has been developed within a department—
charlotte bydler: Like visual cultural studies in Rochester, for example. In the Art
History Department at Södertörn University College, we have modified or con-
tinued the visual culture studies model: a thematic layout of courses over three
five-month semesters, no chronological overview. Each theme is anchored in the
current situation—either a certain problem in art historiography or with an ex-
hibition that also has a bearing on material that is geographically or temporally
distant. For Sweden this could mean that we connect to German nineteenth-
century material when it comes to art history’s history. However, breaking out
of a traditional teaching canon, there is a thematic canon forming within visual
culture studies as well. This set of themes comprises a section on methods and
views of representation means and technologies; a toolbox of methods (for in-
stance, iconography, semiotics, psychoanalysis, Foucauldian structural discourse
analysis); one on images with supernatural powers that would not normally fit a
44 art and globalization

history of the “autonomous art” concept; and another thematizing various arts
and media.
But killing chronology and aiming for a global art history through geneal-
ogy, I think the serious problem in Sweden as elsewhere is the lack of translated
literature in larger languages. This severely narrows the range of known practices,
traditions, and interpretations—there is never enough material to develop a ge-
nealogical method. It is selective, tendentious, and can never be global.
james elkins: Those are themes developed in some detail in Is Art History Global? 15 They
span the range from monolingualism through to difficult issues of translation
among polylingual scholars, as we saw in Shigemi’s seminar.16
thomas dacosta kaufmann: Charlotte, what you are reflecting on is something gener-
ally present in all places, that is, the accessibility of literatures where people learn
other languages less frequently or less fully. There is also a kind of disjunction
between scholarly interest in method and theory on the one hand, and the areas
and objects we study on the other. With all the questioning of the discipline,
the object remains intact much the same, and methodological and theoretical
discussions do not seem to have taken into consideration the expansion of the
canon within traditional fields of study, despite the addition of many different
areas for research and teaching (African art, Latin American, and so on). So a
crucial question is whether and how we should bring in other objects for analy-
sis, and whether this is within the power and the structure of the discipline. It is
much easier to do things as individuals than collectively in art history.
michael holly: Visual studies came about in the 1980s, when traditional art history
was confronted with various theories imported from other disciplines—such as
deconstruction—particularly from literary studies and from the philosophy of
history. And you could no longer call the mixture “art history.” In other words,
there was a lot of significance in changing the name—that act of change had to
signal the difference. Art history in the early 1990s was on death row.
thomas dacosta kaufmann: What difference does it make if art history exists or not?
What is the ideological importance of the discipline, what purpose and what
ends does it serve? I can answer this personally but I don’t know if I can answer
it more generally.
karl hakken: There are places in the academy still where totalizing progressivist narra-
tives are thought of as the right thing to do. And there might be a driving force
here, that of economics—
shelly errington: Precisely, and I think Karl and I are on the same page here because
we talked about it outside of the seminar. I think that economics is a driving
force in progressivist narratives in multiple ways, sometimes subtle or maybe

15. See Bydler’s own contribution, “A Local 16. See Section 2 of the Seminars.
Global Art History,” in Is Art History Global?
edited by James Elkins, The Art Seminar 3 (New
York: Routledge, 2006), 316–21.
45 the prehistory of globalization

repressed—but in art history it is really obvious. It is in the interest of collectors

and curators and dealers, whose activities support and enable art history scholar-
ship and scholars in many different ways—it is in their interest to believe in the
universality of art and to naturalize and mythologize hierarchies of value—and
to tell the right stories about it. If art, and therefore its criteria and standards,
were not universal, how would you know your investment or acquisition would
hold its value or increase? I’m not saying it is as simple as that—I don’t think
quite as crudely as I may sound here—but the huge psychological, conceptual,
and monetary investment of people involved even peripherally in the art market
is obvious to those who stand outside it. The point is, meanings are not intrin-
sic, and narratives are not reflections of what really is the case. It takes work and
motivation and sometimes capital on the part of someone—social, political, and
economic work—to produce narratives and distribute them in a way that makes
them believed and believable.
karl hakken: With regard to the question why visual culture is continuously cast in
the background, and why this continued focus on the same objects—one might
argue that the economics of these objects hasn’t changed at all. The field of visual
culture has not established itself as legitimate knowledge, and we may be talking
about the same things because we are perhaps buying the same things.
pamela lee: I see where you’re going, but I would want to nuance your take on visual
culture and the market. In the academy at the very least, “visual culture” is the
term that threatens to trump art history as an extradisciplinary rubric. Whatever
its genealogy in deconstruction or its force as an explanatory model, “visual cul-
ture studies” has become a way for institutions to consolidate, organizationally,
anything vaguely interdisciplinary and messy; it has enabled a kind of disciplin-
ary and departmental streamlining that actually suggests it is “art history” that
is the outmoded field. And while it’s certainly true that the typical artifacts of
visual culture might not fetch the same kind of prices at auction as your typical
oil painting, the market itself functions as its own kind of visual regime. It is
visual culture par excellence. This is why, I think, we need to worry more about
the absolute continuity between the aesthetic and the economic in our analyses
of globalization and art.
simon baier: This would lead us to the question of how our own discourse, be it art
history or visual studies, is related to and shaped by specific historical economi-
cal formations. An argument and the object it constitutes are dependent on the
sheer possibility that they can be sold. Our present condition prescribes that the
argument appears when its object is able to appear on the market, that is, when
language can be exchanged for money.
Besides this extreme situation, I would like to point to a specific historical
lineage that connects and disconnects our present moment of globalization with
the history of modern art, which I feel has not been discussed here yet. In contrast
46 art and globalization

to today’s equation between globalization and capitalism, it has been of course

one of the key goals of the historical avant-gardes to transgress local or national
forms of artistic practices of the past and to point to an international artistic prac-
tice of the future: the nonobjective, which is not money, the abstract, which is not
equivalence. A history of modern art is therefore a privileged field in order to sur-
vey the history of conflicting concepts of globalization, and it is modern art, as a
symptom, which plays an absolutely crucial role in this history. One could say that
modern art manifests a specific desire for the global. It would be crucial, then, to
analyze how present artistic production can still relate to this desire, whether the
globalized world can still be appropriated as an artistic project.
harry harootunian: I wonder what desire the concept of globalization is emitting
here. I was saying to Fred yesterday that globalization seems to be more repre-
sented than lived right now. For example, today with the discussion of the crisis
of art history. I would say it’s not just art history: everything in the humanities
and the social disciplines—history, anthropology—has been under siege and un-
der crisis for decades. When we talk about globalization, I don’t even know what
globalization is, other than some kind of neoliberal economic necessity. To talk
about it in the perspective of art or art history means to wrest something from
that domain of ineffable necessity. What is it that we are trying to rescue from
the current hegemony of a particular kind of economic activity? What is it that
globalization offers or promises, that previous models or units of organization
such as the nation have failed to? Many of you are historians—maybe there are
some views about some strong desire that drives it underneath?
charlotte bydler: Obviously there is a desire of economic forces; but do not forget
there is cosmopolitan ethics that drives thought and action in a globalizing di-
rection. The ethical dimension is useful to think about—I don’t see solidarity
within the art world or in other communities as a purely economic phenom-
enon. The cosmopolitan heritage should be drawn into account at this point to
counterbalance capital and nation-state as globalizing-extension machines. The
Cynics refused to confine their view of humanity to the city-state borders, just
as medieval Christianity and Islam identified as a community across and beyond
nations. Kant held on to this tradition in his view of rights in the treaty on per-
petual peace, as did Marx in the Workers’ International.
That is what has sometimes been called “cosmopolitanism from below”
could claim as its heritage: an interest-based community that is volatile and pos-
sibly violent. Similarly, there are art worlds that identify against a nation-state
ethos, that are interested in extending their cause-centered community in spite
of drawbacks in terms of status or economic benefit. The artists of the heroic
“net.art” era could be one such community.
harry harootunian: Cosmopolitanism has its own history, and it’s a baleful history,
an ideological history. It is still grounded in some conception of class on the one
47 the prehistory of globalization

hand, and nation on the other. It has really tried to find some mode of articu-
lation between what the nation has to offer and some large notion of worldly
civilization or culture, in which the nation constitutes a voice in this universal
chorus. But basically, when you begin to examine it, at least in the case of Ja-
pan or China—there was a really heavy moment of cosmopolitanism in the
1920s—it turns into an attempt to cover up enormous class disparities and entire
domains of unevenness. When we talk about cosmopolitan cities like London
or New York, what we immediately ignore is large domains of people beneath
who don’t participate.
charlotte bydler: Surely cosmopolitanism is selective. In a sense it reaches out for
equals and therefore it has contradictory effects. It is not purely “good.” But my
point is that cosmopolitanism follows neither economical nor nation-state log-
ics; it has its motivation in recognition of and by other humans. As such, loyalty
and solidarity between friends and family are expressions of cosmopolitanism; it
also appoints equals. So when we are dealing with restrictions caused by citizen-
ship and nation-state borders, a concept like cosmopolitanism might enable us
to mobilize and to imagine alternative loyalties.
thomas dacosta kaufmann: I still think we need to consider whether the contempo-
rary conditions of globalization are special, or unique to our particular period
of time. We have had a variety of answers to that question. In my essay on the
Spanish realms, I posed a variety of terms that could be applied to the global
situation of art in an earlier period. I was concerned with the originary global
imperialist situation, the Spanish one, but I was also proposing that other models
might apply to the Portuguese or Dutch situations, which are not that similar to
the Spanish.
The question that would arise, which you were posing, Jim, and which is rel-
evant, is: to what extent can we use such models for our present circumstances?
james elkins: Since we haven’t talked in detail about your essay on the Spanish realms,
let me bring in an example. As part of your criticism—I think in particular of
Serge Gruzinsky’s book—you mention the fact that some colonial emulation
did not involve transformation. “Many forms of art and architecture,” you write,
“were derived from, copied after, or based upon European sources which were
not transformed, and which thus do not reveal any evidence of indigenous or
mixed hands.”17 That is a mode of exchange, a kind of interest that a margin
might take in a center, that is seldom remarked on or valued in the contempo-
rary art world, because it apparently fails to demonstrate the transformations
and reinterpretations that we value. And yet it has direct relevance to under-
standing the situation of much of the art I was just describing—the art that is
excluded from the global art market. One conceptual hurdle here is reimaging
and redescribing sincere emulation.

17. See the essay partly reprinted in this balization, translated by Deke Dusinberre (New
book; Serge Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind: The York: Routledge, 2002).
Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Glo-
48 art and globalization

thomas dacosta kaufmann: Yes, but I would rather broaden the question. This ques-
tion of the pertinence of past globalisms is of wider importance as well, because
it depends on philosophies of history. Both the generalization from historical ex-
amples—a kind of heuristic approach to history—and the philosophical notions
of forms of globalisms are issues with which we need to deal. With Jameson, for
example, it is clear we are dealing with what one would call a Marxist or Hegel-
ian view of history. I would like to present as a challenge the idea that although
many of our discussions in the seminars this week came out of Marxist or post-
Marxist or Hegelian analyses, these proved to a degree inadequate to our task of
dealing with globalism and art. What other models of historical interpretation
might we find that could be applied to present problems?
zhivka valiavicharska: Of course, previous universalizing discourses and global prac-
tices do exist, and they inevitably participate in current global ones. In the so-
cial disciplines, however—those disciplines that deal with globalization hands-
on—these questions are rarely an issue, due to a number of materialist analyses
that have pointed to the transnationalization of finance capital, of the material
realms of production, and of labor itself. So we are dealing not only with trans-
national models of exchange, but also of production and labor. I think it is very
important, when we talk about globalization, to have in mind how capital, by
exploiting global material inequalities, leads to particular outsourcing practices
that transnationalize the labor forces. That leads to certain “global” human rela-
tions that are completely different from, say, the ones realized in the global trade
routes in the sixteenth century. Of course, this is not about economic determin-
ism, but that these are actual, historical reconfigurations of material relations,
and they carry with them new forms of human experiences and new meanings,
new forms of relations of humans to other humans, to themselves, to things. We
could look at them as the conditions of possibility and impossibility for how
subjects are constituted.
There is another crucial point as well: that the forms of power that produce
current global hegemonies are not the same as those in the past—neoliberal capi-
talism comes with its own mechanisms of power and control, its own technolo-
gies of expansion, very different from the colonial ones. This is why a lot of the
empirical disciplines have taken up Foucault’s later work on governmentality,
neoliberalism, and biopower to understand these new power configurations and
practices in various historical instances.
james elkins: Three levels are in play here. One is the practical one, what Tom called
heuristic: forms of dissemination, parochialism, provincialism, emulation, and
so forth. Second is the question of interpretive frameworks and philosophies of
history: there the mention of Marx and Marxianism is especially pressing because
most theorizing on globalization occurs within broadly Marxist frameworks. I
would add a third level, recognition: the contemporary global art world does not
49 the prehistory of globalization

notice either the possibility that past forms are pertinent or the pervasiveness of
Marxist and Hegelian ideas. They seem natural—they are ideologies, as Marx
would say! So we also need to ask about the conditions under which people
might recognize the issues, because—as Hegel would say!—it is not a simple
matter of pointing them out; they have to be systematically critiqued.
thomas dacosta kaufmann: Just to continue on the first level for a moment: I was
proposing several models: the colonial model, which would be emulative; dis-
cussions of influence, which are related to acculturation or transculturation; and
viceregal models, which involve several cultural centers. These are not necessar-
ily derived from art history itself, but they are all terms used in contemporary
analysis.18
james elkins: Even the existence of that as a classification is important. Your essay is
useful in that regard, and I have other categories in mind that could be added to
your account. In the case of modernism the problem becomes, as it were, three-
dimensional, because in addition to different practices separated by geography
and time (I am imagining those as the two dimensions of your account) there
are problems introduced by competing narratives of the art. So, for example, lo-
cal descriptions of an emulative, “colonial” practice occurring in, say, Paraguay
(where a Paraguayan modernist might be emulating school of Paris painting),
will differ from descriptions of the practice’s model (original school of Paris
painting). The two narratives may not be compatible, making it necessary to
work on a comparison of historical descriptions—of the ways that narratives of
modernism have disseminated, acculturated, and changed. It is not enough just
to rethink concepts like “originality” or the “avant-garde”—because they can’t be
rethought without making nonsense of modernism. What is needed is a series
of multiple meanings for concepts like “cubism,” “expressionism,” “constructiv-
ism,” and all the others in each local context, because they often only appear to
have comparable or compatible meanings in different parts of the world. As far
as I can see, that is the only way to write a history of modernisms around the
world.19

18. It might also be added that Jim Elkins’s
discussions of cartography of the global art
market and of geography are also related to
the methods used to discuss earlier historical
moments: see Kaufmann, Toward a Geography
of Art.
19. This is a pocket description of my work
in progress on modernist painting around the
world, 1900–2000. See the essay “Writing About
Modernist Painting Outside Western Europe and
North America,” in Compression vs. Expan-
sion: Containing the World’s Art, edited by
John Onians (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2006), 188–214.
 4. h y b r i d i t y

It was a surprise to some of us that our talk turned to the question of hybridity. It
emerged because our conversations were continually in need of a term to denote
the complement of the fiction of pure identity. We often made reference to marginal
examples, liminal cases, mestizaje cultural practices, and the fluid identities of in-
ternational artists. Our interest was firmly fixed on mixed practices and changing
senses of boundaries; we seldom mentioned artists who present themselves simply as
representatives of a given place or culture. It became apparent that an analysis of glo-
balization in the art world requires a close look at the terms that serve to articulate
the places where the national situation gives way to mixture and uncertainty. The
most common word for that situation is “hybridity,” so we revisited the word to see
the kinds of work it is doing in the discourse on contemporary art. (Jameson was not
present for this or the remainder of the seminars.)

james elkins: This is a very interesting moment in our conversations, I think: I want to
point out that two of our principal themes have just come together unnoticed,
or fortuitously—so it seems. The first is the question of hybridity, which I would
like to understand here as a placeholder for the question of what mediates the
break between the individual and the particular, what stands for the ground that
vexes and attracts so many international artists, critics, and historians. And the
second is the question of the rift of the aesthetic and the antiaesthetic, which I
introduced by citing that Buchloh critique. I do not think this meeting, or near-
meeting, of two themes means that the aesthetic is to be identified with the local
or national, or anything of that sort. But we may be close to a way forward if
it becomes clear that terms for the middle ground, like hybridity, may be every
bit as problematic as the absent term for the kind of understanding that goes
“between” art history and aesthetics.1
zhivka valiavicharska: Jim, I have a question for you: hybridity was a theoretically
powerful idea in American postcolonial theory and cultural studies about a de-
cade ago, and it was a politically enabling discourse and a politically powerful
concept in a particular moment in the history of cultural studies: it brought
poststructuralism into postcolonial theory and cultural studies, and it was
also deployed as a critique of naturalist notions of culture embedded in the

1. The most interesting positions taken in Art
History Versus Aesthetics, I think, were those
that claimed no dichotomy even exists (Matthew
Rampley, for example, argues that aesthetics
has always only been a kind of historically
specific knowledge), and those who tried to
leave the discourse altogether in favor of a
deconstructive or political critique (the former as
in Marc Redfield’s Afterword). James Elkins, ed.,
Art History Versus Aesthetics, The Art Seminar 1
(New York: Routledge, 2006).
52 art and globalization

ethnographic methods of anthropologists. Now I look at it more as a part of

the intellectual history of American postcolonial and cultural studies debates. I
have training as an art historian: I finished the art history programs in Sofia and
here, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and then I moved on to social
theory and political philosophy, so I left the art-historical debates some time ago.
You seem to be suggesting that first, hybridity has a strong conceptual power in
art-historical and art-critical discourses, and second, that its meaning and its use
have evolved in quite unpredictable ways.
james elkins: Hybridity may have disappeared from social and political critical dis-
course indeed, and Homi Bhabha’s original definition isn’t much used. But it is
ubiquitous in the art world and the art market. (It’s sometimes described as an
old concept, but hybridity and other terms still play an enormous role.2) The
differences are intriguing.
michele greet: I think Fred Jameson is right to recognize hybridity as an ideology, but
then dismissing it is missing a whole way of thinking that is coming out of a
non-European place. One can read that gesture of dismissal as quite Eurocen-
tric. Néstor García Canclini, who wrote extensively on hybridity, wrote from a
Latin American perspective, where hybridity was very much a lived experience.3
In Latin America the strategic use of this lived experience can be traced back
to the idea of mestizaje and the writings of José Vasconcelos.4 García Canclini
extrapolated on this idea to posit hybridity as a strategy to compete with Euro-
centrism—
angela miller: It came out of postcolonial studies—

michele greet: Right, the emerging postcolonial situation.

2. Here is an example of the art-world rheto-
ric that presents hybridity as an old term, but
ends up revisiting it under other guises. InSite
is an art event that takes place on the border
between the United States and Mexico, at San
Diego–Tijuana. A review of inSite_05 by the
critic Nico Israel names hybridity as a concern
of the early 1990s, when the event began. Israel
writes: “Walls everywhere seemed to be tum-
bling down. Accordingly, on the academic front,
there was a theoretical fascination with borders,
migration, and hybridities.” Then he presents
2005 as a time when such interests had to be
reconsidered: “In this changed political climate,
academic inquiry has departed from the border
area and moved to other, more fashionable
quarters (the biopolitical, for example) . . .
InSite_05, the exhibition’s fifth incarnation . . .
confronts these political and theoretical chal-
lenges as an opportunity to rethink the grounds
on which its initial presumptions rested.” The
rhetoric of reviews of inSite_05 circles around.
Israel, “North American News, Over the Border,”
Artforum International 43 (May 2005): 109.
(Thanks to Abigail Satinsky; this is excerpted
from the dossier on inSite_05 she compiled for
the School of the Art Institute graduate class
associated with the Stone Summer Theory
Institute.)
3. Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures:
Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity,
translated by Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia
L. López (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1995).
4. The Mexican secretary of public educa-
tion in the administration of Alvaro Obregón,
José Vasconcelos, proposed the concept of
mestizaje to counter the sense of entitlement
that allowed the United States to impose its will
on the nations to its south. First articulated in
an article published in 1916 and later expanded
on in his books La raza cósmica and Indología,
Vasconcelos’s theory posited that the roots of
contemporary political problems stemmed from
the cohabitation of what he called inferior races
with superior races, provoking social imbalances
and ultimately imperialism. See José Vasconce-
los, The Cosmic Race, translated by Didier Tisdel
Jaén (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press,
1997) and Vasconcelos, Indología: Una inter-
pretación de la cultura ibero-americana (París:
Agencia Mundial de Librería, 1926).
53 hybridity

james elkins: So the mestizo and the hybrid would be two of the several terms we could
consider that work to name the gap, which is either between two or more spe-
cific, local contexts, or else between a local context and a wider regional or global
context. There are many others: marginality, “border aesthetic,” bricolage, and
even the performativity of identity.5
Or, in the abstract language Keith Moxey first proposed, hybridity and re-
lated terms occupy a middle ground between particular and particular, or else
between particular and universal. And of course there are more complex forms:
Guillermo Kuitca, for example, balances between a local context (Buenos Aires
in particular, and the Argentine modernist tradition) and several international
or global contexts such as postwar expressionism.
karl hakken: That’s where Jameson began, by dismissing anything that is not either a
pure, Disneyfied future or a fetishized, ethnographic Other.
joyce brodsky: Hybridity as a notion has informed large areas of the globe, and
I’ve been interested in a whole group of artists and writers who speak very
intensely against hybridity. They see it as a new form of racism. They work
to find a kind of integrated solution where the whole is more important than
the parts.
james elkins: And what would that be?

joyce brodsky: Take Xu Bing as an example: there is a return to a kind of formalism

and to refined technique over emphasizing his being Chinese. The idea is that
one can speak to a large portion of the globe . . . Wenda Gu is doing a similar
kind of thing, as is Cai Guo-qiang. These are the most well-known contempo-
rary Chinese artists who are also transnational. For me, it’s a frustrating kind of

5. Some examples: “performativity” is
used in the reviews of inSite_05 (mentioned
above) as a placeholder for issues that would
have been assigned to hybridity. The curator
Donna Conwell, for example, observes that
“the nation-state is collectively understood as
a natural, territorial, political community, rather
than a contingent historical organization that
has been naturalized. The ritual of affirming
the nation-state is a performance that border
crossers engage in on a daily basis.” Donna
Conwell, “Border (Dis) Order/On the Imaginative
Possibilities of the In-Between,” in [Situational]
Public > Público [situacional]: InSite_05/Interven-
tions—Scenarios, edited by Osvaldo Sánchez,
exh. cat. (San Diego, Installation Gallery, 2006),
13. I understand that performativity is a theo-
retical concept in Judith Butler and others. But it
is also used as a placeholder for the set of con-
cerns I am identifying, for heuristic purposes,
with hybridity. “Border aesthetic” was one of
the themes of inSite_05; it was often articulated
in the press as an emergent property of the
exclusion of the aesthetic. (Thanks to Abigail
Satinsky; this is excerpted from the dossier on
inSite_05 she compiled for the School of the
Art Institute graduate class associated with the
Stone Summer Theory Institute.) “Marginality”
comes into play in characteristic fashion in this
passage from a review of the Fifth Asia-Pacific
Triennial: “Marginality is a sensitive issue in the
once heavily colonized part of the world: Even
the host nation has existed historically at the
edge of the British Empire (in the case of white
Australia), and under the thumb of its colo-
nial oppressors (in the case of the indigenous
population). Crucial as these issues are, at this
point their foregrounding would only limit the
scope of the show. There is by now a core trien-
nial constituency very au fait with postcolonial
identity discourse and a wide range of cultural
specifics, for whom the cluster of cultures in the
region is no longer a mélange of irreconcilable
otherness but a semi-negotiable matrix of simi-
larity and difference from which authentic cross-
cultural appreciation might begin to develop.”
Jeff Gibson, “South of the West,” Artforum
(March 2007): 111. (Thanks to Allison White; this
is excerpted from the dossier on the Fifth Asia-
Pacific Triennial she compiled for the School of
the Art Institute graduate class associated with
the Stone Summer Theory Institute.)
54 art and globalization

effort, because it involves bringing all the negative aspects of modernity back in
again, like essentialism and universality.
james elkins: Hans Belting has recently written about the resistance to both the global
and the local on the part of some non-Western artists: they see the former as
capitalist and Western, and the latter as inappropriately demanding.6 Hybrid-
ity, when it is understood as a mixture of the global and the local, would be the
object of that resistance.7
joyce brodsky: Yet hybridity for many artists has become a term that is actively, pas-
sionately avoided.
james elkins: Formalism is the right word, I think, in relation to Xu Bing: but it’s a
formalism of the contemporary international art world: a kind of lexicon of
contemporary practice—sheet rock, off-white latex paint for walls, documents
pinned to walls, slide projections on buildings, neon, dry ice, things that burn,
things that glow, paths set with candles . . . I’m just thinking of some elements
of an installation he did in North Carolina.8 All those things can be taken, inac-
curately, as formalist elements of a lingua franca of art that ultimately—in this
inaccurate genealogy—come from modernism.
joyce brodsky: Yes; I have not been very successful in finding out how he thinks of
those elements, except as formal, really aesthetic, possibilities. Perhaps they take
place as the “spectacle” that so many artists are producing.
darby english: I’d like some clarification: what is it about hybridity that these artists
object to?
joyce brodsky: That if you take the pieces apart, you’re reidentifying a particular ele-
ment that defines a race or an ethnicity.
james elkins: The parts have to remain in close juxtaposition, but they also have to
remain at least partly unnamed.
joyce brodsky: So by stressing hybridity, you are in effect refusing to see the person,
and the work as a whole, as a totality.
darby english: I see. The only vocabulary for hybridity I know derives from postcolo-
nial theory in the mid-1990s. I was baptized, I suppose, in Homi Bhabha’s ac-
count. That is a doctrine of no-placeness—so what you’re describing is not that.
joyce brodsky: Right. There doesn’t seem to be the kind of anxiety that people like
Bhabha and Said associated with the term “hybridity.” Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay

6. Hans Belting, “Contemporary Art and the
Museum in the Global Age,” in Contemporary Art
and the Museum: A Global Perspective, edited
by Peter Weibel and Andrea Buddensieg (Ostfil-
dern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2007), 16–38.
7. Here I mean to understand usages of the
word, not to defend its coherence: the global,
understood as transnational and internationally
accessible, could not be said to mix with the
local in the sense that is implied by art-world
usages.
8. Xu Bing, Tobacco Project: Shanghai
(2000).
55 hybridity

said that if you’re talking about a specific kind of transnational event that is not
diasporic, then Bhabha’s concept might not apply.
bhaskar mukhopadhyay: If hybridity is a sign of the productivity of the colonial,
there is little to disagree with about the concept’s theoretical purchase. But
Bhabha often gives the impression that the notion of hybridity is somehow
tethered to the emergence of the diaspora.9 This is rather restrictive. First,
it leads one to think that national cultures are somehow pure. I come from
India (one of those few countries where the state and the national bourgeoisie
invested heavily in constructing a synthetic “Indian” culture), and I know
how debilitating the official “Indian” culture is. Second, coupling hybridity
with recent geopolitical history (the large-scale movement of people across
the globe) conjures up a myth of the origin by positing a certain anteriority of
the uncontaminated and the pure. The vernacular or subaltern subjectivities I
have studied show that there are discrepant, disorienting, dissonant spaces—
“zone(s) of occult instability where the people dwell” (that’s Fanon)—which
disrupt the transnational’s privileged access to translationality and the claim of
the national to exhaust the affective space of solidarity, agency, and politics.10
In sum, if we can relieve Bhabha of a certain burden of representation and turn
instead to his trope of “unhomeliness” understood as a generative condition
and his innovative argument about the location of culture (roughly: culture’s
inside lies on its outside)—then we do indeed get a more nuanced account of
hybridity which is enabling.
james elkins: Here hybridity is a resistance against ethnography or the interests of West-
ern art history, which seeks to parse practices into local and national lineages;
Bhabha’s was specifically “the sign of productivity of colonial power”—that is,
bound up with questions of identity that could not be parsed without violence.11
zhivka valiavicharska: In both senses, there is a question of power relations, and it
is still a question of how these unequal relations are perpetuated. The limits of
hybridity as a critical tool lie precisely in that it remains blind to unequal rela-
tions played out on its terrain.12

9. Homi Bhabha, “The Postmodern and the
Postcolonial: The Question of Agency,” in The
Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994),
171–97. My allusion is to Bhabha’s elliptical
phrase “the transnational as the translational”
(173).
10. For example, Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay,
“Writing Home, Writing Travel: The Poetics and
Politics of Dwelling in Bengali Modernity,” Com-
parative Studies in Society and History 44, no.
2 (2002): 293–318.
11. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 112.
12. See Pheng Cheah’s cogent critique of
James Clifford’s and Homi Bhabha’s visions of
hybridity as the new cosmopolitan emancipa-
tory project. He calls the hybridity theory a
“residual” positivist culturalism and a “closet
idealism” that, retaining an ontological under-
standing of culture as an autonomous terrain of
human freedom, effaces the material inequalities
structuring the postcolonial realities they claim
to emancipate. For Cheah, it also presents an
elitist celebration of the postnational traveling
subject, unable to take into account either the
progressive character of national movements
vis-à-vis neoliberal reforms or the vast number
of laboring populations immobilized by free
economic zone policies. Pheng Cheah, “Given
Culture: Rethinking Cosmopolitical Freedom in
Transnationalism,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking
and Feeling Beyond the Nation, edited by Phen
Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1998), 290–328.
56 art and globalization

keith moxey: I think that is one of the things Fred Jameson held against García Can-
clini: Canclini saw interactions between widely disparate cultures as a promis-
ing development, something that led to all sorts of new interests and forms of
expression, but according to Jameson he ignored the power relations that were
involved in those new configurations.
james elkins: There is a lot more that could be said about that passage in Fred’s text, and
about the next page that characterizes Europe and Asia so swiftly. He was taking
hybridity as a concept that could be applied across the board, whereas García
Canclini was thinking of specifically Latin American questions.
If we are parsing this concept, we have at least three forms on the table:
Bhabha’s “original” formulation; Carcía Canclini’s celebration of hybridity as a
generative state; and Joyce’s observation about an aversion to hybridity in con-
temporary art practice. In each of these cases, I think we have the possibility
with which we began, that hybridity might stand in as a placeholder for the
general problem of mediation between particular and particular, or general and
particular. Fred’s text would be a form of this possibility, which is a potentially
distorting abstraction.
isla leaver-yap: For me “hybridity” is a term that seems prematurely celebratory or
maybe ambiguously emancipatory, but it might be interesting to see who is
using the concept now, and who is trying to translate hybrid subjectivities or
localities in an artist’s work.
pamela lee: Xu Bing would probably argue that a large part of his work is organized
around a thematic of translatability and nontranslatability: so hybridity becomes
another arch-critical label, a device used to put him in one category or another.
What you reported, Joyce, reminds me of arguments around feminism in the
1980s and 1990s, and how people were afraid to be pigeonholed.
thomas dacosta kaufmann: The origins of valuations of hybridity began from an
attempt, made within various, individual cultures, to reevaluate what had previ-
ously been despised. But to carry this effort on in the late twentieth and into the
early twenty-first century is objectionable: hybridity carries, to be blunt, a racist
charge—and I wonder, to characterize this way of thinking further, whether
hybridity might be more facilely treated by someone from Argentina than it is,
say, for someone from Mexico.
keith moxey: García Canclini was using hybridity to think about globalization in
terms of reception, whereas Jameson was thinking of the situation in terms of
production, and it is easier to condemn it from that point of view than from
the perspective of reception. For example, Latin America is invaded by all sorts
of Americanisms, from Coca-Cola to music to styles of dress; García Canclini
asks what people are doing with that. They aren’t doing the expected: they use
the commodities produced by international corporations differently: the recep-
57 hybridity

tion, in other words, is different from the production. But Jameson thinks of
it in terms of the hideous machinations of capital that sends its homogenizing
products to wonderful, uncorrupted civilizations that were hitherto blissfully
unaware of these things.
harry harootunian: I think there is more to it. He is responding to hybridity largely
in the older, Bhabhaian inflection, and what is absent in that is class. However
eclectic Fred is as a Marxist, class permeates many of his discussions, and hybrid-
ity excludes class.
thomas dacosta kaufmann: Keith, I agree that there is a positive aspect to these us-
ages of hybridity, but if you want to exclude aesthetic and value judgments from
your analysis, as is being done in these theoretical discussions, then it is true that
hybridity doesn’t fit well with class analysis, or with ethical choices.
I disagree with Peter Burke on another aspect of this problem; he goes
through all the possible terms that may be used, in effect arguing that the phe-
nomenon of hybridity is there, no matter how it is described.13 That basic argu-
ment I can understand, although the other terms he adduces aren’t really won-
derful either. The problem of hybridity is like that of mestizaje: hybridity uses a
botanical metaphor. But, to go back to Jameson’s metaphor, it’s purity that is the
aberration, not mixture.
The problem is: Does any other concept help? Bilingualism, or syncretism?
Or creolization?
shelly errington: Or, the other night at dinner we were suggesting to each other the
term from the cuisine we were eating, “fusion.” Seriously, though, a solution
that I quite like is derived from Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact zones,” so you’d
call them something like “arts of the contact zones”—things clearly produced as
attempts of, say, the Inca to come to grips with the Spanish presence and incor-
porate it visually into what they already were making or writing (in paintings or
clothing or in documents). A more recent analogue, not quite the same, is so-
called tourist art, which Fred raised as a minor issue in his seminar and seemed
extremely skeptical about.14 Both of these are examples of contact zone arts, and
both used to be below the radar of the art historians’ gaze, or anthropologists’ for
that matter. If they were noticed at all they were considered incomprehensible or
impure or kitsch, but now they are getting respect and attention. Anyway, terms
like “hybrid arts” seem to me to evoke and express a certain moment in our
disciplines’ histories, but you really don’t hear it much these days. I guess it’s be-
cause the idea of purity and untouched authenticity has been so deconstructed
and delegitimized that the term “hybrid,” at this point, would sound odd. As
Tom just said, purity is the aberration, if it ever existed at all, and anthropolo-
gists tend to think not. Actually, to reject entirely.15

13. Peter Burke, Hibridismo cultural (São
Leopoldo: Unisinos, 2003). My problems with
notions of hybridity are expressed in Toward a
Geography of Art and further in “Pintura de los
Reinos.”
14. See Section 1 of the Seminars.
15. Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact
Zone,” in Ways of Reading, 5th ed., edited by
David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrovsky (New
York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999). On the Inca
58 art and globalization

james elkins: All the choices of words are likely to come up short, because they are
symptoms of a conceptual structure. That is why I thought it might be best to
begin with abstract terms.
Michele, you wrote me an e-mail before the conference, responding to the
reading—mind if I read a passage? “Students come away thinking Latin America
is a natural term, so that a common ground links Cuba and Chile.” I mention
this because one of the ways forward might be to think of what goes into these
judgments: your comment reminded me of the largest of our naturalized terms:
“international art” or “global art,” which is understood to express at once noth-
ing and everything, in accord with the logic of what Fred called the nation that
is no longer a nation-state. And you reminded me of Richard Dyer, Mike Hill,
and whiteness studies, according to which North American and some European
whiteness is itself both naturalized and invisible.16
When hybridity involves concatenations of the local or particular, on the one
hand, or the universal or global, on the other, then the latter terms can be asymp-
totically close to categories that appear at once universal, natural, and empty.
bhaskar mukhopadhyay: Hybridity is different from syncretism or mixture. All of
you know Bhabha’s (in)famous phrase “almost the same, but not quite,” “al-
most white, but not quite.”17 The internal critique of what Heidegger called the
Western “onto-theology” has been productive of figures like Derrida, Lacan,
and Deleuze who interrogated the founding notions of presence and identity/
difference. All presence (the very notion that something is and is identical to
itself ) is internally fractured by absence, slippage, and uncanny doublings. Yet
a simple disavowal of metaphysics will amount to a repudiation of discourse as
such, which is unthinkable. One cannot go beyond discourse. Thus, the post-
structuralist critique splits along the very axis on which it turns, rendering all
transcendence or Aufheben impossible.
Bhabha gives poststructuralism a specifically postcolonial provenance by
showing that (post)colonial identities are not simply oppositional or self-annul-
ling—speaking in a tongue that is forked but not false. That the agency of the

or Inka, I was thinking of the work of Carolyn
Dean, an art historian: Inka Bodies and the
Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco,
Peru (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).
What used to be called “tourist art” and was
dismissed or not even noticed is also getting
much more attention now, I’m sure for many
reasons. The art historian Ruth Phillips wrote
the work that really articulated the position that
“tourist art,” arts made to sell by native peoples
on the periphery of the global economic system,
expresses not something impure and unwor-
thy of attention but rather creativity worthy of
respect and interest. Ruth B. Phillips, Trading
Identities: The Souvenir in Native North Ameri-
can Art from the Northeast, 1700–1900 (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1998). Interest
in tourist art in anthropology was probably be-
gun with Nelson Graburn’s edited volume Ethnic
and Tourist Arts: Cultural Expressions from the
Fourth World (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1976).
16. For example, Richard Dyer, White (Lon-
don: Routledge, 1997); Mike Hill, After White-
ness: Unmaking an American Majority (New
York: New York University Press, 2004); Karyn
McKinney, Being White: Stories of Race and
Racism (London: Routledge, 2005).
17. Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man:
The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in
Location of Culture, 85: “If I may adapt Samuel
Weber’s formulation of the marginalizing vision
of castration, then colonial mimicry is the desire
for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject
of a difference that is almost the same, but
not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse
of mimicry is constructed around an ambiva-
lence; in order to be effective, mimicry must
continually produce its slippage, its excess, its
difference.”
59 hybridity

colonized does not consist of producing a sort of anticolonial counterconscious-

ness as the advocates of négritude or radical subaltern-nationalists like Partha
Chatterjee would have us believe.18 Rather, identity itself is simulated in the play
of difference and repetition (“metonymies of presence”) and is not a matter of
self-knowledge, autonomy, and negotiating a transparent relationship with the
self and the other.
james elkins: Yes, in terms of Bhabha’s sense of hybridity.

bhaskar mukhopadhyay: Yet one of the things that has happened in recent times,
in the wake of Said and subaltern studies, is a certain proliferation of “opposi-
tional” or “postcolonial” histories whose epistemology derives from a kind of
“the return of the repressed” argument: the empire writes back. After Bhabha,
we need to go beyond “postcolonial” histories.
james elkins: Absolutely, and one of the ways is to reconsider the temporalities that
condition judgments of hybridity—as I hope we’ll do in Harry’s seminar.19
angela miller: Whatever else it may be, hybridity has long been a fundamental strat-
egy of cultural survival for indigenous peoples under colonization. However, we
have long framed the study of art history around notions of purity—of national
traditions, of aesthetic canons, of formal genealogies. This whole issue of hybrid-
ity therefore becomes a central challenge to the way the entire discipline of art
history has framed its subject. The discipline implicitly excludes or derogates
forms of production involving boundary crossing between formal traditions,
appropriations of high art forms into vernacular expression, or of European into
indigenous forms. The reorientation of art history through the introduction of
visual culture has also involved a loss of disciplinary focus, insofar as visual cul-
ture emphasizes circulation and reception, over and above definitions of essence
and issues of quality based on formal purity.
james elkins: Within the traditional study of European art, the kind of internal differ-
ence that is allowed is not only narrower (as in Michelangelo’s supposed opinion
about Flemish art), but also structurally different (as when Bellori talks about
schools within Italy). That is more a matter of influence, to use the old astrologi-
cal term.
thomas dacosta kaufmann: Hybridity has been valued negatively in writing on Eu-
ropean art. This is exemplified by the concluding passage in Baxandall’s much-
admired book on German limewood sculptors.20 The claim there is that there

18. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its
Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1993).
19. See Section 5 of the Seminars.
20. Michael Baxandall, The Limewood
Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1980), 216: “Their new
palazzi [i.e., those of the “modernized dukes
and prince” after ca. 1530] were decorated by
second-rank Italians and half-Italian traveling
Netherlanders, while in the [i.e., German] towns
a rump of guildsmen subsided into a sort of
pidgin Italianism: it was all provincial at best.” I
have spent a good deal of time dealing offering
critiques of this loaded, and traditional, inter-
pretation, e.g., in Court, Cloister, and City: The
Art and Culture of Central Europe, 1450–1800
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press; London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995).
60 art and globalization

are pure styles and mixed styles such as Italo-Flemish, or Italo-German, but the
latter are deprecated.
shelly errington: That is so fascinating, that “mixed” styles were and perhaps still
are devalued in art history—I suppose in part because art history and the state
art museums that enable it developed in relation to the emergence of nation-
states, so national styles became essentialized and valorized. It is really ironical,
too, since most of what traditional art history deals with is objects made before
nation-states were invented. But it is fascinating also because I see here a direct
analogy with so-called primitive art or tribal art. For most of the life of the
concept of “primitive art” in the twentieth century, the kind that was valued
most—indeed the only kind that counted—was “authentic” artifacts made by
peoples who were imaged as pure and untouched by the West, who made ritual
objects not for sale. Objects that were clearly straddling two worlds—such as
the colon figures from Africa—were devalued. They were impure and worst of all
humorous. But as Angela said, “hybridity” in this sense has been a fundamental
strategy for survival for indigenous peoples. What these “mixed” styles are, re-
ally, is being awake to what is happening in your world and incorporating that
awareness visually into the artifacts you are making.
darby english: I have an observation about the semantic nature of the conversation
we’re having. It seems to me that one of the problems that the term “hybridity”
causes is that it puts emphasis on a part of the process that interests us, rather
than one that interests us less: which is to say, it names an effect. We seem to
be evolving an interest in mixture as process—as the middle, the in-between.
Hybridity seems to be a condition, but we are beginning to speaking of it as a
process.
james elkins: That is interesting. Darby, if I understand you, you’re suggesting that
there might be a way to think of hybridity in experiential terms. To put it rough-
ly: there might be a moment in which an artist’s work, for example, strikes you
as clearly composed of two particular references: but you realize, quickly and
without reflection, that you cannot describe those two without being prey to es-
sentialisms, or worse—and so the concept, hybridity, comes into play as a cipher
for that anxiety and as a marker of the hope that you have that some other kind
of description might be created out of those dangerous or unnamable parts. But
of course there can never be such a formulation—there can’t be a way to name
the artist’s practice with some new covering concept—because that would be a
sign that the heterogeneity you perceive and value has been erased in favor of a
new essence, a new irreducible truth. So our circling around the concept, from
the Bhabhaian to what I’ll call the Brodskian—sorry, Joyce—would be a symp-
tom of our anxieties.
61 hybridity

zhivka valiavicharska: Well, I wouldn’t call what you are describing an anxiety; in-
stead we might try to understand it in terms of the constitution of a new sub-
ject—that “irreducible truth” would appear when confronted with the limits of
available discursive modes of self-understanding. It is about giving language to a
lived experience, which experience in turn comes into being through language.
If we think of this category as one that attempts to capture a process and takes
into account the subject’s incompleteness and its radical openness, rather than
presuming a subject or a condition existing prior to it—then it gives us a power-
ful method of historical analysis. It becomes a conceptual category that places
emphasis on the process, it turns the process into an object of analysis as opposed
to things with a preexisting value and meaning. It allows us to think of things as
derivative of historically constituted relations, rather than vice versa. I find this
relational understanding of history very productive—to Bhabha’s credit.
suzana milevska: We have been talking about hybridity in terms of artistic products,
and other have been talking about artistic subjects. This leads to the issue of
whether we can apply postcolonial theories to postcommunist societies: in
Macedonia, for example, we need to think about the contextual implications
of postcolonial theories, and whether hybridity might be applicable to different
specificities and singularities. Let us not forget that the political subject of hy-
bridization for Homi Bhabha is before all a discursive phenomenon, and it does
not take place in visual arts or in everyday life, but it emerges through enuncia-
tion of language, character formation, and narration.21
I would rather think of participation or involvement, as Marie Gee prefers
to call the communitarian participation, something that is taking place here and
now, and less of structural concepts imposed by postcolonial theory.22
james elkins: As you do in your essay on Balkan subjectivity “as neither”: but I wonder
if it might not be legible as another symptom of this underlying concern.23 At
least for me, it is promising to shift away from ideological disputes, and even
from terminological or historiographic disputes, and begin thinking of hybridity
as an experiential process.
darby english: I might accept that reading, but all I was trying to do there was sig-
nal an interest in our dissatisfaction, which seems expressive of a shift of
emphasis toward that which remains perpetually outside the grasp of linguis-
tic description.
james elkins: I wonder. Why assume that? It seems to me two things are entwined here:
first, hybridity is a dusty concept, apparently inappropriately revived; second,
it is a placeholder for various kinds of mixture, coherence, and incoherence,

21. Peter Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial at www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archive-

Writing Between the Singular and the Specific
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001),
24–26.
22. Marie Gee Yes, “My Front Yard: Participa-
tion and the Public Art Process,” High Perfor-
mance 69/70 (Spring/Summer 1995). Available
files/1999/12/yes_in_my_front.php (accessed
October 1, 2007).
23. Suzana Milevska, “Balkan Subjectivity as
Neither,” Third Text 21, no. 2 (2007): 181–88.
62 art and globalization

many of them essential for the articulation of contemporary global art. That
confluence of difficulties is why I am interested in what I’m interpreting as your
emphasis on experience.
 5. t e m p o r a l i t y

As the week went on, time and theories of temporality loomed larger. At some points
it seemed that a rethinking of temporalities was the most promising way to break
the grip of some influential theories of modernism and postmodernism, because they
depend on uncritical senses of time. An initial question was how the senses of time
that informed early twentieth-century modernism might have resonance with the
senses of time that drive narratives of modern and postmodern art. In particular, we
wondered whether the art world’s static, eternal present—the present of international
contemporary art—might be effectively questioned by a closer reading of the kind of
temporality it seeks to exclude.
We had read texts by Fred Jameson and Peter Osborne, and chapters from Ha-
rootunian’s History’s Disquiet.1 In a public lecture the evening before, Harootunian
had spoken of senses of temporality in Max Weber, Tetsuro Watsuji, Nishida Kitaro,
Hermann Bloch, and Georg Simmel, and on the experience of time in cities during
the first half of the twentieth century. The excerpt here is from early in the seminar,
when Harootunian was discussing Simmel, de Certeau, and others as examples of
temporalities that have been omitted from contemporary discussions of global art.
(Susan Buck-Morss had arrived; she was present for the remainder of the week;
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann was absent.)

michael holly: There are many different models of time around the beginning of the
twentieth century. The one that occurred to me first is in Peter Galison’s book
on Einstein’s clocks, where he attributes the theory of relativity to Einstein’s be-
ing unable, in the patent office in Bern, to imagine synchronizing rail clocks.2
That’s a wonderful example of how time can differ, even between people only a
quarter of a mile from one another. Then there is Freud, in Civilization and Its
Discontents, with the model of ancient Rome, which he took as a model of the
unconscious. It exists, with its historical stratigraphy (old Rome interpenetrating
new Rome), even in the present, so there is not one single time, even though it is
the present.3 And then to bring it a bit around to ideas about time in art history:
at the same moment when Viennese art historians were searching for a universal

1. Jameson, “The End of Temporality,” Critical
Inquiry 29, no. 4 (2003): 695–718; Jameson, A
Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of
the Present (London: Verso, 2002); Osborne,
The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde
(London: Verso, 1995); Harootunian, “Some
Thoughts on Comparability and the Space-Time
Problem,” Boundary 32, no. 2 (2005): 23–52;
Harootunian, “Shadowing History: National
Narratives and the Persistence of the Everyday,”
Cultural Studies 18 (2004): 181–200; Harootuni-
an, “Remembering the Historical Present,” Criti-
cal Inquiry 33 (2007): 471–94; and Harootunian,
History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice,
and the Question of Everyday Life (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2000).
2. Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s
Maps (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).
3. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
(1930), in The Standard Edition of the Complete
64 art and globalization

history, there is Alois Riegl’s essay on the cult of monuments, and the important
distinction between historic value and age value.4
I wonder how those models, which surround the points you have been men-
tioning, nuance what you say as it has been experienced in cities and countryside.
harry harootunian: Your description mirrors many of the concerns Georg Simmel
had. He was very much concerned with what had happened to time, and espe-
cially the enormous privilege that was accorded, in the city, to the present. He
tells us, in the work on the philosophy of money, that there is no periodicity, but
only a present. (He is really talking about capitalism, although he rarely mentions
it.) On the other hand, he was very interested in art, and when he talks about it,
he is concerned with the durability of form. He was fearful, in other words, that
the form which had constituted the center of cultural life before modernity was
in danger of disappearing. Art came to represent for him something that could
win some exemption from the processes of change. All of this is accompanied by
an intense discussion of ways that time is interiorized. Michael, you mentioned
that with reference to Freud, but all the philosophic discussions of the time were
bent on springing time free, making a separate realm for individual experience.
For me, all these issues have to do with the ways that history is understood.
Art historians themselves have not been too quick in recognizing that one of
the problems they ought to be dealing with is the problematic state of time and
temporalities. But instead those concerns get subsumed under their interests in
a particular kind of national space.
What all of these considerations do for me is that they return me to a con-
sideration of the present, which for me is the only site for a historical practice.
I think history does not exist in the past: the past is a category that only has a
function in the present, that only has meaning in the present. That may seem
banal, but when you think about the ways that people talk about the past—it
leads to the present, or illuminates the present—you see that people still think
that the past can be studied in and of itself. I have never known what that meant.
I mean I know what it means, but these are ways of avoiding that problem of the
role played by the present, and the politics that is implied by that position.
pamela lee: Can you expand on the relation between capital time and what Appadurai
calls an alternative temporality of people in the countryside (or whatever rubric
you’d choose for that), people who live outside of Taylorization? In some of the
readings you refer to Michel de Certeau—
harry harootunian: No, not really. I have an allergy to de Certeau.

pamela lee: Well, however allergic you are, it did seem to me that this alternative tem-
porality would be in line with a tactical relation to time, as opposed to the strate-

Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans- 4. “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its
lated and edited by James Strachey, 24 vols. Character and Its Origin” (1903), translated by
(London: Hogarth Press, 1966–74), vol. 21. Kurt Forster and Diane Ghirardo, Oppositions 25
(Fall 1982): 21–51.
65 temporality

gies of Taylorization.5 I was curious about how you talk about these two kinds
of time as dialogic, rather than seeing them as coeval. What, in particular, is the
dynamic of power embedded in that relationship?
harry harootunian: The relationship being between capital time and noncapital time?

pamela lee: Yes. Is a tactical relationship the principal one? And could you talk about
noncapital modes of temporality, beyond the tactical or the resistant?
harry harootunian: The basic problem I have with de Certeau is his reliance on bi-
nary categories like “tactics” and “strategies,” taken together to form a symmetry,
which invariably are made to play the role of functions in the operation of larger
system and ultimately cancel each other out in the interest of maintaining the
social equilibrium. But let me start with the tactical. Today, more than ever, the
relation is tactical. People resort to different conceptions of time—and there
may be good reasons for that, as when migrants organize themselves into large
social spaces in New York City or London. What interests me is how certain
things are retained, and put into different registers. But I want to thank you for
that question, because it is precisely because of my allergy to de Certeau that
I’ve ignored that distinction between strategy (used by institutions) and tactics
(which can be deployed by individuals). The distinction allows you to think
about how different times, or noncapitalist temporalities, may be reproduced in
different contexts.
The possibility of extracapitalist temporalities has everything to do with
what kind of furniture, what baggage, each society brings into the world of
capital. That distinction remains to be examined, because it is there that you
can begin to see how forms are used, or not used. In the 1960s and 1970s, there
was a movement that made use of a binary juxtaposition between tradition and
modernity. It led to thinking about how certain traditions forms survive by mak-
ing adaptations, and how they were used to mediate changes. The whole purpose
was to show how societies evolve naturally and peacefully, rather than through
rupture—it was really a Cold War idea. That was a gloss, I think, on earlier
Marxian views on what constituted the difference between formal subsumption
and real subsumption.
I have been very much concerned with that, because I have seen how the
broader forms of subsumption operate. Take the institution of the emperor in
Japan. The Japanese reappropriate that institution at a certain moment in their
modern history: it’s like a tool, which you apply to a new situation: you make the
emperor into something you need, even though he still retains all the marks of an
archaic agrarian society. In the language of conceptual art, the emperor in Japan
comes to us as a ready-made. That strikes me as the product of a certain kind of
historical experience: what you get is a doubling of the historical experience of re-
taining and reappropriating forms, and also a kind of tactical extension of the past.

5. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of for Taylorization see, for example, Robin Cohen
Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendell and Paul Kennedy, Global Sociology (London:
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Macmillan, 2000).
66 art and globalization

darby english: The more I hear you talk, the more it seems the project you have set out
on is more a revival than a revision of the texts you’re engaging.
harry harootunian: I am not sure what you think is being revived.

darby english: You mentioned Bloch and Watsuji, and then you maligned both for a
kind of essentialism.
harry harootunian: My position is to see involvement in temporality as a kind of
permanent condition: there is not something essentialist involved. For a philoso-
pher such as Watsuji, there was something unchanging and irreducible about
what it meant to be Japanese in a society that was geared to rapid change. With
Bloch, it was a case of trying to figure out the relation between cultural residues
and fascism.
That is a very familiar problem, even aside from Marxists like Bloch. There
is a widespread presumption that if a society evolves in a certain way, like the
United States, it avoids some of the uneven asymmetries of development, can
escape the specter of fascisms and authoritarianisms. This happens in Barrington
Moore’s book on democracy and dictatorship, for example.6 It’s about the lag,
about assigning a different development: some societies, it is said, may have de-
veloped a powerful industrial engine, but they lag in developing social structures
that are adequate to a modern society.
I am not reviving those authors, but basically extending them.
darby english: What’s the difference?

harry harootunian: The difference may be no more momentous than that between
“revival” and “revision.” I am saying these forms are characteristic of every soci-
ety, not just certain ones. In other words, there is no such thing as time lag, ex-
cept from the perspective of a certain conception of historical development that
was articulated essentially during the Cold War by American social scientists and
historians. There is just as much evidence of asymmetrical developments in the
United States today, for instance, as there was in Germany or Japan in the 1930s.
This may seem small to you, but at least in terms of a common understanding of
historiography, it’s a pretty big step. Societies like Germany, the United States,
and England came pretty close to replicating a lot of those forms of fascism in
the 1930s which we attribute to underdevelopment. Just look at the present.
susan buck-morss: Let me get at this from another perspective. You talk about mo-
dernity and capitalism, and you want them to have the same valence, and yet
terrorism was embraced by the Soviets in the 1940s—so I wonder if that’s a fair
analysis. Seen from my quick trip to Tashkent and Samarqand, parts of these
places looked very much like a 1970s Soviet city, and I felt right at home. But
other parts were in a temporal lag—I’m not talking about venerable age, the
kind that infuses tourist destinations, but simply old-fashioned, out-of-date.

6. Barrington Moore, The Social Origins of in the Making of the Modern World (Boston:
Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant Beacon Press, 1966).
67 temporality

They had not been touched by modernization. Even in Moscow, behind the
street-facing building fronts, the courtyards are all grass and weeds. As Walter
Benjamin said, Moscow is a village hiding out in the city. So can one really
make the distinction between capitalism and socialism? And if not, then is it
about something else, something more universal in the 1920s, perhaps a utopian
investment in urbanization?
harry harootunian: It’s a complex problem, because socialism, during the Cold War,
participated in many of the same kinds of modernization that are associated
with the “free world.” It’s maybe just the other side of capitalism.
susan buck-morss: Yes, I’ve argued that. But then you can’t keep on using the term
“capitalism,” because the politics you call upon may be part of the problem.
harry harootunian: Well, it is and it isn’t. You can’t think about the emergence or
development of socialism without first accounting for its relationship with the
formation of capitalism in the nineteenth century. You’re right in making that
distinction: there is a socialist modernity, that’s what you’re essentially arguing.
I accept that, but I also think that capitalism is at the heart of the impulse for
modernized development.
keith moxey: I want to bring the conversation back to the possibility of a global art
history. I think your fascinating analysis of these different forms of time, and
the emphasis on heterogeneity rather than homogeneity, really presents an as-
pect of the problem that we haven’t considered. In a way, your conclusion, that
history is always written in the present—something that our age has become
very much aware of—would place a burden on the ideological agendas that
might inform a global art history. Why would one want to write a global art
history? The danger, of course, is that it would cover over the complexity of
the temporal situation that you have been sketching. Or, if it were to recognize
the plethora of different forms of time that are taking place around the world,
wouldn’t those forms of time always come off at a disadvantage when consid-
ered from the perspective of the person writing the history? That person would
always be outside of the system being described, and he or she would probably
be synonymous with the most “advanced” sense of time, the one synonymous
with capitalism, or the West.
This seems to me to dramatize the question of what a global art history
might be. The project of a global art history might seem progressive, in that it
would be an attempt to draw attention to different parts of the globe, differ-
ent forms of artistic production. But what would they be recuperated for? And
where would those recuperations be situated? Into what sorts of narratives are
the recuperated to be folded?
pamela lee: I really appreciate what Keith is saying. I’d like to add that I’m a little un-
comfortable with the notion that, given our current situation, heterogeneous
68 art and globalization

time is necessarily a resistant temporality, much as one might assume by anal-

ogy that a global art history is necessarily progressive. I really appreciate Harry’s
reading, and I couldn’t agree more that the “everyday” is a category of enormous
resonance and explanatory power. But our present moment is radically different
from the postwar or Cold War moment where temporality is concerned. In fact,
isn’t heterogeneous time precisely that which is recuperated under the condi-
tions of the global market, one that enables multiple markets to function by
temporalities—“24/7,” as the ads would say? If a global art history is to remain
a possibility, even as speculation, I imagine it would have to account for these
shifts at the level of its narratives. And how one does that is anyone’s guess.
james elkins: I think the question Why write a global art history? is misleading, because
it implies people set out to do such a thing—Is Art History Global? showed, I
think, that almost no one does.7 What everyone tries to do is write in a way that
is sensitive to local meanings, but what results is a massive, worldwide literature-
in-the-making, in which practices are described in such a way that each is legible
to the others: they comprise a slowly accumulating, global art history. That is
what concerns me, not the ambition of a few people to write about the whole
world all at once.
pedro erber: I would like to go further in this notion of legibility. One could say that
the global character of art history defined in this way would depend upon the
mode of its legibility to others, that is, on the process of translation between the
different local contexts. How we conceive of this mutual legibility, of the mode
of translation and communication between the different particulars, would then
be decisive in determining the character of such globalism of art history—and
of artistic production itself. In other words, how are these different practices and
histories legible to each other? Do they have to partake of some kind of universal
language of art and aesthetics? Or what other modes of cultural translation and
transcultural legibility can we conceive of?
harry harootunian: Keith, I was always taught never to answer a question by asking
another. But it occurred to me: Why would you want to write a global history of
art? There are comparable attempts; there are global histories (not art histories),
and there is also the old model of world literature. The models I’ve participated
in, especially at the University of Chicago, were attempts to do something analo-
gous to what was being done in the core courses on civilization. It was outra-
geous! We were never able to escape from that model of cultural domination and
hegemony.
james elkins: I’d like to add a distinction here, between recuperating for and recuper-
ating as. Consider John Clark’s book Modern Asian Art.8 He presents examples
of modern Asian art as questions of economics and politics—in other words,

7. This is a starting point of my review of 8. Clark, Modern Asian Art (Honolulu:

David Summers’s Real Spaces, in Art Bulletin University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998), discussed in
86 no. 2 (2004): 373–80, reprinted in Is Art my “Writing About Modernist Painting Outside
History Global? Western Europe and North America,” in Com-
69 temporality

he studies the social conditions of production in different places. He looks, for

example, at the socioeconomic situation of art in the Tokyo National Academy
in 1905, and pays close attention to the particular social configuration that
made an avant-garde art possible at that time and place, presenting it as art
history.
But a reader who comes to that material knowing Van Gogh and Gauguin—
I put it that way to avoid saying a Western reader, because I mean nearly every
potential reader—will have a hard time suspending disbelief at the attention ac-
corded to what have to appear as second- and third-rate pastiches of Van Gogh
and Gauguin by artists such as Yorozu Tetsugoro and Kuroda Seiki.9 In other
words, Clark presents a very careful account of what informed art production
in Tokyo in 1905, and he presents it for art history, but he pays a very high
price: he brackets out the kinds of judgment that would allow readers to think
about those paintings as moments in any conceivable modernist art history. He
mentions the avant-garde only in selected brief contexts in his book, shrinking
it, sequestering it, keeping control of it, in order to be able to take such work
seriously.
harry harootunian: One of the stakes here, thinking about these larger narratives,
is inclusion. I’d be the first to defend Clark’s choice in talking about economics
over, for example, some generalized avant-garde, but on the other hand, even
though the work is avant-garde, the category was made someplace else, and has a
whole set of associations that derive from other practices, it would be interesting
to see to what degree these appropriations were mediated by received experience.
That happened in modern Japanese literature. When you talk about what “we”
call the novel in Japanese, it’s really different from what we know as the novel. It
was appropriated as a marketing strategy—
james elkins: A very difficult problem is lurking behind this. If Clark were here, he
might want to say that the category of appropriation also needs to be inter-
rogated. He works on such concepts in different chapters, at the risk of losing
what might be called direction—I’m trying to choose a fairly neutral term here
for what is really nothing less than the purpose and underlying conceptual struc-
ture of art-historical narratives of modernism. It becomes unclear, in his book,
why he is writing about art. Why not any other cultural product that resulted in
interesting socioeconomic contexts?
Here are the choices, as I see them. First: you can write a sensitive, informed,
contextualized account of some non-Western modernist practice, and end up
contributing to the slow accumulation of mutually intelligible texts that com-

pression vs. Expansion: Containing the World’s
Art, edited by John Onians (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2006), 188–214
9. I don’t mean those painters didn’t do
interesting work: I mean that some of their
work, and especially what is illustrated in Clark’s
book, will necessarily appear initially as poor
and derivative. How we adjust that sense is an
entirely different question, but I doubt accounts
that claim such pictures can be seen initially
without such value judgments: if they are actu-
ally apprehended that way, then my claim would
be that so much of the conceptual apparatus of
art criticism and history have been omitted that
the account may not make sense for history or
criticism.
70 art and globalization

prise the world practice of art history or criticism.10 Second: you can break free
of all that by deconstructing or deleting the apparently transhistorical categories
such as value and the avant-garde, jettisoning the judgment of lag or belatedness,
and perhaps ending up writing only about socioeconomic contexts in the way
Clark does (so that your practice becomes, in effect, a study of economic or so-
cial conditions that just happens to use art objects as examples). And third: you
can write idiosyncratically, in some new way, in order to articulate the particular-
ity of the art. In that third case, you are taking the risk that your writing does not
make contact with other people’s narratives at all, that it appears outside history
or criticism—that it appears as poetry.
It is possible to be more exact about individual cases, but I see no way
around those three general choices. The first is whatever is read as art history
(for anyone, by anyone); the second is largely postcolonial theory, sometimes
presented for the interests of art historians and critics; and the third is much
of what gets written in the international contemporary art scene, indifferent or
resistant to attachments to existing discourses. None of them is satisfactory.
joyce brodsky: I am trying to understand what your objections are to Clark’s approach.
To me he seems to contextualize the problematic of modernism within the vari-
ous Asian countries by exploring cultural as well as social and economic institu-
tions, and by deconstructing the binary traditional/modern that makes so much
of Asian modern art seem to be what you think of as second rate. Are you not
just imposing a value-oriented Western modernist aesthetic on his narrative?
Why can his story not exist in parallel to the one you seem to be imposing and
make sense in relation to other discourses?
james elkins: It can exist in parallel.

harry harootunian: This all has to do with conceptions of time. Capitalist time is
a complex thing: it is filled with operations, and self-differences. Marx gave us
our first look at it, and we have gone a long way beyond him. But we still cleave
to things like the working day, for example. The time of distribution, of ex-
change—these are incredibly complex.
james elkins: That’s really intriguing. It’s like an open door, a way forward for the kinds
of conundra I was sketching.
harry harootunian: Capitalism also tries to do what national time does: it tries to
make these things seem smooth on the surface. Capitalist time is a powerful at-
tempt to force a uniformity, even on the level of the everyday, especially at the
level of the everyday. That is what we call “routine.” I think that nonstandard
experiences of time do not disappear: they may just go on in their own way; they

10. This is the direction I am taking in the
work in progress on modernist painting; see the
remarks at the end of Section 3. The second
approach arises in part, I think, from attempts
to critique concepts such as belatedness, the
avant-garde, value (for instance, Greenberg’s
concept of “quality”), or originality. Those at-
tempts have tended to dismantle the narratives
that make historical and critical sense of mod-
ernisms, and what remains tends to be political,
social, and economic matters.
71 temporality

may become mediated; they may represent those nodes of heterogeneity, which
could be mobilized for political agendas. I think it is important to recognize that
the categorical force of “postmodernity” is made to announce the “end of tem-
porality” and the installation of the regime of the spatial dominant, coming on
the heels of a now-passed modernism which presumably concealed modernity’s
uneven temporalities. Yet this kind of declaration is really no different from
those who have circulated the rumor that with globalization the nation is on its
way out.
pamela lee: Maybe this is redundant, but I still feel we need to qualify the ways in
which “heterogeneous” time might remain outside the reach of capital time. The
time of post-Fordist production, after all, is such that it actually accommodates
and facilitates heterogeneous temporalities through its decentralizing of mar-
kets, material resources, and labor. It’s not incidental that this mode of produc-
tion or management is referred to as the “just-in-time” system: it’s the reigning
operational paradigm of Toyota, Microsoft, Monsanto, Exxon Mobil, you name
it. What we mean by the workday has expanded beyond the conventional eight-
hour factory model; and if the workday is what conventionally organized our
relationship to time under the sign of Fordism, we’re now at the point where we
have to reconceptualize our relation to the “everyday.” For those of us working
on contemporary art, it’s vital to retain something of this shift in temporalities if
we’re going to take seriously problems of the global art world, whether its mar-
ket, its audiences and—perhaps most important of all—its intrinsic unevenness.
isla leaver-yap: Certainly this “time of distribution” you talk of becomes increasingly
complex if we look at the current reception of contemporary art. We have seen
how the erosion of temporal and spatial barriers in the global market has acceler-
ated the circulation and reach of contemporary art and given a kind of temporal
density to large-scale international exhibitions like biennales.
michele greet: As art historians, I wonder if we might look at different ways of inter-
acting with differing temporalities, as they exist in different places—studying
heterogeneities in the experience of time. That might reveal a continuum: that
the unevenness is more pronounced in some places, and less in others.
harry harootunian: I think that is exactly right. You have to specify: to make it inter-
esting, you need to make discrete comparisons: that is why the everyday is such
an important unit for me, despite the fact that it is part of some national space,
and also some global space.
 6. p o s t c o l o n i a l n a r r a t i v e s

The following excerpt is from a seminar led by Susan Buck-Morss, in which we dis-
cussed practices of reading events and reconfiguring historical narratives from postco-
lonial perspectives.
We discussed Susan Buck-Morss’s essay “Hegel and Haiti” (now part of her
Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History) and her interview for the Journal of Visual
Culture, titled “Globalization, Cosmopolitanism, Politics, and the Citizen.” 1 Her
“Hegel and Haiti” redraws the intellectual history of Hegel’s much interpreted dia-
lectical formulation of freedom. Rather than reading Hegel’s master-slave dialectic
within the lineage of European liberal political discourse and in the context of the
revolutionary developments of late eighteenth-century Europe, she locates the concep-
tion of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in the empirical context of the 1791–1804
Haitian Revolution, at the historical beginnings of the anticolonial revolutionary
movements. While her essay develops a postcolonial critique of the notion of freedom
as it is articulated by the English and French liberal thinkers during the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, it radically separates the German philosopher from
the French Enlightenment tradition and places his philosophy at the foundations
of twentieth-century postcolonial thought. Buck-Morss’s lecture, which preceded this
seminar, presented her historical research on the Haitian anticolonial movement in
relation to a collective-empathetic notion of universal humanity.

michele greet: In your lecture last night you talked about emotional involvement and
the commonality of human experience of the lived moment. How does that
relate to the task of historical research?
susan buck-morss: The emphasis is not on emotional involvement, although, I ad-
mit, I may have become emotional in defending a project that is today quite
unpopular, because it opposes ideas of alternative modernities, hybridity, and
multiculturalism. I am making a case for universality by focusing on the dangers
that human beings face when they experience the limits of collective belonging.
The project attempts to rescue from long-time disrepute the idea of universal
history, not as world history, not even as the history of global capital, but as
empathic identification with historical actors when they find themselves aban-
doned by their cultures, exposed and vulnerable because they have slipped out,
or been pushed out, of the ambiguous shelter of collective identities, all of which

1. Susan Buck-Morss, “Hegel and Haiti,” Journal of Visual Culture 1, no. 3 (2006):
Critical Inquiry 26, no. 4 (2000): 821–65; 325–40; Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal
“Globalization, Cosmopolitanism, Politics, and History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
the Citizen: Interview with Susan Buck-Morss,” Press, 2009).
74 art and globalization

are suspect. I never met a culture I liked. All of them are based on sentimental
justifications of inequality, exploitation, and oppression. But you cannot get
through to a humanly universal level where empathic identity is possible with-
out empirical work, scrutinizing the details of history, its “lived moments” as
you say. This demands research at the edges, the limits of collective narratives. I
am not so interested in producing interdisciplinary work as I am in probing the
spaces where even interdisciplinary discourses and communities shut down, in
order to dismantle the conceptual blinders that constrain the scope of empathic
imagination. The political responsibility is to produce knowledge that does not
stay contained within the boundaries of cultures and their cognitive frames. It
means looking over the edge of ways that we have been conditioned to know and
see, allowing conscious recognition of facts that have been recorded, but not at-
tended to—like the role of Muslims in leading the slave rebellions that initiated
the Haitian Revolution.
While it may not be that history is citable in all of its moments (that was
Walter Benjamin’s idea of utopia), still, the rescue of elements of the past that
have been overlooked creates opportunities for new historical configurations
that do not keep replicating the relationship of “us” versus “them.”
pedro erber: Since Hegel, Western philosophy is always referring back to its own
history—and making this historical self-reference a fundamental part of the
philosophical endeavor itself. What Heidegger calls the “history of Western
metaphysics,” for instance, is the narrative of a self-enclosed, internal develop-
ment of thought. Despite his attempt to conceptualize such mode of thinking
beyond geographical determinations, namely by identifying the “West”—or
the Abendland—with this very philosophical development, of course he is
talking about European thought. One can see clear traces of this weight of a
notion of Western metaphysics also in Derrida, especially in earlier texts, such
as Grammatology and the conference on “The Ends of Man.” On the other
hand, your reading of Hegel through the Haitian revolution, as an extra-Euro-
pean historical event that dramatically intervenes in this supposedly European
history—rather than through the French Revolution, for instance—questions
the fundamental presupposition of self-enclosure that sustains this dominant
narrative.
Bringing it back to the question of globalism in art—maybe, instead of try-
ing to globalize something, it is a matter of realizing and recognizing that art and
its history are, in fact, already much more global than one might have been told
by traditional narratives.
bhaskar mukhopadhyay: I love Susan’s essay. I teach it to my students. But I also teach
them Fanon and try to come in terms with his legacy. Touissant L’Ouverture is
our martyr, but it needs to be emphasized that he was merely pushing the En-
lightenment agenda to its logical limit—he was a “Black Jacobin” in every sense
of the term. It appears quite extraordinary and exhilarating today that a Negro
75 postcolonial narratives

slave from distant Haiti would demand and fight for what the philosophes articu-
lated from their posh salons. Yet I find this politics of recognition leading to an
ultimate radiance and final reconciliation profoundly problematic. After Fanon’s
Black Skin, White Masks, it is no longer possible to think of the problem of race
under colonialism as a sociological matter of exclusion/inclusion: the politics of
race cannot be contained within the humanist myth of Man or the (meta)narra-
tive of historical progress. The colonial condition renders it impossible to speak
in terms of a commonality of human experience: there, everyday life exhibits a
“constellation of delirium.”2
The colonial state of emergency, as elaborated by Fanon, interrupts the dia-
lectic of deliverance by interrogating presence as such (Man, Truth, Self, Prog-
ress). Practices that are endemic under colonialism—violence, paranoia, self-
hate, treason, madness—are not mere alien presences which the dialectic seeks
to explain away as the ultimate misrecognition of Man. These are what reveal the
presence of the other in the time of our own consciousness.
susan buck-morss: Fanon’s conception of history is far more Hegelian than my own.
I am skeptical of the implication that the solution to Hegel’s Eurocentrism is a
different variant of the same dialectical overcoming. But philosophical relativ-
ism gets us nowhere, and it is counterproductive to give up on the philosophical
concept of truth. If you imagine yourself in the same place as those who have
been betrayed by their culture, you are likely to discover a different truth, one
that is more material, more corporeal, out of play of culture and its meanings.
No collective can claim possession or control of such truth. Of course, you re-
main saturated by particular cultural traces, but that is a different issue.
keith moxey: Maybe the distinction would be between truth with a capital T and truth
with a small t. I think that the small truth is namely that there is always going to
be a truth that is for you, that you believe in something. This is different from
relativism—relativism is always brought out as a red herring. There are perspec-
tives that are irreconcilable.
susan buck-morss: I agree about the noncommensurabilities, but I would want to ar-
gue for the universality of affective reaction to events, a sense of collectivity that
emerges with the experience of human vulnerability.

2. Fanon the existentialist-humanist has to
confront this delirium at every turn. A fright-
ened, confused white child cries out on the
street, “Look, a Negro . . . Mama, see the Negro!
I’m frightened.” Or, “Our women are at the
mercy of the Negroes . . . God knows how they
make love.” What’s so disturbing about Fanon’s
writings on the psychological conditions of colo-
nialism (“Manichaean delirium”) is that, in shift-
ing the focus of cultural racism from the politics
of nationalism to the politics of narcissism, he
opens up a space of engagement “between
mask and identity, image and identification,
from which comes . . . the lasting impression of
ourselves as others.” “I had to meet the white
man’s eyes . . . I was battered down by tom-
toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetish-
ism, racial defects . . . I took myself far off from
my own presence.” Here Fanon is not talking
about colonialism as a violation of some human
essence or the black/white binary as founding
terms (“The Negro is not. Any more than the
white man”). The white gaze breaks up the
black man’s body, and in that act of violence its
own frame of reference is transgressed. It is not
the Self and the Other but the otherness of the
Self that is revealed under colonial conditions.
76 art and globalization

keith moxey: I wouldn’t want to subscribe to a universal notion of a human subject. We

belong to a culture and largely (consciously or unconsciously) share or contest its
ideological commitments. Harry and Shigemi are steeped in the knowledge of
another culture, and yet they have testified the ways in which translation—not
just language—but the patterns of thought of, in this case Japan, cannot be rep-
resented in philosophical/theoretical discussions in this country or in Europe.
For me, this is a matter of power—there is a power differential that prevents us
from being able to appreciate the depth of thought and imagination that other
cultures have to offer.
joyce brodsky: Keith’s comment returns us to the issue of passion, small truths and
political actions. How does the passion about the “universality of affective reac-
tion” direct us to take political and social actions that will use commonality to
bring about political change? I admire your passion, Susan, aroused by the hor-
rors taking place everywhere in this war of all against all—and I share in it, but
I don’t understand how it helps us to identify even the small truths necessary to
begin to produce change.
susan buck-morss: Mistrust of culture; mistrust of any collective that claims you, and
of all the talk centered on “us” that benefits the national leaders who claim to
represent “us.” Solidarity with the humanity that escapes these claims, a kind of
humanist underground, one that has more in common with animals than with
politicians.
zhivka valiavicharska: For Foucault it is a matter of whose truth it is—it is not that
there are no truths, but that truths are always bound up with power, they are in
service of reproducing relations of domination. So the point here is whom these
histories belong to. For Nietzsche there are truths as well—I am not sure if those
are the truths Keith refers to because they are never too pretty. They are really
bloody, in fact, because they come from intense suffering. It is only by uttering
these truths, by exposing them, that a certain self-affirmation happens and an
emancipated subject comes into being. This is why projects that find the radical
space from which to contest and to recuperate certain silenced truths become
political acts.
susan buck-morss: Yes, it is a matter of having this fact decenter a certain narrative and
speak a different truth that displaces the dominant one. It would be horrible if
“Hegel and Haiti” became the canonical reading and the new “Truth.”
james elkins: Just to put this in institutional terms, there is interdisciplinarity with
a capital I and with a small i. The interview you set us as a text took place in
the Journal of Visual Culture, which is, I think, about interdisciplinarity with a
very small i. In that journal many things are recognizable: the parts that come
from different disciplines can be parsed out, and texts are often comprehensible
77 postcolonial narratives

from various disciplinary perspectives. That’s “uninteresting interdisciplinarity”

in Steve Melville’s sense.3
This book series is planned to end in 2011 with a conference and book called
Farewell to Visual Studies, and part of the reason for that farewell is the disso-
lution of interesting conversations on interdisciplinarity within visual studies.4
What is at stake in our event this week is, in a way, part of that. Zhivka and I
wanted these conversations to be intermittently incomprehensible in hopefully
productive ways, and for that purpose your texts and your interventions are
wonderful models—but wonderful, partly, because I don’t think they can be
used as models.
susan buck-morss: Here is an example that might be new to art history’s discussion
of globalization (I think a similar proposal was brought up in Tom Kaufmann’s
seminar). It involves having medieval art history begin with a consideration of
Africa, where method becomes a means of constructing the past not as a nar-
rative of political collectives, but as traces of human borrowing and local in-
novation. Historians like Jan Vansina trace the cross-continental movement of
artifacts among Africans of different cultures, including across sub-Saharan Af-
rica, an area impenetrable for Europeans until the nineteenth century.5 Artifacts
move among people not as the spread of imperial cultural forms, but as the
consequence of intercultural connections. Styles have a way of escaping politi-
cal boundaries. Art not only emanates from power centers but disregards them.
The Department of Art History at Cornell has come up with a brilliant way
of doing global art history. When there was an opening for baroque art, rather
than hiring a European baroque specialist, they advertised for an expert in South
American baroque. And when there was an opening in medieval history, they
hired someone who works on the entire Mediterranean basin and writes on the
influences of Muslim architectural traditions on European architecture and art,
and vice versa. This is one way of doing global art history that manages not to
reproduce the Eurocentric art-historical narratives.
james elkins: Yes, it is possible that art history can expand beyond its regional and
national specialties—but I meant, in a more personal way, that what happens
across disciplines in “Hegel and Haiti” and your newer work is not itself usable
as a model. It follows that this discussion today is not an ordinary seminar about
interdisciplinarity, in which texts and practices can become recipes and models.
I think that is wonderful.
angela miller: I think that “Hegel and Haiti” is an example of global history and the
ways in which a global perspective fundamentally redraws the very substance of
such disciplines as history. Take the history of ideas—intellectual history; it has
too often been segregated from history, a discipline that has the tools to examine
the widest possible web of interconnections between different locations, com-
3. This is elaborated in chapter 1 of my 5. Jan Vansina, The Children of Woot: A His-
Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (New tory of the Kuba Peoples (Madison: University of
York: Routledge, 2003). Wisconsin Press, 1978); Paths in the Rainforest
4. See www.imagehistory.org. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).
78 art and globalization

munities, and centers of power. History as a discipline is at its best when it is

most global. “Hegel and Haiti” charts a new direction insofar as it resituates the
history of ideas within this global network of historical forces. It breaks through
the disciplinary blindness of intellectual history, which presumes a genealogy in
which one idea begets another idea—a process of filiation that occurs indepen-
dently of any kind of historical determination. In this sense, when one resituates
ideas as part of global history, one may be transgressing disciplinary boundaries,
but one is also reanimating intellectual history in a way that makes it newly rel-
evant to the study of global processes.
shelly errington: Angela, that is a deep point, and it relates to what Pedro said a little
while ago—something about the fact that we don’t have to globalize something,
but rather it has always been global. The point is that we have not always nar-
rated objects or events as globally connected, because they have been subordi-
nated to narratives of linear unfolding, or in disciplinary narratives of purity
that do not admit of interconnectedness or “hybridity” to hearken back to a
previous conversation. The issue, which Susan is addressing in Hegel and Haiti
explicitly, is to find ways to narrate those interconnections, that “globalism,” that
are persuasive. The point is not to strive for “interdisciplinarity,” but rather to
see connections that a strict adherence to a disciplinary way of thinking might
make one blind to—like seeing that Hegel might have been reading about Haiti
in a magazine and might have been inspired by it, whereas that can easily be dis-
counted or simply be under the radar if you have a mindset to write a big story
whose structure you already know.
michael holly: Susan, I would like to point to the affect, the passion in your writing—
that affect then creates the effect of your analysis. Would you not agree that in so
much historical writing—and this might be a problem when it comes to global
art histories—research as research gets in the way of insight and understanding?
In your interview with Marquard Smith and Laura Mulvey in the Journal of
Visual Culture, Mark started talking about how to use images as philosophy, to
make them speak. And then you responded: “I plunder visual culture for certain
theoretical use, where affect is mobilized.” I don’t see that in “Hegel and Haiti.”
There you use images as historians do—images are somehow transparent and
you don’t use them in a way you’ve used them at other places where you use
painting as nontransparent, painting as an argument that challenges . . .
keith moxey: At some point in Dreamworld and Catastrophe you talk about the way
you use images that might be analogous to the fragmentary quality of Benjamin’s
writing in the Arcades Project. I am thinking of someone else who uses photo-
graphs in a very effective way, W. G. Sebald. He uses images that have nothing
to do with his text, but they clearly work on another level—it is as if the book
has an unconscious to it. You could call it a Benjaminian haunting—you are
haunted by memories you remain completely unaware of.
79 postcolonial narratives

Is this what you are looking for? Is this the cognitive value or the affect value
of your fragmented juxtapositions?
susan buck-morss: Perhaps the argument in “Hegel and Haiti” is not based primarily
on the interpretation of images, but images still play a crucial role throughout—
from my critique of Simon Shama’s history writing, to the sections on the spread
of freemasonry. The use of images has to do with method more than anything.
The discovery of certain images is key to formulating questions with which to
approach the historical sources. They provided clues as to where, and how to
look. In Dreamworld and Catastrophe, the method was to build sections of text
out of clusters of images.
When I was writing The Dialectics of Seeing, finding the objects that entered
Walter Benjamin’s visual field was fundamental to the interpretive process. I
went to Paris and followed Benjamin’s footsteps around the city, traversing, as he
did, its many arcades. I found catalogues of exhibitions and world’s fairs that he
attended, and images from magazines that he might have read—anything that
might help me encounter fragments of the past about which he wrote, so that
I could see how these things happened to him. Images do methodological work.
Very rarely do I use them as illustrations for what I already know needs to be
said. And I try to let their ambiguities speak.
james elkins: There is a very complex question lurking here, which I don’t think we can
open now. (I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m thinking ahead: the second conference
in this series, which we’ll have in these same rooms this same time next year, is
on the subject What Is an Image?) So I’d just like to mark this moment. We ap-
proach the question of images in our texts in a very curious way, by asserting that
they work in unexpected ways in our texts, and occasionally—as you’re saying,
Susan, and as I’ve said and some others have said—that they can even create
their own narratives. That is a strangely truncated rhetoric. It stops well short of
saying what exactly happens when images like the ones in Dialectics of Seeing are
permitted, for a while, to be something more complicated than either cognitive
tools or affective opportunities.6
michael holly: What about Warburg? What about really strange similarities and dif-
ferences that had points? They seemed that they were repossessed by the same
historical sensibility. Warburg’s and Benjamin’s notions of eruptions through

6. To clarify that: like some other histori-
ans, I have also written books that began as
sequences of images, with no narrative. But I do
not think that the pictures are as undetermined
or as potentially independent of our intentions
as we may hope. And I am especially interested
to notice that conversations on this subject, in
and around visual studies, tend to stop with
the assertion of the potential independence of
images. (That is what happens in the Journal
of Visual Culture interview that was set for
this seminar.) It’s like saying an employee is
free to choose: after that assertion, it’s time to
get back to work. Next year’s Stone Summer
Theory Institute will be partly on this subject. I
have tried several times to write books whose
structure grew in surprising ways from images
I had collected. One is The Object Stares Back
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997), and another
is Six Stories from the End of Representation
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). Each
time the apparent freedom evaporated: it wasn’t
much more than a desire I had in relation to
writing and images.
80 art and globalization

time and space might provide an encounter of Western modes of art-historical

inquiry with global art.
susan buck-morss: Yes—just the idea that he would put the image of a Greek statue
next to a golf player because the drapery was moving in the same way. I find
Warburg’s approach fascinating because instead of universal, timeless truth, he
gives us moments captured in images from different times that resonate strongly
with each other.
shigemi inaga: Two years ago Griselda Pollock came for the first time to Japan to give
a talk about Aby Warburg. She insisted that the Hamburg Library has a round
reading or conference room.7 In reality, however, it is not round but oval. The
oval was very essential because for Warburg there is no one center of knowl-
edge—knowledge is interdisciplinary. How can one reduce this multiplicity into
one center, to concentrate all knowledge into one system! If there are two cen-
ters, the orbit that gravity creates is inevitably elliptical; similarly, if we are talk-
ing about globalism and global knowledge, that knowledge has to be configured
around an elliptical orbit—which is, I think, quite inevitable.
My idea here is—and I am making a metaphor—elliptical: the subject we are
discussing is always elliptic and not always very visible. While Warburg developed
the idea of the Pathosformel and the pathology of images, Gombrich completely
repressed that aspect and instead proposed a psychology of cognitive perception.
In the same way, while Warburg put forward the idea of passion, Ernst Cas-
sirer—because he didn’t have any passion—framed his theory of the visual in
terms of symbol. In all these transformations—from passion to symbol, from
pathology to psychology—signify a process of sublimation and repression of
what Warburg was trying to accomplish. We must be careful not to subordinate
images into solid narratives.
T. J. Clark’s most recent book, The Sight of Death, is a great experiment in
visual reading that stresses the necessity to make an effort to read images on their
own, rather than reducing them easily to discursive narratives.8 In this, I think,
he has much in common with the sensibility of Warburg’s project.
james elkins: If by “discursive” you mean argued, propositional, empirical, polemic. If
you mean something weaker, like “possessing a continuous sense or purpose,”
then you could also adduce radical experiments like Jean-Louis Schefer’s, where
the writing is not only nondiscursive but also illogical and even ungrammatical.9
I take all such experiments seriously, but I don’t think they are our topic here.

7. Griselda Pollock, “Visions of Sex: Wander-
ings in a Visual Feminist Museum ca. 1920”
(January 16, 2006); “Disciplines, Interdisciplines
and Transdisciplinary Perspectives on History
of Art and Culture” (January 17, 2006), F-GENS
Journal (Tokyo: Ochanomizu University, March
2006): 201–24. Inaga’s critical commentary
on Pollock’s lectures has been published as
“Pandora’s Hope—Exposed Subject, Matrix, and
Ellipse,” Aida 122 (2006): 11–18.
8. Clark, Sight of Death (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2006). See my “A Calm Mirror
of the Water and the Dark Realm of the Serpent:
A Reading of T. J. Clark’s The Sight of Death,”
in “Thought of Disease/Disease of Thought,”
special issue, Site Zero\ ero Site, no. 1 (2007):
258–85 (in Japanese; ISBN 978-4-9903206-1-4).
9. For example, The Enigmatic Body: Essays
on the Arts, translated by Paul Smith (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), or
81 postcolonial narratives

From my point of view, the Haitian images in Susan’s essay “Hegel and Haiti,”
the images in Dreamworld and Catastrophe, the images in Tim Clark’s book, the
images in Warburg’s Mnemosyne, and the images in Schefer’s books are all dif-
ferent cases. At the moment I don’t see any of them as models for writing about
contemporary global art, for two reasons: first because in each case I think nar-
rative does dominate, even in Warburg; and second because the art world has an
infinite capacity to dilute serious experiments into impressionistic pastiches.10
shelly errington: If I may go back to the idea of breaking the vase—

james elkins: Michael introduced that metaphor, of art history as a beautiful vase that
now lies broken, in fragments—
shelly errington: One of the reasons that I like the idea of shards is that “we” are
shards among others. We can no longer count on just one whole totalizing story
like the beautiful vase of traditional art history that could contain everything
and that will be the answer to everything, but there are lots of bits and pieces
that don’t cohere. My question is: how do you use these bits and pieces without
gluing them together to a mosaic of the whole, reconstituting them as another
vase with another shape and design, but still an all-comprehensive story?
My favorite globalization theorists address this issue, of how to make a big and
even global story without making it totalizing or linear. One is my colleague Anna
Tsing, whose ethnographic work was mainly in Borneo. She published a book
called Friction, which is really about globalization, and her idea was to let the struc-
tural order of these stories and interviews emerge from their undisturbed multiplic-
ity. I told her before it was published she might have called it “Traction,” because
it is about how ideas, often misunderstood, land in alien places and get traction
in these new contexts—they stick and produce something new. To her question of
how we can engage in an ethnography of global connections, she talks about grasp-
ing the productive moments of misunderstanding, both in what we narrate and in
how we understand what’s going on. In other words, she has a way of putting these
experiences together not into a totalizing and bounded whole but in a way that
leaves them contingently connected and open. There’s breathing space, and even if
her story is big and comprehensive, it is anything but inexorable.11
susan buck-morss: Of course, you do have to know the canon, otherwise you are
dominated by it without knowing it—there is no way around that, no shortcut.
There would not be the disciplines as they are today without the neo-Kantian

Schefer, The Deluge, the Plague, translated by
Tom Conley (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1995).
10. Saying narrative dominates in Mnemo-
syne is saying that the reception of Warburg is
a series of texts. Even Georges Didi-Huberman’s
interventions are textual (although at the time
of writing, fall 2007, he is said to be at work
on a purely visual response). There is virtually
no visual criticism or visual history. Around
2003–4, the Irish art magazine Circa staged an
experiment in visual criticism, inviting anyone
to review an exhibition with an image instead
of a text. Almost no one volunteered. All this is
to say, in a telegraphic fashion, that the issues
raised here are peculiar to Buck-Morss’s texts,
and misused as potential models for art writing.
11. See Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An
Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2005).
82 art and globalization

discussions in the late nineteenth century as to what “science” was, or what

constituted “the humanities”—these were the debates at the moment when the
modern disciplines in European universities were founded, and they influenced
studies in and on the colonies as well. It is important to know about them
because they are presumed as given by subsequent knowledge. Our disciplines
were constructed on the premise that history is developmental in a Hegelian
sense. Hegel remains important because his thinking permeates the epistemo-
logical structures of our thought.
zhivka valiavicharska: Not to speak of his political effect, from Lenin to Fanon, to
his influence on a lot of contemporary radical philosophy.
michele greet: Western philosophy is always referring back to its own history. It is
an enclosed system. How relevant is this intense knowledge of Western intel-
lectual history to the formation of global theory of art history? Perhaps we could
reframe this intellectual history comparatively, in a way that would allow us to
understand Western ideas in dialogue with Chinese, African, or Latin American
intellectual traditions. We really seem to be privileging certain intellectual histo-
ries in this discussion and excluding dialogue with other sources.
harry harootunian: This is an admirable idea—the Japanese have spent an awful lot
of time doing exactly that. There are writers that are in fact incredibly literate
philosophically—they read Kant and Hegel, some of them actually studied with
Heidegger in the 1920s and 1930s. They thought there was a dialogue, but it was
only a one-way dialogue. There was both a total lack of understanding—because
people didn’t read Japanese in the first place—and a kind of distancing on the
part of Western philosophers. Take a statement like the one Husserl made in the
1930s when he asserted that only the West knew philosophy. A statement like
this at this moment of global economic, political, and cultural crises forecloses
any possibility for discussion—
michele greet: I don’t mean discounting Western philosophy, but rather reframing it—

harry harootunian: I understand, and it needs to be staged now. It seems that any
global project, whether it is art-historical, historical, or political, would need to
struggle to put together some kind of stage or a form where these kinds of dis-
cussions can be imagined and go on.
james elkins: I agree. But I think we are missing two crucial things here. First, the art
world already does this—it produces a myriad of promiscuous mixtures of refer-
ences—and the result is writing that can appear ephemeral, labile, impression-
istic, opportunistic, inessential. Second, in academic writing there are political
obstacles to this kind of mixture: a young scholar cannot get a job at a major
university by explaining Renaissance altarpieces in terms of Peruvian huacas.
And a senior scholar who does that is likely to be ignored because her narrative
will be idiosyncratic—it won’t speak to an engaged interpretive community.
83 postcolonial narratives

suzana milevska: When we were talking about temporalities, I kept thinking about the
Russian philosopher Pavel Florensky, who, in his work Iconostasis, offers a really
unique inverse conception of time, which he grasps in the inverse perspective of
the Byzantine medieval iconographic tradition but also through experimental
psychology of dreams.12 In addition to the issue of translation, these concepts
come with all this baggage of different cultural conceptualization of time where-
in cause-effect relation may be inversed both in space and time and therefore
such mystical temporality is difficult to be communicated.
darby english: As Shigemi said in his seminar, some translations produce losses.13 I
was wondering if we can look at this loss as something that can be productive
rather than as a threat. Perhaps if we think about how we respond to that loss,
when we see in the loss an opportunity to attempt a recuperation, to accept the
disorientation Susan is talking about and see where it leads.
zhivka valiavicharska: I would also caution against foreclosures, and return to the
idea of how imagining certain possibilities, rather than losses, within our given
global conditions becomes a politically enabling practice. Benjamin has an essay
on translation, where he focuses on the “translatability” of the work as its highest
dimension, and understands translation not as a loss, but rather as a way of en-
richment—rather than looking at how a certain meaning is lost, he looks at how
the language it is translated from “expands.”14 So translation has possibilities for
reconciliation and it is also a deeply ethical, if not explicitly political, practice.
In a very similar way, postcolonial thinkers such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o have put
forward a certain notion of humanism in the incommensurability of languages
and the experiences they contain. But in their accounts, these incommensura-
bilities also harbor a radical possibility within: that of their communicability.15
susan buck-morss: If cultural languages are incommensurate, what is said in these lan-
guages at times converges despite their differences. When experiences are new,
language needs to be stretched to articulate it. So the translation is not only
across discrete languages, but within every cultural language, over time. And
the need to translate local idioms, local traditions, into a global context is just
such a new experience. Not all of our experiences are understandable in terms of
identifiable cultures. Experience can cause cultural languages to be pushed to the
breaking point. Between and beneath cultural languages, subterranean solidari-
ties among people takes form. It is this process, threatening to existing cultures,
that makes human progress possible in history.

12. Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis, translated
by Donald Sheehan and Olga Andrejev (Crest-
wood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996).
13. See Section 2 of the Seminars.
14. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the
Translator,” in Illuminations, edited by Hannah
Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn (New York:
Schocken Books, 1968), 75–82.
15. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the
Mind: The Politics of Language in African
Literature (London: James Currey; Nairobi: EAEP;
Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1986); Moving
the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms
(London: James Currey; Nairobi: EAEP; Ports-
mouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1993).
 7. n e o l i b e r a l i s m

The passages in this section are from two seminars led by Zhiva Valiavicharska, cen-
tered on different definitions of globalization and neoliberalism, and followed by
a reading of Foucault’s work on governmentality and neoliberalism, together with
several key critical analyses coming out of his thought.1
Starting points for discussion were recent texts from the political theory and po-
litical economy of globalization, including Hardt and Negri’s Empire, David Har-
vey’s Limits to Capital and The New Imperialism, and Gillian Hart’s work on the
ethnography of development. Critical geographers understand emerging global and
local geographies as social formations, a result of the development of transnational
material relations. The uneven development of transnational capitalism, they say, is
a historically contested process contingent upon social, cultural, and political contexts,
forming uneven geographies in which various forms of power relations and material
inequalities are manifested and spatialized. Our goal was to join materialist criti-
cal approaches to understanding how the growing contemporary “international” art
production and its sites of display participate in transnational capitalist regimes, as
well as to interrogate how dynamics of material power are obliterated in conveniently
used categories such as “global” and “local.” 2
In relation to Foucault, we tried to find ways to reconceptualize newly emerging
cultural institutions and practices as a functional element of neoliberal governance.
We asked how the arguments in these theoretical accounts open or foreclose ways in
which we can rethink global configurations of contemporary art production and dis-
play; how we can contribute to reformulating current understandings of the relation-
ship culture-economy; and how certain instrumental uses of art relate to neoliberal
subject formations.

pamela lee: The one mention of art in Empire comes as late as page 382, where there is a
brief nod made towards modern art’s relationship to the Cold War and cultural
practice: the reference is, of course, Serge Guilbaut. It’s an important reference
because when we’re confronting a theory of the Spectacle—which underwrites

1. For these seminars we read the following:
Michel Foucault, “Governmentality” in Power,
edited by James Faubion (New York: New Press,
2000), 201–22; Foucault, “Security, Territory,
Population” and “The Birth of Biopolitics,” in
Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (New York: The
New Press, 1997), 67–71 and 73–79; Thomas
Lemke, “‘The Birth of Biopolitics’: Michel Fou-
cault’s Lecture at College de France on Neolib-
eral Governmentality,” Economy and Society 30
(2001): 190–207; Wendy Brown, “Neoliberalism
and the End of Liberal Democracy,” in Edge-
work: Critical Essays in Knowledge and Politics
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005),
37–59; Tony Bennett, “Acting on the Social: Art,
Culture, and Government,” American Behavioral
Scientist 43 (2000): 1412–28; James Ferguson
and Akhil Gupta, “Spatializing States: Toward
an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality,”
American Ethnologist 29 (2002): 981–1002.
2. The readings we had done in advance of
these discussions included David Harvey, The
Limits to Capital (London: Verso, 1999), chap.
13, 413–45; Harvey, “The New Imperial Chal-
86 art and globalization

a lot of what Hardt and Negri do—there is an absolute convergence between

the aesthetic and the economic: the fact that we live in a world where capital is
aestheticized to the point where it’s image. This is something that Stuart Hall
also broaches in his writing on globalization, if in an inevitably different register
than Hardt and Negri. So if you want to take that as a general starting point for
how so much social and political theory figures into art-historical reconceptual-
izations of practice—and I don’t just mean in terms of contemporary art—then
we begin to open on to far greater issues, including the art market, and will
inevitably have to draw from methodologies from the fields of sociology, anthro-
pology, and so on. To my thinking, it is crucial that we as art historians engage in
these issues, and certainly so if we are thinking about space as a term which we
seem to have, especially after David Summers, limited to a Panofskian purview.
I am interested in how we can produce a history of art that is somehow critical
about its own relationship to the categories it uses—a history of art which is a bit
more self-reflexive about its relation to the categories of the economic and the
aesthetic where globalization is at issue.
zhivka valiavicharska: I really support your idea of rewriting art-historical and art-
critical concepts of space from a materialist perspective, especially when we are
dealing with the globalization of labor and production. I was even hoping to
complement our emphasis on temporalities and histories, which comes out in
the work of Harry Harootunian, Fredric Jameson, and Susan Buck-Morss, to
some approaches coming out of critical space studies. Much of critical geogra-
phy of globalization examines, first, how the transnationalizing forces of produc-
tion—meaning labor—constitute global geographies and spaces; and second,
how material inequalities themselves come into existence through these geo-
graphical differentiations. Perhaps one way to go is to return to the practice of
art, its sites of display, and its discourses as material practices, to think of them
from the perspective of production that generates and absorbs surplus.
suzana milevska: I cannot think of a better example of these phenomena than of the
“biennialization” of contemporary art and its take on expansion of capital and
its markets, the unequal exchange of profit and the accumulation by dispossession
in global terms, to apply David Harvey’s concerns. Many paradoxes take place
under the label of globalization and need to expand and disperse the art coming
from non-Western art scenes. The most troubling and perverse example is no
doubt Tirana Biennial: its creation for “beneficial” reasons by Giancarlo Politi,
the owner of the renown art magazine Flash Art. His investment in Tirana Bien-
nial in 2001 (he tried to launch a Tirana Biennial, still under the same name, in
Prague, but had to call it the Prague Biennial, a name he succeeded in copyright-

lenge,” in The New Imperial Challenge: Socialist
Register 2004, edited by Leo Panitch and Colin
Leys (London: Merlin Press, 2004); Gillian Hart,
“Geography and Development: Developments
Beyond Neoliberalism? Power, Culture, Political
Economy,” Progress in Human Geography 26
(2002): 812–22; Hart, “Geography and Develop-
ment: Critical Ethnographies,” Progress in
Human Geography 28 (2004): 91–100; and Hart,
“Denaturalizing Dispossession: Critical Ethnog-
raphy in the Age of Resurgent Imperialism,”
Antipode 38 (2006): 978–1004.
87 neoliberalism

ing) was carefully premeditated and calculated. Not only was he counting on the
lower prices of local artworks that he purchased for his collection and museum
in Torino but he also acquired lot of works by Western artists who were tricked
into exhibiting for free, thinking of their participation in the Tirana Biennial as
part of a mission to help the miserable art scene and the troubled political situ-
ation in Albania.
isla leaver-yap: A key question to think about would be how biennales such as Docu-
menta and Venice, but also the ones that are founded in cities in decline or in
economic crisis, or in cities that want to establish themselves as international
hubs, such as Johannesburg—how they all begin to feed into a kind of political-
economic order that Hardt and Negri have termed Empire.
shelly errington: In this context it’s hard not to think about David Harvey’s article
about a crisis occuring in capitalism when simply too much capital is accumulat-
ing at the top of the system. Buying art is a solution for what to do with it. Of
course, it was ever thus—think of the Dutch and English in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. We’re in another phase like that, or like with the robber
barons in the late nineteenth century being great art collectors. Right now there
is just too much money at the top of the system and of course not just the very
top—so a lot of people who are not just the J. P. Morgans of the world are mad
for buying art as well as other things that have no use-value. It’s too boring to put
it into a savings account or even the stock market. Consuming art is more fun.
pamela lee: I have to say that I found Harvey immensely compelling, despite the total-
izing explanation that he ultimately offers. But I also think that, in terms of a
certain crude Marxist historiography, relationships between culture and the eco-
nomic are invariably based on reflection, the sense that culture is always seen as
epiphenomenal to material relations. The best work, of course, goes beyond that.
zhivka valiavicharska: It is absolutely crucial that we revisit connections between
the cultural and the economic in new ways. And it is actually Jameson who
first pointed to the need to reformulate relations between categories: there is an
identity between the cultural and the economic, he noted, and this is a crucial
aspect of postmodernity. He doesn’t go much further than this, but what this
means for me is that cultural practice is no longer a superstructure derivative
of economic relations, a field of reflections, representations that disguise and
mystify a material reality—as it appears in a long tradition of Marxist thinkers
who have taken seriously the notion of ideology from Marx’s early work. Nor do
the material and cultural realms constitute each other dialectically, as in Gram-
scian cultural studies and some postcolonial theory, where culture is redefined in
politically enabling ways. Culture, in the work of Amilcar Cabral, for example,
acquires an agentic dimension, a quasimaterial quality, capable of exerting its
own force upon material realities. We read Fred Jameson arguing that the free
market together with the commodity and labor regimes have to be understood
88 art and globalization

not only as economic categories but also as a set of cultural values practiced
directly through activities such as labor. And vice versa: art and culture have the
ability to transport political and economic mechanisms of capital—they are an
immediate and functional aspect of the economy.3 But we are in need of more
rigorous formulations of these new relations. I would even hesitate to call them
relations; perhaps thinking in terms of new symbioses would be more appropri-
ate. For me, what is crucially absent is the question of the subject: how are new
globally articulated subjects formed through cultural practice?
Recently, with critical discourses on neoliberalism and governmentality
coming out of Foucault’s work, distinctions between the economic and the po-
litical—and more specifically the liberal claim that they constitute autonomous
realms—have been under critical scrutiny. Much in the same way, in order to
see how the arts take part in the realities of transnational capitalist relations and
their everyday practices, we need to revisit some old theoretical discussions in
radically new ways. Perhaps we need to dispense with these distinct categories
altogether—even in their most rigorous dialectical configurations—for they no
longer have analytical force. Jameson’s dialectical model is very invested in pre-
serving the integrity of the cultural and the economic, but in a sense these have
become discursive tropes that have a limited conceptual value. Just to follow
up on Suzana’s concerns, there are new cultural practices that have emerged in
service of neoliberal reforms: these function under concepts such as “cultural
capital,” “cultural policy,” “social capital,” and so on. It would be a task of fu-
ture scholarship to examine empirically how they are being practiced, how they
function to enable certain economic reforms, what their rationalities are, what
kinds of mechanisms they employ to produce not only political institutions and
economic effects, but also subjects and subjective experiences.
suzana milevska: The idea of creative industries, for example, which has been promot-
ed by Great Britain in the last five years, is in need of serious critical examination
in terms of economic reforms. There are entire institutions, even departments,
which started programs in creative industries in Britain, thus promoting the idea
that culture and creative activities such as graphic design, architecture, advertis-
ing, fashion design, or entertaining software can also be a basis for establishing
and maintaining lucrative businesses, new jobs, and GDP increase. However,
the idea of creative industry is a kind of neocolonialism—
zhivka valiavicharska: —or neoliberalism perhaps—

suzana milevska: Yes, of course, when taking into account that its purpose is even
more pragmatic in the global context: it is imposed on different regions of the
world and aims to change complete economic systems. A good example is Co-
lombia, where there is a great infusion of British money to support traditional

3. Fredric Jameson, “Notes on Globalization Masao Miyoshi (Durham: Duke University Press,
as a Philosophical Issue,” in The Cultures of 1998), 54–77.
Globalization, edited by Fredric Jameson and
89 neoliberalism

arts and crafts or music. On the one hand it boosts the diverse local communi-
ties’ economic income, but on the other hand it is difficult to predict what it
means in global economic profit turnover. We need to look at these phenomena
closely in order to understand how cultural capital becomes real capital, how this
transformation functions simultaneously on the local and global levels.4 Only
then can we understand the reciprocal relation between the two levels and why
creative industries became the new ideology of British Labour.
shelly errington: That’s a good idea, and it’s the opposite of the Marxist one of
overaccumulating capital then prompting people to convert it to art, or cultural
capital if you will. What you’re pointing out is that you can also commodify,
through tourism and marketing devices, culture and crafts, turning those cul-
tural forms into things that can produce economic capital.
shigemi inaga: It is crucial to analyze the notion of cultural capital as different from the
traditional economic notions of capital. Lee Eo-ryeong (1934–), the first Korean
minister of culture, is the person who initiated drastic change in Korean society by
way of information technology in the last ten years. He is saying that “possession”
is no longer equated with capital, and cultural capital cannot be reduced to eco-
nomic capital. His paradigm is quite different from the classical notion of capital.
According to him, mobile phones are the key. Previously the possession of the
telephone was a status symbol and represented by itself a cultural capital. The logic
of “primitive accumulation” was still intact. But who possesses the mobile phone
in which place is no longer essential in the ubiquitous environment. Instead, who
is connected to whom has become the capital interest.5 Thus, interconnectedness
would replace the old notion of capital possession, and in this sense, the idea
of the spectacle—in the sense of Guy Debord—would be out of date because
spectacle consists of someone who possesses capital and the audience who gathers
together around this centralized capital. With the interconnectedness, in contrast,
there is no center anymore. One of the consequences of Lee’s paradigm shift is
visible in the advertisement industry. A tremendous number of advertisements
are created with enormous capital investment. They are massively diffused, but
to whom do they belong? Within two weeks, most of them disappear. To prevent
this massive loss of cultural capital, Korean society constructed the public online
database covering the total number of advertisements and made it accessible to the
public free of charge. Advertisements are not regarded as the exclusive possession
of the copyright holders or diffusing agencies, but they are recognized as a com-
mon cultural capital from which the whole nation should benefit.
Here is a radical redefinition: cultural capital is not something to be pos-
sessed according to the logic of the capitalist market but something to be cir-
culated in the open network, which not only guarantees but also multiples its
value, and people gain profit from it.

4. Gerald Raunig, “Creative Industries and 5. Lee Eo-ryeong, Janken Bunmei Ron (To-
Mass Deception,” Framework—Surplus of the kyo: Shinchô-sha, 2006) (in Japanese).
Arts, no. 6 (January 2007): 8–13.
90 art and globalization

pamela lee: I think what is original about the current situation and one of the most
important questions that we need to pursue when approaching the work on
globalization from the social sciences and political philosophy would be the
question of representation—what do we do with representation. And I think
this is where Jameson might again provide something helpful to us, in his early
accounts of postmodernism. There, it seemed to me, he was working much more
critically with the theories of representation and the limits of thinking in terms
of representation—
keith moxey: In terms of Hardt and Negri: who is representing whom? We are allegedly
being represented by something that exceeds our capacity to understand. What
is the nature of the concept of representation in the order that they capture?
pamela lee: Yes, these are the questions that need to be asked. And if we are thinking
about contemporary art, one has to take that problem seriously as it applies to
the stock, iconographic possibilities that are trotted out to map globalization as
visual phenomena. Those iconographic conventions can only fail to represent a
term—“globalization”—about which there is next to no consensus in either the
humanities or social sciences. Not that any of us ever imagined some perfect
adequation existed between iconography and object, but I worry that we risk rei-
fying our topic when we place too much faith in representation as such. Where,
for instance, are the readings that take up the materialist dimensions of artistic
production? If this is an epoch in process, just how do we account for that
process in our own work as critics and historians? For me, the great and inspir-
ing lesson of Empire is ultimately that of immanent cause and the biopolitical
mode of production continuous with this model of causality. It’s a controversial
notion, immanent cause, because it’s inevitably bound up in debates around
the possibility or impossibility of an “outside”; but at least it presses us to think
critically about production. And if we are indeed immanent to that thing called
“globalization,” then it seems premature that we restrict our analyses to represen-
tation, which implies some degree of critical distance from our object of study.
zhivka valiavicharska: Of course, and the concept of representation becomes espe-
cially problematic when we begin thinking of the art or visual object in terms
of its agency—as something that has formative power, acts upon us, produces
us as subjects, affects our self-understanding, and so on. Much of that work has
been done by poststructuralist visual theory and anthropological approaches to
the visual object—but also methodologically, to look at the work not as some
reified and self-sufficient object, but to focus on how these objects enable and
reproduce human relations. In other words, to understand how these objects
become agents in historical change means to understand how they participate in
human interactions, to see them in their interconnectedness and in their func-
tion of mediating relations of power. I am thinking of Lukacs’s elaboration of
Marx’s dialectical method as a mode of historical inquiry: it’s a notion of history
91 neoliberalism

which, rather than ordering a rigid causality out of events and objects with fixed
and immutable nature, focuses on the constantly changing relations of humans
that produce these objects. Objects and events become derivative of historically
constituted relations, rather than vice versa. I am reminded of that because you
also seem to be suggesting a methodological approach where objects and events
never exist outside of the subject—an emphasis on the process would not posit
a reified subject but a subject always open to enunciative possibilities. I am won-
dering how this mode of historical interrogation might give us a useful way of
rethinking discourses of representation as they persist in the art disciplines.
bhaskar mukhopadhyay: If I may go back to the question of neoliberalism and its
cultural dimensions: recent empirical research, which makes use of Foucault’s
work on governmentality, is crucial in understanding how neoliberalism works,
and I would be curious to see how, in this era of internationalization of art, we
can think of art itself as a strategy of normalization or governance.
susan buck-morss: It’s a wonderful question, and, absolutely, there is no more influen-
tial institution for policing the imagination than the art world. The issue is not
only who is funding the art world, whether it is private or public, governmental
or nongovernmental. The art world is the space in which some of the most inno-
vative practitioners of visual culture, those with the most creative potential, are
contained and managed. At the same time, the art world produces art consumers
by focusing its attention on the specific objects that produce value by attracting
an audience.
zhivka valiavicharska: In other words, the question of how art and culture have
become an agent and an instrument of social transformation projects with neo-
liberal agendas. For example, the concept of cultural policy—
bhaskar mukhopadhyay: Which is all over Europe and in parts of Southeast Asia and
Latin America, instrumentalizing the entire domain of civil society6—
zhivka valiavicharska: Yes, for example, I have been doing research on European
funding in the sphere of contemporary arts and culture in some postsocialist
countries in southeastern Europe. This funding comes with very clear politico-
economic agendas and enhances the neoliberalization of these countries. Now
we implement “cultural policies” and draft “strategies for culture” that have an
openly instrumental approach. I am particularly interested in the rationality of
these projects and how successful they are in inserting new subjects.
angela miller: Isn’t the question of subjective formation really prior to the question of
cultural policy and art, insofar as it becomes a reflection of, or an embodiment
of, a certain kind of political subjectivity?

6. George Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture:

Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2003).
92 art and globalization

zhivka valiavicharska: Can’t subject formation happen through cultural and artistic
self-realization, rather than being prior to it?
angela miller: A contrary notion of society, and subject formation, as prior to the state
is very deep-seated in American art history; it is part of the same intellectual
climate that has largely ignored class formation or other social determinants of
consciousness. There is a great deal of resistance to the idea that objective social
structures produce, rather than project or embody, the will of the individual
subject. Foucault’s impact on cultural studies has been enormous, but the idea
persists that somehow creative agency is primary.
zhivka valiavicharska: I think you are absolutely right. Rather than asking how the
arts and culture express a preexisting subject, it would be more interesting to
examine how a certain subjectivity comes into being through artistic practice.
And further, how cultural self-realization at some point in time becomes an
instrument of the modern state—an instrument of governmental conduct—to
produce particular subjective effects and experiences.
Foucault’s almost exclusive emphasis on the biopolitical strategies of gov-
ernmental power may be somewhat limiting when it comes to our problems of
culture. His “population” is almost exclusively a biological category: it governs
life, health, and death to produce economically efficient masses. It forecloses an
inquiry into the question how neoliberalism instrumentalizes the ethical val-
ues of entire groups of people towards rational-economic ends—what he has
called “the political technology of the individuals” elsewhere.7 In other words,
the question would be how the moral, cultural, and ethical relationships be-
tween individuals and their self-understanding turn into an explicit concern and
a governing method of state conduct, a method of achieving an economically
productive citizenry. That would be very different from framing these questions
in terms of ideology.
shelly errington: Don’t you think it is through promoting consumption? I mean, no
one believes the trajectory of history is moving in a good direction, as Europeans
did a century ago and in fact until the late twentieth century with the myths
of modernization or development. The new myth that is taking over is the so-
called free market and the subjectivities it produces and depends on—the self-
activating entrepreneurial consumer, who is completely governable because the
purpose of life is to consume, and the life story is the story of what you consume
and when, and your tastes. Wendy Brown’s article, which I thought was ex-
tremely clear and persuasive, gives a way to understand how the state “governs”
by creating subjects who are consumers above all.
thomas dacosta kaufmann: How does this differ from the period of Louis XIV, where
you have most directly the arts being used as an element of state expression?

7. Foucault, “The Political Technology of

Individuals,” in Power, 404.
93 neoliberalism

harry harootunian: There is a real qualitative difference between the time of Louis
XIV and what Foucault is talking about: when Foucault concentrates on the
population, he is really talking about mass society—it is not the same thing as
seventeenth-century France; he is dealing with massive forms of differentiation
and the entire division of labor.
susan buck-morss: But today people refer to the “demassification” of society. Audi-
ences have become fragmented, diminishing the effectiveness of any remaining
public sphere. The art world is one such fragmented audience, a niche market
for selling not so much art as the promise of cultural belonging on new, global
terms.
bhaskar mukhopadhyay: What you had during the Sun King’s reign was royal patron-
age; the state more or less coincided with the royal domain.8 It was only after
the Enlightenment that something called “society” clearly emerged with a will
to govern which began to shape what we nowadays would call “public opin-
ion.” The German historian of ideas Koselleck has clearly analyzed what really
changed between absolutism and Enlightenment: the emergence of civil society
as an almost autonomous domain which has a very precarious relationship with
political society.9
What has happened since the 1980s (the time when Thatcher and Reagan
came to power) is that the institution of the (civil) society as something in be-
tween the state and the family has collapsed. Thatcher went to the extent of
proclaiming the death of the social when she said that there’s no such thing as
society, there are only families and the state.
susan buck-morss: I don’t think we can avoid the distinction between Enlightenment
liberalism and contemporary neoliberalism. This is a historical question. What
we describe as neoliberalism is post-Thatcher, post-Reagan, post-Soviet, which
is to say that ours is not the same world that even Foucault described. There is
a huge difference, and a real problem in conflating the neoliberal agenda with
Enlightenment liberalism, much less anything that went before. But Foucault
remains useful in helping us understand where to locate these neoliberal prac-
tices when the state is no longer an adequate space for considering problems
of power. The governmentality of the 1970s, when Foucault was writing, still
presumed the social welfare state that has now been significantly dismantled.
Sarkozy’s neoliberal liberalism, its so-called reforms of the state, are not a phe-
nomenon of the 1970s.
zhivka valiavicharska: In other words, we have the classic neoliberal move of state
withdrawal from social responsibility, and placing that social responsibility onto
individuals or groups—we see that formulated in his lectures on biopower. It is
also important to note how this neoliberal withdrawal happens through tech-

8. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two 9. Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis:
Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern
(1957; Princeton: Princeton University Press, Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988).
1997).
94 art and globalization

niques of “self-empowerment”; these reforms succeed by “empowering” the sub-

jects they produce: you read policy statements and they always aim to give you
the means for your own self-control, self-empowerment, self-knowledge, and self-
sustenance. This is why these projects always require the active and willful partici-
pation of these subjects; in other words, the human values and human behavior
neoliberal projects prescribe have to give the opportunity for these subjects’ self-
realization; they provide a terrain for their self-constitution. The question is how
this is happening through the arts as well, which are some of the most powerful
means for crafting social and political values. For example, this self-realization
aspect is key when you see an openly neoliberal organization such as the Balkan
Trust for Democracy, for example, which commissions large-scale art and theater
projects on peace and reconciliation from artists and intellectuals from the Balkan
countries who are genuinely concerned about peace in the region.
keith moxey: I would like to respond to this point: what about the imagination? Surely
it is the imagination that prevents us from distinguishing governmentality from
the social—because we can’t really pull them apart. If that is the case, then the
social imagination becomes a really important issue. I am referring to Arjun
Appadurai’s work on globalization, which argues that it is not the economy but
rather the imagination around which social arrangements revolve. If the imagi-
nation is responsible for the incorporation of what seem to be external ideas, the
appropriation of values, for example, then presumably those ideas and values can
also be turned on their head, as they apparently were in the Polish experience—
there are possibilities for liberation here.
Foucault had this notion of power as reversible, and we have to think about
his notion of governmentality as potentially containing possibilities for reversal
within itself.
Perhaps as a footnote, I would like to bring García Canclini back into the
discussion. He says that “commodities are good to think with,” that the realm
of consumption is just as important as that of production in trying to under-
stand the social. This sounds improbable and utopian, but it gestures toward the
power of the imagination. Commodities, key elements in Marx’s understanding
of how capitalist mystification happens, are clearly products of the imagination,
and what we do with them is way more complex than a Marxist analysis of pro-
duction allows us to imagine.
susan buck-morss: This is important in relation to the society of the spectacle, or the
spectacle that produces the social—it is not exactly an ideology; there is some-
thing else on the spectacle side of the mirror. There is a play of mirrors going on
now, where something seems to be happening in public space. It is so mediated
and constructed—governmentality seems to be operating at a little bit of a dis-
tance—you use statistics and govern masses, you produce policies, but it’s not
face to face, there is not this directness as in the spectacle, where so much power
95 neoliberalism

is staged. I am not talking about the old ideology but something different where
people act in this space and take themselves seriously in the logic of that space,
where the self-fabrication of the subject happens—
joyce brodsky: —A perfect example would be the recently installed piece by Anish
Kapoor in Millennium Park a few blocks away from here.10 Because people’s
actions are reflected, there is a lot of movement going on, but it’s totally cir-
cumscribed by the reflective material of this gigantic piece. There is a sense of an
experience of total freedom that is giving you the power to play and allows you
to see yourself as a part of this situation as if you were fully interactive. However,
you cannot really change the “situation” because it is set up for you, everyone is
interactive in exactly the same ways—
susan buck-morss: Isn’t that Zhivka’s point? Neoliberalism claims to roll back state in-
tervention, leaving the field of the social open to private interests by dismantling
the public sphere, but its cultural policies provide all kinds of new techniques for
governing and controlling the visual field and shaping the subjectivity of view-
ers. There is a difference between commodity consumers—subjects shaped by
weekend trips to the mall—and “consumers” of art, most of whom are viewers
rather than buyers.
Consumers of art are engaged in the formation of a different kind of commu-
nity, including the one produced internationally by art-world NGOs. Art-world
participants are connoisseurs, in the know, international travelers, members of a
global elite, witnesses of visual breakthroughs—all this is more important than
owning the art. Ownership is in fact too private a goal. The excitement of the
art world is that acquiring insider knowledge allows initiation into a privileged
group, where nationality and race are of decreasing importance and gender and
sexual preferences are wide open. Yet the price to pay is the policing of imagina-
tion and self-expression, which in modernity once provided a means of cultural
resistance (for bohemians, Surrealists, hippies, dropouts, and refuseniks of all
persuasions). Artists today are businesspeople with managers, agents, and high-
tech labs. Artists are commercial performers rather than cultural resisters, and
their audiences are a well-heeled, global jet set, who practice deterritorialized
belonging on the basis of exclusive access to what has value. Together artists and
their publics are unwitting collaborators in shutting down possibilities for es-
cape from neoliberalism’s self-proclaimed freedom, which is in fact highly regu-
lated—all the while they are supposed to be having fun.
But there is a growing fatigue with this kind of culture. The global circuit
of biennales is so well traveled it no longer can give the illusion of being on the
cutting edge of free expression. The whole experience has become predictable,
and artists working in local contexts, which neoliberal policies imagine as satel-
lites of the global art world, are eager for an alternative. Keith’s optimism has
merit—if somehow the entire apparatus of the art world can be turned inside

10. Anish Kapoor, Cloud Gate, 2004, Mil-

lenium Park, Chicago.
96 art and globalization

out. It is hard to imagine . . . but that is just the point. Imagination freed from
the cynicism and defeatism of neoliberal hegemony is precisely what is at stake
in this discussion.
 8. f o u r f a i l u r e s o f t h e s e m i n a r s

This section and the last are from the five-hour closing roundtable. Here James Elkins
introduces four themes that remained unresolved during the week of seminars: (1) the
slightly suspicious ease we experienced in talking about contemporary art, as opposed
to the difficulty of talking about history and our place in it; (2) contemporary art
practices that are excluded by the international art market; (3) whether or not there
are emergent histories of art that are structurally different from the one developed
in North America and western Europe; and (4) the fact that most of the week of
seminars had been devoted to finding oppositional concepts and practices, instead of
understanding the current shape of the market.

james elkins: Welcome, everyone. Well, by my count we have finished thirty hours of
conversations. Zhivka and I have decided to divide this conversation into two
parts. First I will introduce issues that pertain to the contemporary art world,
and then Zhivka will give an account of a concept that has haunted our discus-
sions during the week.
I said at the opening roundtable that I wanted to make life more difficult
for people who write about contemporary international art, and I would like to
propose four themes that I think we have not adequately conceptualized.
The first has to do with the ease or pleasure of talking about contemporary
art. At several points during the week, we were struggling to find new ways to
think about the concepts that drive talk about the “global” in art-historical and
art-critical discourses. When we talked about our relation to history (the history
of the discipline of art history, universal histories before modernism, the histo-
ries of national identities in art), it was sometimes difficult to make headway.
But when we turned to contemporary issues, our conversation went much faster.
Everyone had lots to say. There is something very easy about nationalism and
internationalism in contemporary art: that’s not to say anyone solves or resolves
anything, but that concepts can be deployed with minimal resistance. We talked
freely and quickly about capitalism, globalism, the biennale culture, national
traits of artists, and many other things. Too freely. I was glad when we turned
back to the past, and to other disciplines, and got bogged down. I was most
happy when one of the Fellows said, during a break, that he liked this event be-
cause, as he put it, “Normally when I go to conferences I understand everything.
Here I don’t.”
The second is what remains invisible to the global art market. A useful way
to approach this is to think of a map of places and practices that participate in
98 art and globalization

the global art market. In this cartographic metaphor the areas that do not par-
ticipate are like the parts labeled terra incognita on some famous old maps. Ac-
cording to the self-enclosed euphoria of the global art market, there may be such
places (art practices) that are not yet known, and in fact it’s one of the art world’s
principal hopes that there are still such places. (Another hope is that there might
be oppositional spaces within the terra cognita, which can critique it, in part,
from within—but that leads to my fifth point, which I’ll defer to the end.)
I want to point instead to the enormous regions of art practice that are per-
fectly well known to the global art world, but excluded: I mean the many kinds
of sincere, nonironic practices, from old-barn watercolors to midcentury ges-
tural abstraction. They would be the oceans in my metaphor. I’ve already men-
tioned Howard Behrens, the cruise-ship palette-knife painter. Actually, some
of the richest artists in the world work on cruise ships, as an article in the Wall
Street Journal demonstrated. Here’s another example: Ipek Duden, an art histo-
rian in Istanbul, told me once that the Istanbul Biennial has “no effect” on the
art market in Istanbul. “Once it leaves,” she said, “the galleries have to go back
to what they can actually sell,” which is principally painting.1 Susan Buck-Morss
and I have both recently made trips to Central Asia—they were entirely separate
trips, but to some degree I think they shared a motivation. As Susan said, she
wanted to visit the place where the map folds.
susan buck-morss: Where our map folds, or mine did, at least, when I was in school.
But this is precisely the geographical area of the Silk Road, a trade route that
long before the rise of the West connected the world economically and culturally
and spread the influence of Islamic culture and higher learning from the Niger
to China.
james elkins: One of the things I found in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, and to a lesser
extent in Kazakhstan, is that contemporary artists feel more isolated now than
they did under the Soviet regime. An artist in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, told me
that once he could go to Moscow for forty rubles; now it costs four hundred
dollars, and he can’t afford it. In some communities, there is less access to the
Internet than before. In Almata, Kazakhstan, Amandos Akanayev, a very well-
traveled artist, universally known in art circles there, said that when he teaches
art in Kazakh (as opposed to in Russian), his students do not recognize names
like Salvador Dalí or Ilya Repin. Artists and students like those are already well
outside the discourse we have been developing about neoliberalism: not merely
because they haven’t read Hart or Harvey, but because they are not interested in
oppositional spaces or the articulations of governmentality. I’m afraid it is one
of the signal failures of this event, but also of academic discourse generally, that
we have left them out.
I want to register the fact that most of the art practice around the world
remains disconnected from the global art scene: most art would not be viable

1. Conversation, March 2006. I thank Rana

Ozturk for introducing me to Ipek.
99 four failures of the seminars

in biennales—including Akanayev’s. He paints rainbow-colored animals and

nudes with three-dimensional buttocks, sculpted from papier-mâché: they just
wouldn’t work in the international market. I propose that all of that—not at all
unknown, just ignored—is the real Other of the art world, not the oppositional
practices we have been privileging all week long, and certainly not the “undis-
covered countries” of avant-garde art practice that some hope—even though
they know it’s an imperialist hope—to continue discovering.2
zhivka valiavicharska: What you are saying is really interesting. For example, take
Saskia Sassen’s formulation of global cities as hubs of transnational capital: she
says that they have become global spaces of exchange of information, flows of
money, the sites where a transnational finance capital class is concentrated.3 Her
analyses are very good, but the question of localities remains very problematic:
we won’t get too far if we understand them as isolated and cut out from these
global exchanges; we have to see how they exist in an unequal relation to it.
And not only that—critical geographers have showed us how these localities
are actively produced by what we’ve called the global. So I think your argument
cautions against a similar methodological assumption. It also makes another
theoretical gesture: rather than seeing the local arts in some isolated and discon-
nected way, we could look at how they enable global formations of art markets
and art practices; how they’ve become their constitutive Other. I would be very
interested to see a good, rigorous analysis of how this is happening in each par-
ticular case.
james elkins: Exactly. That is why it is significant that we choose not to include such
practices.
To continue the listing: first was the difficulty we all had in describing how
our conversations are situated in history; second was the blindness on the part of
both the art market and academia to certain contemporary art practices, which
I proposed are the majority of all contemporary practices. The third point con-
cerns problems that arise when it comes to writing histories of world art. The
largest unsolved divergence of opinion among the authors of Is Art History Glob-
al? was between two versions of the globalization of art history.
On the one hand were writers who felt that the discipline of the history of
art—including, here, its apparatus, its interpretive protocols, its institutions, in-
cluding conferences and books like this one, its journals and their guidelines—
that the discipline of art history may indeed be becoming global, but that its
globalization is not a problem in the end because the various elements of art

2. All this is the subject of a work in prog-
ress, Success and Failure in Twentieth-Century
Painting. A chapter has appeared as “Two Forms
of Judgement: Forgiving and Demanding (The
Case of Marine Painting),” Journal of Visual
Art Practice 3, no. 1 (2004): 37–46. Prominent
among the perpetually rediscovered “undiscov-
ered countries” is naïve art. I discuss naïve and
outsider art as tropes of modernism in “Naïfs,
Faux-Naïfs, Faux Faux-Naïfs, Would-Be-Faux-Naïfs:
There Is No Such Thing as Outsider Art,” in Inner
Worlds Outside, edited by John Thompson, exh.
cat. (Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2006),
71–79.
3. Her exemplary books on the subject
are The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) and
Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the
New Mobility of People and Money (New York:
New Press, 1998).
100 art and globalization

history are sufficiently malleable so they can rediscover themselves in their new
occasions. They can adjust, adapt, and expand. That perspective was exemplified
for us, in that book, by David Summers’s Real Spaces, which uses Western art
theory to describe world art practices.
One the other hand, there were writers who hoped or knew or suspected
there are other forms of writing that constitute viable interpretations of art, and
those writers were, to differing degrees, content with the possibility that those
interpretive practices might not appear useful for art history, or even appear as
art histories.
When we were discussing this divergence of opinion earlier in the week,
Michael Holly introduced a suspiciously felicitous metaphor, which I would like
to revive. She compared art history to a beautiful vase, which has broken. The
shards are art history’s methodologies—semiotics, deconstruction, iconography,
and so forth—and they are what now confront us. (Later in our conversation,
the shards weren’t methodologies but other kinds of fragments.) We are then
faced with three alternatives. In the first, which was Michael’s point when she in-
troduced the image, we should celebrate the fragmentary state of things, because
it can be wonderfully productive. In the second, which Tom suggested, we try
to glue the vase back together. I’ll call that the archaeological instinct: we see the
shards had a shape, so we can’t just treat them as separate wholes. We embark on
the process of reconstituting them, not because we’re antiquarians, but because
we have no choice but to be distracted or even compelled by the original shape.
And in the third alternative, we try to do something with the shards: we smash
them, we cut ourselves on them, we glue them together into something new, and
we do that because we are impelled to avoid that haunting form.
For me, Michael’s vase metaphor goes to the question that remains unde-
cided in Is Art History Global? because hypothetical new, non-Western ways of
describing art would necessarily appear partly—sometimes nearly wholly—as
fragments of something we recognize, and we would feel or resist the pull of
the vase.
harry harootunian: I think what’s implied in these last points is a very interesting
but problematic set of assumptions. I like the metaphor of the vase because it
speaks from a culturally specific perspective. You’re really talking about how art
history has been practiced in Europe and the United States. But when you begin
to speak about other traditions, you already imply that there are such traditions.
I don’t know of any historiographic tradition about art in Japan before the nine-
teenth century. There are forms of classification, for example, but they would be
parts of larger practices.
james elkins: That is exactly the case with premodern writing in Chinese, Arabic, and
Sanskrit. These discourses have sometimes been enlisted as different or parallel
art histories, and sometimes as non-art-historical texts usable for art history, but
101 four failures of the seminars

they are always, in my experience, distinct in ways that are as obdurate as Shi-
gemi’s example of karate bows.4
harry harootunian: I guess I object to the presumption of some kind of native theory.
In order to compensate for the enormous amount of Eurocentric or America-
centric emphasis on interpretive strategies, there have been attempts to find Chi-
nese theories, or Japanese theories. That too makes a presumption, namely that
such forms of theorization exist formally or systematically, or even unsystemati-
cally, as a kind of analogue to the Western understanding of interpretation.5
All this depends on the period in question. It’s one thing if you’re talking
about premodern practices, or for example about premodern Asia or Africa, or
even Europe, as Tom is. But when you’re talking about the modern, the Japanese
and Chinese have already, without even being conscious of it, they are already
recuperated by the very theorizations you are trying to bracket.
james elkins: That is certainly true in recent art history. My own position is that mod-
ern and contemporary writing on art is overwhelmingly bent on straightforward
and often unreflective emulation of what is taken as art history. In that sense the
discipline of art history is nowhere near as diverse or multicultural as it often
portrays itself as being. It harbors a hope about divergent practices, but contact
with the discipline of art history in places like Paraguay or Kazakhstan (or, of
course, any number of places within the first world) nearly always provokes
either wholehearted emulation, or a kind of reaction that begins only after the
writers have adopted the language of their adversary.
harry harootunian: I keep thinking of the art historian Kazuko Okakura, who was
a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historian and curator. He wrote
a wacky book called Ideals of the East, which is intended to provide some kind
of supplement, from Asia, to fill out the picture—but it is basically a Western
narrative.6
thomas dacosta kaufmann: Harry, I think it is useful to recall earlier forms of history
writing as well, especially if we are talking about earlier models of writing art
history, and about art history as an institutional practice, and what happened

4. In addition to Is Art History Global? see
the references in On Pictures and the Words
That Fail Them (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1998), which considers Arabic, San-
skrit, and Chinese texts from the ninth to the
sixteenth centuries. Zhang Yanyuan’s text is the
most vexed of these examples because it has
been suggested it be revived, and it has been
taught alongside Vasari in European and North
American art history classes. For a discussion
see my afterword to Discovering Chinese Paint-
ing: Dialogues with Art Historians, edited by
Jason Kuo, second edition (Dubuque: Kendall/
Hunt, 2006), 249–56.
5. See Harry Harootunian, History’s Disquiet:
Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question
of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2000), 25–58. The recent reaction to the
surfeit of theorizing in area studies has led to
a dangerous fetishization of native theory and
knowledge, as if both could be found in some
pristine, unmediated state. This appeal, which
today is institutionalized in every job advertise-
ment inviting candidates with “native or near
native fluency” in languages like Chinese or
Japanese to apply for teaching positions, reflects
the more insidious presumptions of a fraudulent
hermeneutic once embraced by a generation of
anthropologists and historians who, following
the lead of Clifford Geertz, actually believed they
could stand in the footprints of the native.
6. Okakura, The Ideals of the East, with
Special Reference to the Art of Japan (1903;
Rutland, VT: C. E. Tuttle, 1970).
102 art and globalization

when it entered into universities. All the latter is bound up, as Michael Holly
said earlier this week, with Hegel.
But models of history including models of progress were certainly in place
prior to the nineteenth century, and to Hegel. Many of the ideas we tend to as-
sociate with art history were already there during the Enlightenment, and even
before that; in the sixteenth century (and implicit in the fifteenth century) there
are models of history of one kind or another found in discussions of art.
There is also a long tradition, as you know better than I do, of historical
writing in China, and of art history there as well, and there are now efforts,
exemplified by the work of Yukio Lippit, to reinvigorate a Japanese sense of art
historiography that may found in the past as well. These Asian and earlier Euro-
pean models may not be adequate to the issues we face now, but certain practices
and ways of thinking are continuous.
The exhibition that is upstairs right now, of Jeff Wall’s work, may clearly be
related to Asian traditions—the display of the master’s work, the biographical
model—as well as to earlier Western traditions such as Vasari’s.
james elkins: It may be useful to distinguish two forms of this question. One would
be the very attenuated survivals of these historical models in contemporary art
practice, and the other would be the force exerted by desires people in the global
art world have that there will be these unassimilated historical models and prac-
tices. The desire for history, and the actual history.
zhivka valiavicharska: Tom, you are talking about traditions that persist through his-
tory and culture—are you making a claim about some inherent value in them? If
so, I have to say there is something deeply troubling about erecting this notion
of value. The example of the Wall exhibition assumes the value of the artist as
an autonomous subject: that persists in Western art-historical practices, and the
assumptions that go along with this presumed autonomy remain completely
unquestioned. It’s a fact that such practices remain hegemonic: but why, in art
history, should they remain unquestioned? And what are the stakes of preserving
the discipline?
thomas dacosta kaufmann: I wasn’t claiming such things have value in themselves.
I was describing continuities of practice. The point of my intervention was to
suggest the problem of looking at the present as completely cut off from previ-
ous periods. Fred Jameson said earlier in the week that he is interested in dis-
junctions in history. Of course breaks occur, but there are also continuities, and
we have to be able to recognize them—otherwise the possibility of the kinds of
change you suggest will not be there to begin with.7

7. In fact, I have raised questions about
relying about the authority of tradition as a way
of determining interpretations: see my review in
the Art Bulletin 80, no. 3 (1998): 580–85, of Di-
eter Wuttke, Dazwischen: Kulturwissenschaft auf
Warburgs Spuren, Saecula Spiritalia 29 (Baden-
Baden: Valentin Koerner, 1996); Jeffrey Morrison,
Winckelmann and the Notion of Aesthetic
Education (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996);
Catherine M. Soussloff, The Absolute Artist:
The Historiography of a Concept; and Michael
Ann Holly, Past Looking: Historical Imagination
and the Rhetoric of the Image (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1996). In the review I also com-
ment on notions of the restriction of the canon.
103 four failures of the seminars

zhivka valiavicharska: Yes, we need to recognize continuities. But my question is

about how by insisting on these continuities we privilege certain narratives; and
in turn, how those narratives enhance certain power configurations, which we
reproduce by clinging to them. I am talking about a set of bourgeois liberal as-
sumptions that structure the traditional core of the discipline’s methodology.
thomas dacosta kaufmann: Well, I was suggesting that there are a number of disci-
plines, including anthropology, that are germane to these questions. Here at the
Art Institute there is also a show of Islamic pottery, which is not arranged ac-
cording to the same principles pertaining to the Wall show in the same building.
susan buck-morss: Here is a methodological suggestion. There is something that hasn’t
been problematized during the three days I have been here, and that is that we’re
talking, on the one hand, about art history and the teaching of art history, and
on the other, about museum practices, which is a contemporary problem (al-
though it has a historical dimension). And we have also been looking at artists,
but not as extensively. I do not think those three problems can be solved in the
same frame. Jim, you started with the problem of the artist, with that anecdote
about Central Asian artists—the ones who can’t pay to go to Moscow, now that
they are free to go where they want. That resonated with my own experiences of
Moscow philosophers, who were the top of the top, totally able to have confer-
ences on Heidegger, discuss Foucault, and do all these wonderful things during
glasnost—but as soon as the Big Bang happened, and the ruble went down in
value, they could not leave Moscow. They became very isolated.
My own methodological way of pressing further with that anecdote would
be to go into history. If I take the metaphor of the urn—
james elkins: It was a vase!—but it can certainly be an urn.

susan buck-morss: Urn, then! Using that metaphor, my impetus would be to take a
piece of it, and put it together with a piece that came from a different urn.
james elkins: You would be a postmodern archaeologist.

susan buck-morss: I don’t want to be postmodern—but I think that would be an in-

teresting approach. You would not be putting pieces together to make a whole,
but instead experiencing a flash of recognition that came from very different
cultures. In that way you could give much more valence to a cultural practice of
the past, because of its resonance with the present, than you would have given
it before, when it would have remained invisible no matter how much work was
done on problems of narrative or translation.
An example: let’s say there’s a line that goes from Kyrgyzstan to a Venice
biennale. Resistance would flow the other way: if you exhibit in Venice, you
show as a critical artist, criticizing globalization, but you do it in Venice. Your
resistance takes you back to the local, but the objective dynamics takes you to
the higher point of power. There are two lines, going back and forth.
104 art and globalization

The analogy I would love—I’d love to go home and write an article about
it—is what happened to Soviet artists who moved both ways along this line,
literally to Venice’s biennale and back, because it engages a significant part of the
Soviet story in the decade of the 1920s.
james elkins: That is just what I was in the “stans” to study. Some artists have turned to
Sufism, which makes it even less likely that they will be in a biennale. An artist
named Ahmadaliev in Tashkent does serious Sufist paintings on wool, and so
does a man named Abdrashit Sydykhanov in Almata, Kazakhstan. Both are in
their sixties or seventies, and both worked under the Soviet regime. Their cur-
rent work would be just barely viable, in theory, for the international art scene,
but the further they go in the direction of their own beliefs, and the less pressure
they feel from the international art scene, the more likely it is they will never
show outside their countries.
susan buck-morss: Some Soviet artists also went to the West: that’s where the fame
was, and the money. The movement goes toward the center, because that is
where money and power flow for artistic practice—and yet resistance goes in the
other direction.
james elkins: We’re talking about different kinds of resistance: one accomplished by
artists who already know how to play the game of the international art world,
and the other by artists who cannot play, or don’t want to try, and resist by “pas-
sively” comprising the static local store of art production. They “resist” by being
useless to the system. Your examples resist, without scare quotes.
susan buck-morss: The double direction of resistance is a nice way of comparing ap-
ples and oranges, and linking the three separate issues that have been raised here
(art history, exhibitions, and artists).
james elkins: The idea of taking pieces from two different urns, or vases, raises the pos-
sibility that the pieces might not belong to any vessels: they might not be parts
of discourses on art that we could recognize as such.
thomas dacosta kaufmann: A note on the vase metaphor: one need not think of put-
ting the vase together into its original shape. It could become something quite
different; I am thinking of Bernini’s addition to the Mars, or Bertel Thordvald-
sen’s re-creation of the pediments from Aegina, which was then destroyed.8 So
your model, Susan, is also one that is creative—
susan buck-morss: I wouldn’t try to make a whole. I am talking about taking two
pieces and superimposing them.
thomas dacosta kaufmann: Yes, sometimes you would just be creating new forms.

8. For this destruction, perhaps relevant Aegina Pediments and the German Confronta-
here to consider in terms of this discussion tion with the Past,” Art Journal 54, no. 2 (1966):
of fragments and fragmentation, see William 60–66.
J. Diebold, “The Politics of Derestoration: The
105 four failures of the seminars

james elkins: Before we stop, I want to append a fourth and final point, one that has
been drifting along with us the whole week. I note that some of the texts Fred
Jameson set for his seminar were attempts to describe cultural globalism, and
others used the word “resistance” and were more concerned with slowing or
problematizing globalism.9 I think we need to be careful not to lose sight of the
fact that we may be attempting to understand the globalization of art principally
in order to understand how to resist it. We have been focusing on a small percent-
age of practices that are aimed at resistance. This was the second of the talking
points I raised at the opening roundtable, and I have to say I don’t think we have
made very much headway with it.10 All of us here are not really studying the
globalized art market as it exists, but rather the tiny percentage of intellectually
serious, politically engaged, conceptually oriented art that critiques the market.
I very much like Fred’s idea that globalization exaggerates and foregrounds
the nation-state—from which I draw the conclusion that apparently uninterest-
ing, politically passive, historically irresponsible art, the kind Buchloh hates, is
of a piece with apparently cutting-edge institutional critiques. The artists from
Central Asia I mentioned are not resisting globalism, and the majority of art at
any art fair is celebratory, recherché, or otherwise less than captivating. Boring,
really. No one writes about most of Art Basel Miami, what most of it is like, and
yet those practices are the same as cutting-edge initiatives like superflex and
the Critical Art Ensemble, because they are dialectical parts of a larger practice.
It’s important, I think, to keep thinking about boring and recherché art, and not
just the avant-gardes.
michele greet: I’d like to address the question Tom raised about using models from
the past for present concerns. I wonder, conversely, how we can use the theories
that are emerging from our experience of globalization to understand the past.
Clearly we always write history in a particular moment, but is there something
about our current moment that demands a break with older art-historical meth-
odologies, or can we rethink these methodologies and continue to use them in a
productive way? Where along the continuum of break vs. continuity is the most
productive place of inquiry?
harry harootunian: But isn’t that what we have always done? Aside from those pieties
and claims about understanding the past on its own terms, and so forth, isn’t
that what we basically, invariably do, without knowing it? In some ways, the
mediations that have constituted our own education and socialization comprise
the past. Perhaps we worry too much about breaks and disruptions demanded
by a certain mode of periodizing, as Jacques Rancière, in The Politics of Aesthetics,
has recently proposed and as I have suggested above.
james elkins: And so an interesting form of the question is: Why seek to understand
globalization of art better, or differently, now? And why ask Tom’s question,

9. See Section 1 of the Seminars. 10. See the Introduction.

106 art and globalization

which is also my question, now? What experience prompts us to wonder about

the utility of a specific past, or pasts, to the understanding of the present? And
what change—what familiarity or overfamiliarity with the art market, what
staleness in the world of art fairs, makes use look backward in just this way just
now? All that I think we register about this is what journalists like Jerry Saltz and
Peter Schjeldahl register: dissatisfaction or unhappiness with the slipperiness of
the present.11
harry harootunian: I think we tend to valorize that past moment, which in some
ways enhances one’s conception of the present.
suzana milevska: The vase metaphor has been appearing and reappearing all through
this week: but we have all been assuming that art history as a compact concept
once existed. What if it never did?
james elkins: Imagine you find some fragments of pottery; they are curved, and they
look like they belong together. You are probably going to wonder what they
once were, even if you have no interest in gluing them together. I don’t think
it is possible to imagine an “aesthetic of shards and fragments” (I think that is
the philosopher Guy Sircello’s phrase) without the idea of an original.12 For me,
that’s all that counts: it animates the uses to which we put the pieces of our in-
terpretive traditions.
claire pentecost [artist, School of the Art Institute Faculty]: If someone puts the vase
together, they are reconstructing something that was always Frankensteinian.
It seemed to be a single thing, but was more a bricolage, a collective process. In
relation to Jeff Wall, why not show other artists who have worked that way? Why
not ghost the show, Aby Warburg fashion? I was glad to hear what Susan said
about bringing different things together.
james elkins: This vase, this urn, this cenotaph, these fragments, this group of unaffiliat-
ed objects, is actually quite a fruitful metaphor. I just don’t want to lose sight of the
fact that a concern over the nature, history, interest, purpose, and fate of the vase,
urn, or cenotaph is completely invisible in contemporary art discourse. Where are
the writers who worry about the traditions of interpretation on which they draw?
Our mutagenic metaphor doesn’t exist anywhere in the current art world: it’s just
the air people breathe, the language they speak. It’s history naturalized.

11. I am thinking of Jerry Saltz’s “Ugh, Ven-
ice,” a column for the New York Magazine Art
Review, July 2, 2007, which explains why he isn’t
going until the crowds thin, and pictures a new
art journal called Biennial, with columns called
“This Month in Relational Aesthetics,” artists
discussing “how they had ‘intervened with the
local culture,’” and writers “asserting that their
work is a ‘subversion of biennials’” (nymag.com/
arts/art/reviews/33952/, accessed July 25, 2007).
I’m also reminded of Peter Schjeldahl’s unhappy
review of Miami Basel in the New Yorker, which
muses that “fairism (if you will) is inexorable,”
even though shows like Miami Basel create “a
stupor of overstimulation.” Schjeldahl, “Tempta-
tions of the Fair,” New Yorker, December 25,
2006/January 1, 2007, 148–49.
12. Guy Sircello, “Beauty in Shards and
Fragments,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 48, no. 1 (1990): 21–35, quotation at
22. Or, as an elective affinity, there is Wallace
Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar”: “I placed a jar
in Tennessee, / And round it was, upon a hill.
/ It made the slovenly wilderness / Surround
that hill. // The wilderness rose up to it, / And
sprawled around, no longer wild. / The jar was
round upon the ground / And tall and of a port
in air,” etc.
107 four failures of the seminars

karl hakken: I’d like to make an observation here, on behalf of the students. It came
up at lunchtime, in conversation about the week of seminars. Most of us have
recently had an experience of the master narratives of the discipline, in the form
of a textbook by Gardner or Janson. So giving up entirely on the metaphor of
the vase, acting as if it is merely shards, is not entirely true. There was a vase: it
actually existed when we arrived on the scene.
michael holly: As the author of this now very misshapen vase metaphor, I would like
to say that I like, Susan, your turning my vase into a burial urn. But for the other
Fellows here, the vase links to things we talked about this past week—W. G. Se-
bald’s use of images, urn worship, Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, and even
Nietzsche, who worried that all we historians do is lament time’s passing. Maybe,
until this moment, as art historians we have felt no urgency toward the present.
The trouble with the historical profession is that it causes us all to feel related
as epigone, latecomers, even voyeurs to the past. Nietzsche said, and I think this
has relevance today, that the most powerful mode of inquiry in the humanities
is to think one unlike thing with another: to rub them up against one another
like two sticks when you’re trying to start a fire. I like this mode of inquiry, the
idea of encounter: between two cultures, between past and present, or as we did
this week, between high political theory and low, regular art history. What also
has to change is the way we conduct arguments in art history. Maybe arguments
have to be done by innuendo and implication, rather than by influence. At least
in art history, influence was once upon a time the master narrative. I would like
to think of a way of thinking, a way of relating the very disparate things we have
been talking about here. An argument (“fiction”) created by friction.
darby english: I should probably let this lie, because Michael has articulated it so well,
but there is something about the friction that different approaches generate,
that pertains directly to the comments that have been made about contempo-
rary art discourse. I want to try to think about Michael’s insight about friction
in relation to Jim’s observations throughout this week about contemporary art
discourse. Maybe we need a language for translating understanding itself, rather
than being content with the potential or lack of potential of a translation, or be-
ing content with the compromise that is reached. Translation itself sets the outer
boundaries of our conversation about it. We don’t ask questions about the kinds
of understanding we are moving toward.
james elkins: Darby, Michael, those are beautiful questions—and suitably abstract.
They are just the kind of friction I think we need to move forward. I hope that
some people who write commentaries on this conversation can find ways to
“translate understanding.”
 9. u n i v e r s a l i t y

Zhivka Valiavicharska led the second half of the five-hour closing discussion; in the
portion excerpted here, she leads a discussion on universality. Two of the most abstract
concepts that articulate writing on globalization are universality and particularity:
they appeared in the very first seminar (see Section 1), and they persisted throughout
the week. Whatever sense globalization is to make as a dialectic complement to the
particular artwork (or the individual artist, or the particular cultural gesture), it
will depend on a concept of universality. As usual, the literature that is produced
in the international art market entirely ignores this issue, preferring to continue to
privilege a Romantic notion of the individual autonomous artist, contrasted with a
treacherously unexamined notion of the universal human culture of the twenty-first
century. Here Valiavicharska concludes the week’s discussions by proposing a new sense
of universality, one that can respond to the crises and vicissitudes of contemporary art.

james elkins: Welcome back, everyone, for the last two hours of our thirty-five-hour
conversation. I’ll turn it over to Zhivka, who will introduce conceptual issues
that have arisen in the course of the week.
zhivka valiavicharska: It has been a challenge to think of a theme that would link
the messy and uneven discussions, in which I was really surprised to see various
positions, investments, and knowledges seriously collide. I found these clashes
extremely productive in a difficult way, in the sense that I myself experienced
some kind of displacement. That displacement was quite strong for me because I
never knew how much I could assume; it pulled me out of the discursive frame-
works my interpretive acts operate within. It produced a serious uncertainty:
for example, when Jim was saying something in the seminar that was meant to
be very clear and simple, I could look at it as two radically different statements,
almost opposite to each other. [Laughter.] As one of our Fellows said—the one
Jim quoted in his introduction—I often did not know what was going on. And
I don’t think I ever will know what actually happened.
james elkins: The meeting is concluded.

zhivka valiavicharska: Well, in a sense it has just begun. This is precisely why I would
like to call this gathering an event: events are never too pretty, they are always
messy, and they are events precisely because they seriously disturb our semantic
references, our modes of intelligibility. They leave an opening that is always
already gaping—they are structured by an a priori incompleteness. Whether we
110 art and globalization

attribute this opening due to a void of meaningful frameworks or to an excess

of experience—of human experience—it will never yield itself to a final fixing.
So the theme I came up with last night is quite risky: universality. It is risky
but also very tempting because it came up in discussions in several strongly con-
flicting modes. First was the immense universalizing drive of the discipline of
art history in our discussions, and it seemed to me that at times the force of that
knowledge was much stronger than us. Then there were the voices of the critique
of universality: much of capitalist development and European colonial projects
was realized under universalizing concepts of history, humanity, civilization,
progress. And third, meanings of universality, humanism, and cosmopolitanism
also emerged in their emancipatory aspects—in some attempts to rescue these
from their essentialist discourses and practices perhaps, to recuperate their in-
dwelling possibilities for overcoming the historical present. For example, in her
public lecture two nights ago, Susan Buck-Morss put forward her own notion
of universality: for her, it emerges at the limits of human experience, where we
not only have an experience of displacement, but are also confronted with our
humanity in a radical way. This is where, she said, we are all the same—where
the possibility for a collective human subjectivity emerges. As I understood it,
this is not to give a new substance to the human, which would congeal into a yet
another essentialist notion of universality that transcends the historical moment.
It seems to me that she argued for universalities seen as possibilities within the
historical moment; universalities that are always already within history—where
human subjectivities are constantly being constituted and reconstituted in ways
that can never escape the singularity of the event, the contingent historical forces
that enabled them.
Certain events, she said, can be powerful enough to trigger experiences of
collective displacements. I would like to ask Susan, however, if she could go
further into what precisely she means by an “event,” or what makes what she
means by “event” an event? Aren’t events and collective subjectivities mutually
constitutive, or, to put it differently, can we talk about events outside of their
discursive frameworks?
Some of our seminar discussions raised the issues of incommensurability of
multiple truths, human values, and human languages, which reminded me of a
number of African postcolonial thinkers, who have put forward an emancipa-
tory notion of universality. For these postcolonial thinkers, it is through revo-
lutionary action, through often violent self-enunciations, that we can gesture
towards universality. Like Fanon, Ngugi wa Thiong’o has defined universality
as an open field of perpetual historical contestations and struggles.1 And like
Benjamin, Ngugi has also imagined a humanist universality in the multiplicity
of languages stored in the very possibility of translation—translation here being
not just a matter of language, but, as Darby has elegantly framed, of modes of

1. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Moving the Center: Politics of Language in African Literature (Lon-
The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms (London: don: James Currey; Nairobi: EAEP; Portsmouth
James Currey; Nairobi: EAEP; Portsmouth N.H.: N.H.: Heinemann, 1986).
Heinemann, 1993); Decolonizing the Mind: The
111 universality

understanding within which we operate. Ngugi speaks about how languages

can be “opened up” to the realities of the struggles in order to convey their
revolutionary content. There is an act of emancipation—universally human and
yet historically situated—that happens in communication, in the possibility to
communicate the incommunicable. And of course Judith Butler—following
Laclau and Mouffe—has seen the political promise of a kind of universality that
belongs to the open-ended field of hegemonic struggle. For her, the promise that
universality harbors for a radical democratic project is precisely in its failure, as
a historical project, to articulate itself fully without being haunted by that which
it negates. Its failure is conditioned by the fact that from the very beginning,
universality is already contaminated by its other and haunted by the possibility
of the return of the excluded; and this failure—as a condition of possibility—is
what could enable its future radical reinscriptions.2
susan buck-morss: There is one word, which may make a difference in your very lucid
description of the problem of universality: you said at one point that this new
form of humanism could be understood by thinking of violent confrontations,
at the limit of our humanity, and that at those moments we might all be the
same. There’s a twist there: for me, it’s not the limits of humanity, as if we have
to experience a life-and-death struggle before we can recognize each other. Then
we’d be hoping for more of those experiences, so that we could finally realize our
humanity. I would say it’s a matter of violent confrontations with the limits of
our subjectivities, our acculturation. Suddenly our culture doesn’t allow us to say
what we have to say. Our culture betrays us. That is what worries me: the mo-
ment when your culture betrays you, when your very affirmation by the cultural
collective places you in a precarious position. Welfare mothers, for example, are
damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If they resist the conditions put
upon welfare distribution, they are considered ungrateful for the assistance they
are offered. In the United States, that can mean their children are taken away
from them, because it is said they are bad parents—refusing money, not taking
care of their children. What concerns me lies at the limit to the cultural con-
structedness of your experience, and events can expose those limits. Nine-eleven
was that kind of event in the collective consciousness: that kind of event is not
supposed to happen in American’s consciousness of itself. But it happened, and
the response was totally inadequate. Katrina, even more so. There is a kind of be-
trayal involved, and the fascist mindset emerges—you’re either for us or against
us, and so forth—but it is also possible to imagine a kind of collective solidarity
based on the betrayal.

2. Butler has also invoked translation to
imagine a possibility for a common politics on
the Left that retains the multiplicity of its move-
ments. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj
Z̆iz̆ek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality:
Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London:
Verso, 2000). To follow back the discussion on
universality and hegemony, see also Ernesto
Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and So-
cialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic
Politics (London: Verso, 1985); Ernesto Laclau,
Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996); Judith
Butler, “Sovereign Performatives,” in Excitable
Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London:
Routledge, 1997): 72–102. See also Linda
Zerilli’s review of Laclau’s Emancipation(s), “This
Universalism Which Is Not One,” Diacritics 28,
no. 2 (1998): 2–22.
112 art and globalization

We have been discussing a lot of real-life contradictions, the kind under

which we all work. Adorno says contradictions aren’t resolved in the head; or, if
you do, you end up justifying the status quo. But then to glorify friction as in
itself the salvation of humanity is wrong.
I guess I’m saying that I do not experience a “we” as existing today in the
U.S. I am supposed to be part of American culture, and I am, in zillions of ways,
but for me the sense of a “we” has been betrayed by the government’s perverse
invocation of America to attempt to justify an unjustifiable foreign policy. Per-
haps precisely when the “we” has been betrayed, that is the moment when one
can break into another space. But the problem is that this positive possibility is
severely limited.
I have seen democracy function in its pure form once in my life, in late
glasnost. I saw democracy when people went around Moscow listening to live
debates in the duma, the Assembly, of people criticizing the Afghan war, prob-
lems in the state, environmental issues, the economy, everything. And when the
duma was in recess, instead of getting into black cars and speeding away, the
politicians walked across Red Square to the subway stop—and the people who
had been listening ran up to them, and tapped them on the shoulders, and said
things like, “What you said there—that was really good!” That was democracy
in action, and I had never seen it so vividly before. Once the Soviet Union fell,
however, and officially Russia was pronounced a “democracy,” that was gone.
Underneath the radar of the categories of belonging, outside of concepts
like the subaltern, stuff goes on that could actually deserve the appellation of a
concept like democracy.
zhivka valiavicharska: You are absolutely right: you are arguing for the subject’s radi-
cal displacement from the context of her own self-understanding. I would call
precisely this displacement a confrontation—and a violent one—if not violent
in the ordinary sense. Who knows what kinds of violence are involved in these
forms of displacement? They are the junctures that form and reform the human
subject.
susan buck-morss: I am saying there is a we which emerges, which is not constituted
anyplace. That is the utopian event: the product of these encounters is not yet
an official we anyplace.
zhivka valiavicharska: The we is constantly being constituted in and through various
historical moments—
susan buck-morss: No, and that is where we differ. I would never say “constantly”; I
wouldn’t say that is the human condition, as if to imply that I could step outside
the process, and proclaim it, and know it.
I think the formulation you are describing forgets that we are in there. As we
try to grasp it, it hits us from behind. I don’t want to propose a general philo-
sophical position. I am trying to communicate a lived experience, which cannot
do the work that philosophy demands of it.
113 universality

harry harootunian: Susan, the problem of democracy these days is a particularly

interesting one, and I hesitate to pronounce on it—but I have been reading
Jacques Rancière for many years, and he has recently come out with a book called
Hatred of Democracy.3 It is a reworking of some of his earlier philosophic work,
especially the book Disagreement.4 Rancière has a view of democracy similar to
the one you’re describing. One of his observations about the many attempts to
democratize other countries is that it is usually done by people who really hate
democracy, who distrust it. I don’t have to elaborate on that, especially with the
current U.S. administration. He says that it is a mistake to think of democracy
in terms of inclusion. That leads to polling, counting, efforts to make sure every-
one has his or her place. Rancière says that is not democracy, although it seems
to have become one of the prevailing views of democratic practice in the United
States and western Europe. I hesitate to put a label on his view of democracy,
but there is an anarchist dimension to it. Rancière was one of the more radical
students of Althusser, and he has a Maoist phase, but he’s abandoned that in
recent years—although there are shards of it shot through his writing. The kind
of democracy he is talking about was impressed on him in May 1968 in Paris,
and he interpreted it as a kind of explosion (Susan, when you mentioned glasnost,
I thought immediately of Rancière’s description of May 1968) that just happens.
You have politics, he says, precisely at the moment of disidentification, when
people are no longer willing to accept identity as a kind of inclusion.
The difficulty, as Rancière knows, is that it’s an enormously difficult view
to sustain. Putting it into some kind of expectant historical narrative would
immediately turn it around—
susan buck-morss: But I think you can put this democratic experience into an institu-
tional context, which would be different from a historical or ideological context.
I think you can base it institutionally on a balance of powers—a principle that I
respect enormously—and on human rights, that could allow at least some pro-
tected space, some room for the experience of disidentification. The problem is
that these principles are always precarious, and their institutionalization cannot
be taken for granted.
harry harootunian: I think you’re right, and I don’t have more to add, but I think it
is a fillip to what you were saying.
susan buck-morss: I am a great fan of institutions. You can’t institutionalize democracy
by having everyone get involved, I agree. But you can by struggling to sustain a
balance of powers. You can by having checks on civilian use of the military. The
problem is not that we have these institutions in the U.S., but that we are in dan-
ger of losing them. Institutional guarantees have disintegrated in this country.
And the public is not up in arms about it. That’s the scandal.

3. Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, translated 4. Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Phi-

by Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2006). losophy, translated by Julie Rose (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
114 art and globalization

harry harootunian: Alain Badiou criticizes Rancière, saying that Rancière has no
means to regularize, institutionalize, or continue his particular form of demo-
cratic practice. As a good Marxist, Badiou sees the danger of relying on a kind
of spontaneity that cannot be sustained. But Badiou has also grown old: he is
actually older, chronologically, than Rancière . . .
Universalism, and appeals to it, make me nervous. I am never sure where it
is coming from. Whose universalism? By whom, and for whom?
susan buck-morss: And whether you’re allowed in it!

harry harootunian: Right. Basically, this concern has come from my own study of
an area outside Euro-America. It agitated Chinese and Japanese throughout the
twentieth century. Who was determining what was universal? When Japan re-
sorted to the construction of the nation-form, which was intended to be inter-
changeable with other nation-forms, they were well aware of the fact that history
itself, the narrative of world history, still excluded them.
james elkins: As usual, I am listening with an inappropriately allegorical ear, and hear-
ing things that have to do with the art world. What is biennale culture if not
a universalism that welcomes alternate histories, but never articulates them? A
culture that is impeccably inclusive, and yet excludes the majority of modes of
art production worldwide?
It is also problematic that Susan’s model cannot describe a consistent practice
that could be represented in the art world. Individual artworks can certainly give
evidence of the kind of experience that she describes: but to my ear, the discus-
sion in the last ten minutes has been dispiriting because it shows the lengths—
the sheer radical, anti- or extra-philosophic lengths—to which artworks must go
if they are to genuinely “disidentify” and refuse to “do the work that philosophy
demands.” And also the impossibility of ordinarily local practices, nonopposi-
tional ones, working apart from the universality of global art. (Harry’s senses of
everydayness are more optimistic in that regard.)
I’m imagining the conversation may have sounded promising from the point
of view of resistant art practices and institutional critiques. But surely it would
be exactly wrong to hear a prescription for contemporary art practice in what
has been said here, as if it were a call for an even more vigilantly radical avant-
garde. If anything, Susan’s model and Harry’s amendment show how complicit,
how weak, how predictable, how misguided about their own independence, art-
world gestures toward radical disidentification must be. And how far from a
viable sense of the local we really are.
shigemi inaga: My principal problem is that I constantly feel the danger of the desire
to be included in the so-called master narrative, or to be properly represented
in a dominant economic market. The fact that I am here on this stage is already
very contradictory in that sense, and personally I’d prefer to be in the audience,
or even underground!
115 universality

The global art market is like the top floor of the Titanic, which is sinking.
There are many laborers, who are not unionized, working in the hold of the ship.
(And why not? The revolution comes from the bottom.)
james elkins: Well, if they’re in the lower decks of the Titanic, they’re all drowning.

shigemi inaga: Hmm . . . they can probably find a submarine.

james elkins: Shigemi, that is the second great maritime metaphor we’ve had this week.
The other one we stole from Julian Stallabrass: he described the art market as
Ahab, tied to the whale of capitalism.
bhaskar mukhopadhyay: The only universality that exists today is the universality of cap-
ital. I think we should be cautious about universality as such, because if you think
historically, Western universalism has always been a mechanism for exclusion.5
Even in today’s mediatized, globalized world, how many people are citizen-
subjects in the Kantian sense?6 I would say not more than 20 percent. However,
unlike the eighteenth century, today’s noncitizens have to negotiate, perforce,
with various institutions which are metropolitan in origin but touch upon the
lives of millions of Third-World people. Think of the NGOs in Bangladesh, UN
humanitarian organizations in Africa, the institution of democracy in India, and
the civil society movements in Latin America. There are also widely dispersed
diasporic and refugee communities from the Third World in various parts of
Europe and the U.S. Today, real politics in “most of the world” does not take
place in the sanitized domain of “civil society”—the precious flower of associa-
tive endeavours of “free” citizens. They have bartered politics for good living.
Politics worth its name goes on in those dark, nebulous zones where the mass of
disenfranchized, marginal population of noncitizens negotiate with the various
institutions of global civil society.7
These are the places where new political imaginaries are being forged, and
it is through these tentative, hesitant, and often violent negotiations that a new
political modernity is emerging. These are the spaces of hope, this is how new-
ness enters history. The celebration of people’s so-called enthusiasm (a typical
Kantian trope) about “politics” in Moscow during the last days of Soviet Com-
munism or the legacy of the “Black Jacobins” of Haiti will only help perpetu-
ate the Eurocentric legacy of the Enlightenment. So, Susan and others of her
ilk, encore un effort si vous voulez être republicans. Hence, instead of looking for

5. Through a rigorous deconstructive read-
ing of a canonical text of Kant, Gayatri Spivak
has demonstrated that “the subject as such in
Kant is geopolitically differentiated.” Which is
to say, non-Europeans (e.g., “New Hollanders”
and “the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego,” in
Kant’s own words) cannot be citizens precisely
because they are not yet subjects. Thus Kant
signaled the axiomatics of imperialism—White
Man’s Burden—which was put in practice by
European colonialism in Asia and Africa during
the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries
and whose echo is still audible today in Bush’s
rhetoric on Iraq and the discourse on clash of
civilizations. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Critique
of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of
the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1999), p. 27.
6. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Minority Histories,
Subaltern Pasts,” in Provincializing Europe:
Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
7. Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Gov-
erned: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of
the World (New York: Columbia University Press,
2004).
116 art and globalization

some vestiges of the stale Enlightenment ideas, instead of this leftist melancholy
and nostalgia, it would not be a bad idea to follow Negri. Under the present
restrictive conditions, our immediate preoccupation should be, not a pedagogic
project of elevating not-yet-subjects to citizenship, but the activist project of
demanding global free mobility of labor—now!
zhivka valiavicharska: Bhaskar, thank you for your fiery response to my provocation.
Of course, no one who has experienced the dismantling force of a powerful cri-
tique would disagree with you. It would be wrong, however, to prescribe univer-
salizing modes of thought entirely to the Western historical and intellectual tra-
dition: any normative claim implicitly gestures towards the universal. And I also
don’t agree that the forms that universality takes within modernity have enabled
only practices of domination. We shouldn’t go as far as denying the critical mo-
dalities inscribed within modernity itself, which have given birth to modernity’s
own historical overcomings, to its own self-undoing. The socialist struggles, for
example, clearly articulated themselves around the international idea, while the
African national liberation movements claimed there is a universal human en-
deavor in each historical instance of struggle against colonial domination.8 They
argued for multiplicities of interconnected experiences, a kind of universality—
or rather, a gesture towards it—that is not reified in some essentialist content
because it remains open to the outside, it dwells in a state of becoming. Recent
discourses on popular cosmopolitanisms and various pluralized forms of global
political consciousness have suggested that there might be some political agency
in rearticulating and reframing these ideas for the sake of the historical present,
especially in a moment of vast global reorganization of labor. That would mean
subverting their universalizing drive and reinscribing them into concrete mate-
rial realities.9 I think it is rather these performative gestures of active subversion
that open up productive possibilities.
pedro erber: But even if we could get rid of the problem of exclusion, inclusion itself
is not less problematic and tyrannical. This is precisely the problem of imperial-
ism—or “empire,” which in this case does not make much of a difference. And I
don’t think it can be solved within the realm of universalism.
james elkins: But even so, if I persist in my perverse allegorical reading, Bhaskar is
right: “citizens” of the global art world certainly exclude many others, and they
do so in the only way that is genuinely ideological: they do it while imagining
they are incapable of it by definition.
suzana milevska: It was interesting for me to listen to all these thoughts about belong-
ing and inclusion. In the opening roundtable, I was concerned that we talk
about these themes, and somehow we have come around to them at last.

8. Pheng Cheah’s Spectral Nationality
provides a brilliant exploration of this question.
Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from
Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2003)
9. Look at Anna Tsing’s previously cited Fric-
tion, as well as Pheng Cheah’s Inhuman Condi-
tions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).
117 universality

I would like to propose a link between our concern with the narratives of
art history and these concerns about inclusion and universality. Perhaps it is
important to return to belonging without belonging or belonging without having
something in common: Rancière and Agamben both talk about this in relation to
the events in Tiananmen Square, where the students did not want to claim cer-
tain identity—they did not want to write manifestos, or define and sign lists of
demands. The students wanted not to belong, not to be overwritten by one iden-
tity, but still to participate. For me, this was not only a question of participation,
but also a question of longing to belong without belonging, to be-in-common
without a common cause or identity.10
So when we’re looking at a model for universal art history or criticism, we
don’t need to look further than this event. When the book Is Art History Global?
came out, I saw it as participatory, because it had a whole series of events linked
together—seminars, transcripts, assessments, commentators. All this thorough
and complex process of redistributing and circulating ideas through rhizomatic
networks produces an unprecedented multilayered knowledge art-history mod-
el. We should look for new, participatory models of art history. Even though
this one event—this week—by itself is problematic, because it brings together
authorities, provokes stress, and so forth, a different structure, a series of events,
would be welcome.
thomas dacosta kaufmann: That is a very productive idea. In all our talk about
Kantianism and so forth, a distinction that has slipped away is one made in
Panofsky’s commentary on the difference between works of art and historical
events.11 I would like to push this point further, and consider the distinction,
if we can make it, between the subject matter of the field—works of art, their
histories—and the theorization of them, that Panofsky was considering in his
argument—the methods by which they are approached. Would you, then, have
anything more to add about how you might treat contemporary art that might
be related to your suggestion about belonging?
suzana milevska: Well, you could look at the practices of artists and try to find models
there—
james elkins: Participation and collaboration are well thematized in contemporary art12—

suzana milevska: My idea came from contemporary artistic practices, actually. There is
already a predominance of more or less successful participatory models in con-
temporary art that intervene in art history or in institutional practices.
Let me mention Jochen Gerz, whose participatory book project Anthology of
Art consisted of contributions via Internet by artists and art theorists who sent their

10. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Commu-
nity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1993), 86–87.
11. Erwin Panofsky, “Der Begriff des Kunst-
wollens,” reprinted in Aufsätze zu Grundfragen
der Kunstwissenschaft, 2nd ed., edited by
Hariolf Oberer and Egon Verheyen (Berlin: Bruno
Hessling), 29–43, especially 29–30.
12. For example, Charles Green, The Third
Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptalism
to Postmodernism (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2001).
118 art and globalization

answers to the artist’s question “In the context of contemporary art what is your
vision of a yet unknown art?”13 Or David Medalla, who created a participatory non-
institutional London Biennial by gathering mostly the immigrant artists in London
with whom he collaborates on daily basis.14 Often participatory art functions as a
kind of institutional critique of art history and institutionalization of art practices.
james elkins: For what it’s worth, the idea of this book series is to be participatory
in such a way that no position is ruled out of court: any engagement with the
themes that can be seen as such—that can be understood as engagement, by any
of the participants—will be included.
claire pentecost: Regarding participation in art practice, as it is usually seen in gallery
art. One of the reason I often find participation extremely disappointing is that
the artists themselves do not participate in heterogeneous or interesting worlds
beyond their own art practice. So what they are inviting us to participate in is
something that remains isolated in relation to the culture at large. So I think the
whole rubric of participation needs constant, thorough deepening, if we are to
go in that direction in art.
susan buck-morss: At Cornell, the Visual Studies Program organized a conference
called “State of Emergency,” before George Bush invaded Iraq. Paul Chan took
advantage of that moment, when it was inevitable that we would invade: he
went to Iraq and made a video of people in a park, people enjoying their Sunday
afternoon.15 It’s a historical document, and whenever I see that video, I see the
images of the war that followed, the destruction of the country, superimposed
on that video. He situated himself in a moment of time and space, used the
global possibility of travel, went there, and made the work.
claire pentecost: Paul went there at the invitation of Voices in the Wilderness, a
group based in Chicago, which had been taking food and supplies to Iraq for
years, during the embargo. So it’s significant that he did that by connecting with
a group that was involved in the world.
andrzej szczerski: I agree with Suzana, and I would like to add the dimension of ge-
ography, or space. The very narrative of globalization implies participation, and
yet the kind of participation is clearly implied in each case. I am participating
differently when I speak from Kraków than I do when I speak here. I think this
question of location can be crucial for the degree and kind of participation.
For example, in relation to Susan’s “Hegel and Haiti,” about the Haitian
revolution and its relation to Hegel, I would be interested to know if other co-
lonial revolutions that were taking place at the same time could themselves be
points of reference: instead of our thinking of Hegel in relation to Haiti, Haiti
could become a point of reference in relation to the other revolutions. And so
forth: I would insist on the importance of the spatial and local.

13. Jochen Gerz, Anthology of Art (Cologne: 14. See www.londonbiennale.net.

Salon Verlag, 2004). Available at www.antholo- 15. Paul Chan, Baghdad in No Particular
gy-of-art.net (accessed October 1, 2007). Order, January 2003, 51 mins.
119 universality

james elkins: So, sorry to be the perpetual allegorist, but if I read that in terms of narra-
tives, I see the same possibility that first came up in Is Art History Global?—that
the points of reference of art history and criticism might become unmoored
from Hegel, Benjamin, Foucault, Barthes, Lacan, and the others, and take as
their compass points Vico, or Sor Juana, or Gombrowicz.16 That would be an
example of Susan’s idea of direct juxtapositions, and it is also the most radical
possibility for current art history and visual culture. The cultural geography of
art writing could be forever altered if we dared change our methods as well as
our subject matter.
And yet in the contemporary art world this possibility is once again invis-
ible, because it seems everyone already does it (what with the myriad obscure
references that are sprinkled into every account of art), and yet few people do it
in any profound sense, because art narratives remain closely bound to the He-
gels, Foucaults, Lacans, and so forth.
bhaskar mukhopadhyay: India is about to have its first biennial.17 As some of you may
know, India had its own art history, its own homegrown modernism: it had the
Bengal school, the Calcutta group, and it developed an interesting art history.
Indian modernism did not so much negotiate with the Western avant-garde as
come out as a reaction against Indian indigenism. Tagore, who took to painting
late in his life, was hailed by Kandinsky as an Expressionist avant la lettre. We
had powerful figures like Jamini Roy and Ramkinkar who blended the virility of
folk art with Western modernism. As the biennial culture comes in, we are con-
fronted with works which are Indian in name only. I am not being judgmental.
I am merely recounting where the force of global capitalism takes us. The indig-
enous, “small” tradition has been completely obliterated by the globalization of
Indian contemporary art. Yet nothing has come up to compensate for the loss of
our autonomy and agency.
susan buck-morss: Well, hold on. We have to ask about the difference between global
capitalism, as far as India’s cultural autonomy is concerned, and the present form
of cultural dependency.
bhaskar mukhopadhyay: In India, we have a home-grown, indigenous capitalism as
well as a home-grown indigenous democracy. These were achieved through a
long process of anticolonial struggle. Until recently, we could decide what we
would do. We dared to go against the powerful U.S. hegemony during the hey-

16. This is something I argued in Visual
Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (New York:
Routledge, 2003)—that the field could grow
most radically if writers gave up the familiar
methodological sources and looked to Vico,
etc. The theme recurs in the review of David
Summers’s Real Spaces, in Art Bulletin 86, no.
2 (2004): 373–80, reprinted in Is Art History
Global?—there the context is the possibility
that art history might respond to visual studies,
postcolonial studies, and cultural theory by
shedding its reliance on its stock of philoso-
phers and theorists and finding non-Western in-
terpretive methodologies. I still think these are
important possibilities that are not pursued. To
put it in emblematic form: even Gayatri Spivak
relies on Derrida for methodological structure,
rather than taking Sanskrit texts, for example,
as methodological models.
17. This is supposed to take place in Delhi
in November 2007, but there is a strong chance
that it may be postponed for reasons that have
to do with funding.
120 art and globalization

day of the Cold War; we preached nonalignment from Bandung. In sum, we had
control over our own destiny. And that is much better than being swamped by
global capital, IMF, the World Bank, and biennials.
susan buck-morss: Good. But it’s not home-grown indigenous art.

bhaskar mukhopadhyay: I am not advocating indigenism. By no means. “India” is not

an object apart from the world; we must acknowledge its entanglements with
various elsewheres. But the global village is counterintuitive, and nobody lives
there. So long as the debates remained local and the imaginary called “India” was
considered as a relatively autonomous place, we had space for maneuvering, we
had agency. And we produced interesting art. Now all that is gone.
james elkins: Bhaskar, I do not disagree about the overwhelming effect of biennial
culture. But I have to say that your advocacy of Indian modernist painting is
problematic. I wish it were so simple. The painters you admire, Jamini Roy
among them, cannot be described in texts that will be read in western Europe
and North America in such a way that the artists appear necessary to modernism.
They are representable as local, but not as necessary.
I agree there was an indigenous critical and historical discourse in India;
actually, I think it is still well embodied by people like Geeta Kapur. But that
discourse can only seem necessary when its context is outside art history. That is
why Geeta is so often welcome at conferences of cultural history, postcolonial
theory, subaltern and area studies, and so seldom invited to speak to art histori-
ans who study Western modernism. I’m sorry to be such a broken record about
this, but without taking this problem into account, a gesture in the direction of
Indian modernist painting and modernist art history is a gesture in the direction
of something that cannot be valued because it cannot be translated.
michelle eischen: I am an art professor, and I’ve been attending the public events this
week. I kept thinking I should define what I have in mind before I say it, but
then again no one else seems to have any idea what they’re talking about either.
I attended the Venice Biennale this year, and I was blown away by the work,
and the amount of work. Living in South Dakota, and coming to Illinois—from
a very conservative state to a very liberal one, although Bush has spoken in both
places—it occurs to me that I often have no idea what people are talking about in
South Dakota, and people there sometimes have no clue what I’m talking about.
They use the same words, but they mean something completely different there.
So in translating other cultures, including those that exist within your own
nation, you look for things you recognize. I wonder, then, about the effects of
globalization on America, instead of the effects of America on globalization. It
seems like we’re imagining that America is somehow in charge of globalizing the
world, and we’re trying to understand what our effect is, but there is also the
effect we have on ourselves—
121 universality

james elkins: It’s a wonderful point. So the confusion of our topic would be an effect
of confusions about the effect of globalization on America.
michelle eischen: Yes. The products of isolation in regional America are political and
racial intolerance. Those things exist in other nations, and our communities are
gateways for bringing people from other nations, and specific populations go
to specific regions in America. So I am trying to understand how this kind of
regionalism has a place in globalization.
harry harootunian: I really like that question. It dovetails with something I have been
thinking about for the last few days. I have always thought of global capital in
terms of the way it acts on the local. But you put it well: some form of globaliza-
tion really does situate itself on the level of the local or, as I would prefer to say it,
the everyday. But we have not dealt with how that local is able to disaggregate or
segregate capital, or capital’s time. It does, in interesting and unpredictable ways.
zhivka valiavicharska: Gillian Hart’s Disabling Globalization, for example, poses the
problem with the totalizing force of what we mean by “capitalism” methodologi-
cally: global processes, she says, are being actively transformed and transfigured
in their concrete instances, and it is up to our methodological and conceptual
ability to capture these processes in politically “enabling” ways.18
susan buck-morss: I think Michelle’s question is brilliantly stated, and necessary to open
a whole situation that our discourse has somehow not even allowed. It is totally rel-
evant. It is a way of really bringing things together that did not seem to be linked.
claire pentecost: I met a South African artist, Garth Erasmus, a couple of years ago at
Bellagio. He said after Picasso, painting, for Africans, is impossible. The genera-
tion of European artists who used African art totally screwed us. Where do we
enter a globally understandable art language, without either being derivative of
Picasso and the surrealists, or parading some false authenticity?
This really interests me. I am very interested in the responses of artists who
do not normally participate, when they are asked to participate on a global level.
pedro erber: This reminds me of the case of Brazilian modernism in the 1920s, and
more precisely of what a group of intellectuals theorized at that time in terms
of antropofagia. They defined the specificity of Brazilian culture in terms of its
capacity to “eat,” to cannibalize the foreign. Although this was portrayed by
Oswald de Andrade in the 1928 “Anthropophagic Manifesto” as a Brazilian par-
ticularity in relation to the European world, it can be understood as a cultural
strategy for the periphery in general. What cogently emerges in the case of Pi-
casso’s relationship with African art is that, in a sense, European culture too has
always been “anthropophagic” through and through. It grew by cannibalizing
the rest of the world. So even that possibility is foreclosed as an original cultural
strategy for the periphery.

18. Hart, Disabling Globalization: Places of

Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002).
122 art and globalization

james elkins: Claire, that fits perfectly well with what we were talking about during the
week, and it is the main reason I travel to places like Kyrgyzstan. When I said to
Bhaskar that Indian painters like Jamini Roy cannot be described in such a way
that they appear necessary to modernism, I didn’t mean to imply there weren’t
counterexamples. Abanindranath Tagore and Amrita Sher-Gil come to mind,
and there are others in their generations. But no Western text is going to be able
to find a place for an artist like M. F. Hussain, whose work will appear—sorry
to have to say this so nakedly—as belated, watered-down cubism. This is a very
serious problem, which I think needs protracted, sympathetic attention.
And Pedro, Tarsila do Amaral, and other artists of the antropofagia have
places in North American and western European pedagogy, but they are the
places so well understood from Fanon and Said onward: the entrancing and in-
novative but ultimately marginal optional artists of modernism.
claire pentecost: There are art histories being constructed by artists, through their
negotiations. Fred Wilson is a mainstream, inside-man example, but he is mak-
ing new art histories.
zhivka valiavicharska: There is, for example, East Art Map—

claire pentecost: That was done by irwin, a painting group in Slovenia, which has
made a map of the art that was happening in the Soviet bloc—Brian, you can
explain this better.
brian holmes: If you want to do something in art and art history, you have to address
yourself to experimental devices, where people are trying to do something that
is social, that isn’t limited to the realm of education and peer reviewing. There
are a lot of these projects, and they take place on many levels, from activism to
something as complex as intervening in art history.
The East Art Map is an ongoing project of the irwin group, which is part of
the Neue Slowenische Kunst group in Slovenia.19 They began from the observa-
tion that if an Eastern artist goes to the West, they die as an artist, whether a
literal death, or by disappearance and absorption into a field that ignores them.
So they decided to stay in Ljubljana, and one of their projects is a map, which
they made by selecting artists in the former Soviet sphere. At first it was a special
edition of a magazine, then a Web site, and now a large book.
suzana milevska: I am sorry that I have to intervene here, but it is relevant to mention
that irwin did not make the selection of artists on their own: they invited more
than twenty art historians from eastern Europe make the selection and to write
about the artists and art practices that were overlooked by Western art historians
and critics. So there are two omissions in our conversation: the irwin artists did
not make the selection themselves, and it was not only artists from Soviet sphere
that they looked at, but the book also included artists from former Yugoslavia.

19. East Art Map: Contemporary Art and

Eastern Europe, edited by IRWIN (London: After-
all Books, 2006).
123 universality

brian holmes: Whether their choices are right or wrong, and whether the artists stand
up to historical scrutiny or not, some will, and that will lead to other choices.
That will create comparisons different from the usual ones, in which people
say, “Oh, that artist is derivative of what happened in New York.” irwin are
convinced that scrutiny and study will result in an extension and multiplication
of what art history can be. It is an intervention in art history by people who are
outside it.
james elkins: Yes, I’ve met the irwin group, and I’ve seen that project. I agree with
the first part of what you said, that interventions in art history need to find new
forms. And I can’t disagree with the last part of what you said, that artists need to
bring artists to scholars’ attention. But I don’t think of that example as anything
other than an art book—which is how it is presented—and a curiosity. It is often
mentioned as an example of an intervention in art history. I think the problem
is far more serious than anything that can be addressed by just presenting new
artists for consideration. That has always resulted in the marginalization, the
oblivion, of the “new” artist: it happens in Steven Mansbach’s book, in Clark’s
book, in the case of Indian artists, in innumerable attempts to present “new”
modern artists.20
I really don’t want to sound doctrinaire or conservative. I am not at all de-
fending some status quo, or hoping for some universal art history, or defending
some version of the discipline. I am working hard on this problem in my own
research, and my stubbornness comes mainly from seeing the enormous quan-
tity of these efforts, and their universal failure. In Kazakhstan, I “discovered” a
wonderful Kazakh modernist, someone who could plausibly catch the attention
of western European and North American historians of modernism: a truly ex-
ceptional, bizarre, captivating artist, a kind of Alfred Kubin. But I know it will
take more than exhibitions and books to create a narrative of modernisms that
needs to include him. It takes a foundational criticism of the terms of art, his-
tory, and the global, and foundational reconsiderations of concepts like cubism,
expressionism, and so forth.21
claire pentecost: But so what that East Art Project was presented as an art project?
Why is there a line between what counts as art history and art criticism?
james elkins: There doesn’t need to be, but the discourses have to speak to one another.
In that case, I don’t see that they did.
susan buck-morss: But we are not trying to solve the problem, we are showing models.
In other words, the question is: what models are the right ones for changing the
situation? Should we look at theory, or at artists?
zhivka valiavicharska: I think there are two sides here. I side with these emancipatory
knowledges that are emerging, and these self-constituted art histories, that do

20. For Mansbach’s book, see Is Art History 21. See the end of Section 3 of the
Global? Clark’s book is touched on earlier in this Seminars.
transcript.
124 art and globalization

not want to be incorporated. One could read projects like the East Art Project in
this way, and this is precisely their political gesture.
But on the other hand, I do have to agree that there is such an enormous
hegemony of practices, discourses, and methods in art interpretation and art his-
tory. This is why I would caution against making foreclosures by erecting impos-
sibilities and staging universal failures. For me the question is not about whether
alternative art histories and translations are possible, but how they are possible
within the art-historical discursive and institutional contexts; more importantly,
we need to embrace them as they are, in their imperfect formulations, and move
towards their practice. Only their practice can test their validity against history.
suzana milevska: I am not completely convinced of the irrelevance of the issue of
inclusiveness. I doubt that the book would have been published with the well-
established Western art publisher Afterall Books had they not wanted to be
included. Moreover, when I was invited to write the section on contemporary
artists from Macedonia, I encountered another inner contradiction of East Art
Map book project methodology: it was exactly the fact that we were expected
to stick to the national model of reflecting on art. Even though the ambition of
the irwin group was to deconstruct the limitations of the national framework,
there was no relevant cooperation among the invited writers, and we each had to
write about artists from our own countries. We were all working independently,
communicating only with the group members who thus became the masters of
the overall narrative by drawing the relations among the suggested artists into a
map (using questionnaires that were completed by all of us). The map was later
woven into a kind of carpet. It is bewildering how what are assumed to be vi-
brant relations among different art phenomena in eastern Europe have ended up
“objectified.” It’s so contradictory to the project’s otherwise important initial in-
tention of opening new potential interpretations, relations, and collaborations.
andrzej szczerski: The project has also been contested because despite its emancipa-
tory rhetoric—that is, its bringing back lost knowledge—it actually reproduces
the very same essentializing categories of East and West. It can also be argued
that it is a product of globalization, in that it foregrounds those categories, which
operate in a global register.
thomas dacosta kaufmann: We can distinguish here between agents, modalities, and
the means of distribution. The agents are artists in this instance, and I agree there
isn’t a distinction to be made between art historians and artists; after all, before
art history became an academic discipline, most of the people who wrote about
art were artists. Second, the modality or form of the presentation includes the
geographic means of presentation, and its presentation in book form, and this
has also been done before.22 What is distinctive, and gets to the global side of the
matter, is that communication has changed. In all our thirty hours of conversa-
tion, we have talked very little about that issue. In regard to continuities and dis-

22. See Toward a Geography of Art.

125 universality

ruptions: it’s not necessarily only the scale or the speed of things that is involved,
but differences in technologies of communication that become important. The
Internet creates possibilities that are genuinely new, and this point relates to the
question of hegemonic discourses, because Internet sites can be seen very widely.
james elkins: This, of course, pertains to modernist art—in India, in the Balkans, in
other places—but not international contemporary art. It’s another example of
the curious phenomenon I noted when we started this morning: when we talk
about premodern art, or modernism, there are all sorts of ragged edges to what
we say. But when we turn to contemporary international art, even if it’s prob-
lematic, our conversation flows ever so easily. It’s the effect Leo Steinberg called
“modern oblivion.”
chris cutrone: 23 In conceptualizing “commodification,” we have assumed that it is
simply an effect of homogenization. It could instead be understood as an effect
of heterogeneity and homogeneity. Value is said to deconcretize, decontextual-
ize, and homogenize. These categories are being raised only negatively or pejora-
tively, and posed as the problems of capitalism.
But I would propose that we could raise the question of the commodity
form as a kind of participation and not only as constraint or destruction. Re-
cently we have seen the “wiping out” of various forms of particularity in global-
ization, but we have also witnessed the emergence of the local and the particular
through such things as the local/informal economy, which has become an im-
portant aspect of post-Fordist and neoliberal capitalism since the 1960s. All the
discourse on art community, situating art as concrete and irreducible, partakes
of this phenomenon. We should beware of falling into a one-sided understand-
ing and hence potentially reactionary critique of capital and the social forms it
conditions.
Such a dialectical approach to addressing capital, as a temporal-historical
process that is the fundamental structural context for concrete phenomena of
modern society, and the commodity form as double-sided, as bound up with
a process of both emancipation and domination, owes to Marx’s mature criti-
cal theory in the Grundrisse and Capital, elaborated subsequently by the criti-
cal theorists of advanced, twentieth-century capitalism Georg Lukács, Theodor
Adorno, and, more recently, Moishe Postone in his critical exegesis and reinter-
pretation of Marx.24
james elkins: That is a wonderful note to strike here at the end, because it keeps alive
the possibility that we might not be investigating our subject only in order to
find new ways to break the system. The global art world is so enormous, so rich,
and yet so vapid, that it deserves serious study and not just intervention.
Thank you, everyone. See you next year.

23. Cutrone teaches in Liberal Arts at the 24. Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social
School of the Art Institute of Chicago. See Domination (Cambridge: Cambridge University
home.speedsite.com/ccutrone/. Press, 1993).
Assessments
globalism/globalization

Caroline A. Jones

If constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair, it is
all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless
criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results
it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers
that be.
—karl marx to arnold ruge, 1843

In the sheaves of documents associated with this book was an intriguing incon-
sistency. Reading various proposals and synopses, I wondered: was the book to be
Globalism and Art (as in some versions) or Globalization and Art (as in others)?1
In other words, was the brief to examine artistic representations of an actively
evolving world system? Aiming at “globalism,” to operate within the discursive
sphere of art, with its traditional “isms” producing situated subjects by leverag-
ing a protected aesthetic realm? Or was the book going to wade into charged
debates over the powerful economic, environmental, and political processes that
are captured by the term “globalization,” imagined to harry art’s autonomy at
every turn? The former imagines that the work of art can be given attributes by
the artist so that the object may knowingly reflect on its global situation from
a protected sphere; the latter suggests the artwork’s helplessness, its inability to
avoid translations, transactions, transportation, and transformation by pervasive
processes of globalization. The latter seems to dominate the Seminars—but the
utopian dreams of the former haunt every page.
Thus we find the traces of these two formations in the printed seminars:
globalization [G] dominating globalism [g], anxious Left academics battling for
intellect’s autonomous realm. My goal here will be to advocate [g] over [G], but
what is also worth noting are the topoi that wind between the two possibilities
and reveal them as interdependent. Take Jim Elkins’s constant admonishment
that we should really be thinking about global art production in quasistatistical
terms. He asks roguishly whether there isn’t more tourist than “fine” art, aren’t
more collectors acquiring “art” from the cruise ship than from the dealer next
door, more visual things on people’s walls and the screens of their computers
than have ever passed through the so-called art world. Elkins’s demotic desires
motivate an argument that no theory of art can call itself “global” if it cannot
leave the (still modernist) fascination with “critique” and elite art production [g]

1. Yet another was Theorizing World Art,

which suggests the packaged consumer panoply
of “world music.”
130 art and globalization

to deal with the globalized labor that produces art-like objects every day [G]. Yet
to address this question properly (and frame it, as does Shigemi Inaga, in terms
of “cultural capital” per Bourdieu), one would need to bring the work of more
quantitative social scientists into the discussion.2 Yet they were not invited to the
seminars—art, literary, political, and cultural theorists predominate. Thus the
fear that we should really be dealing with [G] kept erupting, despite the fact that
[g] is much more accessible to our analytic tools.
The second trope emerged in the shadow of those absent quantitative social
scientists. Marxist economist Ernest Mandel’s category of “late capitalism” was
important for reorienting the work of culture from individual genius to social
agency, yet its thoughtful adherents Buck-Morss, Jameson, and Inaga have no
interest in measuring art by numerousness, ubiquity, market share, or consum-
er satisfaction. They ask instead a more urgent set of questions inherited from
modernism’s Marxist past, and its productive twilight in the 1970s—what is to
be done, and what is being done even now? The urgency is driven by the certain-
ty that “trickle-down” globalization is most pernicious when it hits the ground
of local practice. Artists outside the center (which center still exists, apparently,
and is here in the good old U.S. of A., according to a performative claim made
by [the American] Fredric Jameson) have little chance of negotiating with the
hegemony of capitalism in its late, Hardt and Negri–style dispersed imperial
phase. [g] is dwarfed by [G] at every turn.
Unless, in Inaga’s and Kaufmann’s very provocative interventions, we reckon
with the fact that culture is always moving, acquiring ideas and producing other
ideas and “things to be collected.” In this fruitful model, we can argue that the
dominant mode of all kinds of cultural production is, in fact, appropriation and
translation. This activity neutralizes the hidden imperialism of an always-dis-
cursive “center” by producing an infinitely extensive surface of borrowings and
mimetic adaptations. Potentially fusing the [g] and [G] strains, creative mispri-
sion emerges as the first path to “local” identity, and identitarian cultural forms
can be strategically reconnected to a global flow.
Yet this promise of synthesis never really happens, and the two strains never
fully intertwine. Elkins never gets anyone to care about the kitschy cruise ship
artist, and Jameson never seems to convince anyone (certainly not this writer)
to agree with resurrected twentieth-century epigrams such as “There is only the
national situation . . . It’s a boundary that cannot really be transgressed.” Young-
er participants in particular seemed restive with such pronouncements. I don’t
blame them: it’s not that the national disappears, it’s just that it needs to be
understood as an ideological effect of globalization rather than some impervious
boundary to its invasive force.3

2. I’m thinking here of the work of econo-
mists such as Bruno Frey, who argues that the
measurable economic effects of having an opera
in your town, for example, far outweigh the
likelihood that you will actually attend. See Frey,
Arts and Economics: Analysis and Cultural Policy
(Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2000).
3. It is, in this argument, the intensifying
pressures of internationalizing technical regimes
and world orders that stimulates the highest
pitch of nation-talk and ethnic action. In his
analysis of the “Nation-Thing,” Slavoj Z̆iz̆ek cites
Lacan in locating the upsurge of ethnic national-
isms “as the reverse of the striving after uni-
131 assessments

Perhaps because few actual artists got discussed, the seminars were more
about the problem of the global in art history than in art. Actually existing art
production would be a good place to begin questioning this scalar divide—be-
tween, on the one hand, the dispersed microeconomies implied by Elkins, who
wants to think about isolated but highly productive “art pockets” around the
world (whether the now-infamous cruise ship artist, or the painter of big-bot-
tomed nudes for local living rooms in Kazakhstan), and, on the other, the world-
girdling hegemony of capital suggested by Jameson, where the only conceivable
form of resistance is to “do work that doesn’t want to be looked at by Americans”
(the Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai’s work set in Buenos Aires being his
example—although he does seem to have looked at it).4
Actually existing art production does happen in pockets5—but then we need
to ask how the pockets are sutured together into economies and discourse net-
works (such as the event itself, the Stone Theory Institute). It turns out that this
suturing happens through practices that are already global, including Elkins’s
travels around the world, his increasingly well-published and distributed lec-
tures, and his now also public discussion of the Kazakh artist—who is suddenly
less isolated than one might have thought. Similarly, the “resistance” Jameson
wants to see in local production is already global if it is positioning itself against
an imagined tractor beam of global proportions—at least in the rhetoric and
discourse of “central” scholars.
A potential for bridging Elkins’s thesis and Jameson’s antithesis was a third
trope that began to emerge from the eddying debates. Inaga’s emphasis on trans-
lation, and Kaufmann’s on transportation, fueled younger scholars’ interests in
the localized production of the subject in and for globalization. Here is where
Jameson connects (at least for this reader): “As for consumption: I think an ex-
cellent way of talking about it is in terms of constructing subjectivity. Art and
culture program people to live in this new world of globalization, and in par-
ticular in its new spaces . . . The ideas people have about globalization and the
free market are certainly part of what the artwork works on, and it is very much
involved in consumption.”6 I would argue, however, that the Marxist distinction
between production and consumption is too rigid to be useful at this moment,
for the contemporary art world is full of shifting models that mix and muddy

versality that constitutes the very basis of our
capitalist civilization”—but “reverse” understood
not dialectically but psychically, as residue or
effect. Z̆iz̆ek, Looking Awry (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1991): 162.
4. Echoing “actually existing socialism” here
is not purely a joke (mocking the blasted ter-
rain of Brezhnev’s plans for Eastern Europe). It
means to take our leftist anxieties about what
global capitalism is doing to us seriously, both
by reminding us of the roots of our utopianism
and by bringing these ideas to the measure of
actual praxis.
5. Indeed, Alice Kim provides this gloss on
the supposedly “unavailable to Americans” work
Jameson references: “This movie won the best
director prize at Cannes (Wong Kar Wai attains
recognition as global auteur director), Tarantino
introduced and released Wong’s Chungking
Express to American film audiences, and most
of Wong’s films have been re-released as DVDs
by the Criterion Collection. And In the Mood for
Love and 2046 didn’t do too badly in the U.S.
box offices either. Wong’s highly stylized mov-
ies may not be on the short list of Hollywood
enthusiasts but they are avidly consumed by
many American cinephiles—especially fans of
the French New Wave, as well as art students
etc.—you can even find this film at some Block-
busters outlets.” E-mail communication, March
3, 2008.
6. See Section 1 of the Seminars.
132 art and globalization

these very categories (just as outside the art world’s semipoliced boundaries,
categories of vee-jays and d-jays, mixers and matchers, YouTubers and Face-
bookers fatally complicate the model of maker and receiver).7 The artist herself
experiments with subject formation, being the first “consumer” of the art in its
ideational phase; the collector fiddles with aesthetic subject formation, installing
the piece just so; the art critic’s subjectivity shifts, sometimes cataclysmically,
in direct encounter with whatever it is we still call “art.”8 In this ever-shifting
context, what frame could it be, in which “there is only the national situation”?9
Given that globalization (like internationalism before it) works as a surfactant,
spreading across world systems to break the surface tension of “the nation” (with
“German” pavilions famously exhibiting a Korean American, or Documenta
Platforms operating in New Delhi, Dakar, and Lagos, or Manifestas and bienni-
als leveraging global attention on cities, rather than states). That “nation thing”
(per Žižek) is produced today as a trauma-scarred remainder in globalization’s
biennial culture—produced only to be broken, and reformulated, and broken,
performatively, again and again.10
Such forces of translation and transportation make it equally problematic,
in my view, to describe Hélio Oiticica as an artist whose effectiveness was con-
fined to the “smaller country” of Brazil (smaller than what, and how would that
be measured?), where presumably, per Jameson, an artist emerging “outside the
center” would need to remain in order for his work to have its greatest politi-
cal resonance. Umgekehrt! Oiticica was engaged in actually existing globalized
art production—and this can be studied in historical terms, since he was most
active from the 1960s through the late 1970s. The only way one could agree
with Jameson’s depressing judgment that a non-“central” artist works best at
home would be to ignore this history, as when Pedro Erber blames “a generalized
blindness among critics and scholars in the United States and Europe” for their
supposed incapacity to recognize “the international or transnational implica-
tions of the works of artists in these ‘smaller countries,’” such as Oiticica.11 His
writings were collected and studied in English (see the Witte de With catalogue
of 1992) in parallel with their collation and publication in Brazil.12

7. See Jones, “The Server-User Mode,” Artfo-
rum 46, no. 2 (October 2007): 316–25.
8. Here one thinks of Diderot dealing with
Greuze, Baudelaire encountering Guys and then
challenged by Manet, or Greenberg transformed
first by Mondrian and then Pollock.
9. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s salutary
focus on “things made to be collected” (or, I
would add, gifted as tribute) reminds us that
long before the national, the trade in fancy
goods had always vexed the boundaries of the
local—that was its job. The Bronze Age dagger
of Ahmose found in Queen Aah-Hotep’s Egyptian
tomb uses Phoenician palmettes laid in niello
techniques from Byblos with Syrian animal-style
motives to make tribute to the knowing tastes
of its royal recipient. This tribute item already
knows the tricks of a trade that will display ex-
otic distinction along with a bravura syncretism
available to the skilled artisans and cosmopoli-
tans of the day.
Objects at this and larger scales (the archi-
tecture of Venice, for example) perform their
worldliness—not as hapless “influence” but
artistic strategy—and it is only the blindered
optics of regionally organized art history that
have hampered us from telling these more nu-
anced tales.
10. Z̆iz̆ek, Looking Awry, 162.
11. See Section 1 of the Seminars.
12. Hélio Oiticica (Rotterdam: Witte de With
Center for Contemporary Art; Minneapolis: Walker
Art Center, 1992). The exhibition appeared in
Rotterdam February 22–April 26, 1992; Galerie
nationale du jeu de paume, Paris, June 8–August
23, 1992; Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona,
October 1–December 6, 1992; Centro de Arte
Moderna da Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian, Lis-
133 assessments

Oiticica is a good historical example of actually existing global production.

Increasingly in the postwar period, we see a globalism that required a multicon-
tinental set of contacts, whether imaginative or actual. Oiticica’s imagined “con-
tact” with Mondrian even when he was still in Brazil is important to my argu-
ment, precisely because—via the theory of antropofagia (aggressive consumption
of the culturally “Other” by the culturally “native”)—it appropriates, translates,
and aggressively interprets the dominant master of Western abstraction. To my
reckoning there is no theorist or historian who captures the sublimated spirit-
work of the Dutch modernist more accurately, or gets its spatial implications
more fully, than Oiticica. Providing an “object lesson” for us today, Oiticica
shows what it means to transform the utopian universalism of Mondrian’s Eu-
ropean abstraction into a strategically local “efflorescence,” referencing its latitu-
dinal concerns with a different kind of light and color even as it gives important
feedback to European modernism about what systems of repression and exclu-
sion undergird “universalist” claims.13
Oiticica’s history exemplifies something of the real-world practice of actu-
ally-existing-globality, which in his case would include the artist’s important
correspondence with Lygia Clark in Paris, his enduring bond with Guy Brett
in London, his cooperation with curator Kynaston McShine in New York (Mc-
Shine included him in MoMA’s 1970 Information show), and of course the in-
formal global network of cocaine trafficking that paid the rent on his Manhattan
apartment and kept Oiticica buzzing.14 All of these contacts tethered him to an
increasingly global art world during a punishing military dictatorship in Brazil,
where he didn’t have a chance of showing his face, much less his art, for decades.
How to understand and configure such actually existing globalization of art
production and reception? In the case of Oiticica’s work, we trace the figure of his
globality in the very rootlessness of his practices: surfing on information (in the
form of magazines, music, gossip, and his own intensively documented designs)
and creating “Bablyonests” for temporary habitation within the confines of a
usefully anonymizing Manhattan. Nomadism is the constructed “nature” of his
art, with its tents, habitats, performative cloaks, and portable nesting pods. Yet
while antropofagia was effective for Oiticica to theorize the localized work of ne-
gotiation with the global, the concept imports a toxic metaphor of essentialized
“savages” that encounter and devour the Euro-American Other.15 Antropofagia

bon, January 20–March 20, 1993; and the Walker
Art Center in Minneapolis, October 31, 1993–Feb-
ruary 20, 1994. Brazilian publication was quite
slow until military rule ended in the mid 1980s.
13. Recall Greenberg’s comment on the
global ambitions of Mondrian’s project: “[The]
final intention of his work is to expand painting
into the décor of the man-made world—what of
it we see, move in, and handle. This means im-
posing a style on industry, and thus adumbrates
the most ambitious program a single art has
ever ventured upon.” Greenberg, The Collected
Essays and Criticism, vol. 1 (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1986), 188.
14. Kynaston McShine, Information (New
York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1970). [This is
discussed below, in Esther Gabara’s Assessment.
—J.E.]
15. Based on the 1928 manifesto by poet
Oswald de Andrade, antropofagia has to be
seen in parallel with other “racialized” theories
of contact and modernization, such as Mexican
minister of education José Vasconcelos, who
published in 1925 his theory of mestizaje (mis-
cegenation), in which the four world races would
ultimately merge into a fifth, “cosmic” race.
134 art and globalization

is eventually inadequate, because Oiticica always operated on both sides of the

constructed border.
What I am calling “actually existing globalisms” or “actually existing global-
ity” are sets of conscious aesthetic strategies concocted in response to increas-
ingly obvious conditions and constraints on visibility in a truly worldwide art
system.16 Without taking up the fanciful French distinction between mondi-
alization (a kinder, gentler, cultural worldliness) and globalization (that nasty
American form of capitalism), we can make our own useful distinctions between
these terms in English: the global, globalism, globality, globalization. Just as
we usefully deploy the semantic differences among derivations of the modern:
“modernism” as an aesthetic strategy for responding to a condition of “moderni-
ty” being pressured by ever-quickening “modernization”; so we can use “global-
ism” to designate the artist’s conscious reference to the condition of “globality”
formed by ever-expanding regimes of “globalization.” Globalism or [g] is the
artist’s mining of widely shared references, against which he or she might pose
the strangeness, wonder, resistance, or irritation of local residues—the abjecta
of the nation-thing, the friction of the other’s body, the re-production of sexual
difference, the existence of mottled temporalities, and so forth.
The [g] I am analyzing is in full-throttle negotiation with [G]. Yet despite
what the majuscule and minuscule relation of those typefaces suggests, this is
no longer the superstructure teetering on an enormous base. Rather, we have to
see [g] as multiple, molecular, interstitial, and as widely dispersed as [G]; these
multiple aesthetic globalisms are both the surfactants that produce us as subjects
for globalization and also the textures that give us the consciousness to resist its
more pernicious homogenizations. In the most effective art of today, the analyt-
ics and strategies of globalism form an already existing set of practices. They are
still-being-theorized beliefs, convictions, and behaviors analogous to those we
once called modernist: but in place of an active aesthetic negotiation with the
condition of modernity and the process of modernization, we are forging an
active aesthetic negotiation with the condition of globality and the process of
globalization.
As we look at historical and present cases of actually existing globalism, the
constituent elements of a larger demographic might be outlined (within which
I positioned Oiticica as an exemplary model). And in this longer-term demo-
graphic are clues to contemporary globalist practices: the artist will have a dealer
on several continents, a world phone not tied to any landline, a proprietary
Web site (with nonnational e-mail address to match) in which artist-certified
documentation can be accessed from any network portal on earth. Media that
are easily transported, such as video installation, are favored, as are commission
structures in which work can be designed (or adapted) after a site visit and then
installed by assistants. Artwork and discourse networks speak to subjects who are

16. Here I disagree with Jameson that the ket. China, for example, moved into third place
U.S. remains “the center,” when the Basel Art for art revenue during the U.S.-led recession in
Fair, British Frieze, and even Beijing may be 2008 (just behind the U.S. and the UK).
more economically active centers of the art mar-
135 assessments

not universal, but multiply locatable (in the manner of translations, often made
manifest in the catalogues accompanying the globalist show). The ex-nationals
and transnationals moving restlessly through this global art world are subjects
who demand from us nonessentialist thinking. Oiticica, for example, was upper
class in the Third World and lower class in the first, possessing class mobility in
both directions. His “transnationality” became “translational” indeed—abetted
by the gay identity that drove him to cross racial and geographic boundaries
even when “home” in Brazil. It’s truly a bizarre twist on Oiticica’s complexity to
cement him into a “national” context, where he becomes a victim “ignored” by
the Anglo-European hegemony.17 Partially educated in the United States, shown
in London at an important and transformative phase of his career, often dia-
sporic or exiled, lapsed from Brazilian art history until the mid-1980s, Oiticica
can neither be seen as exclusively Brazilian nor precisely anything else. These are
the conundra that should properly beset an art history still locked in regional
taxonomies (from the slide drawers to the database)—and it is time to compli-
cate such fixities, if we do nothing else.
Mind you, the national, regional, and “international” rubrics that estab-
lished art history die hard. They are rising again in “contemporary” art history.
A shifting target that began with the canonization of postwar art, reset the clock
to the 1970s in the 1990s, and is now considering the 1980s or ’90s fair game,
histories of “contemporary art” are threatening to recapitulate the area studies of
an earlier age: students study “Contemporary art of the Middle East,” “Postwar
performance art in eastern Europe,” “Painting factories in China,” “Contempo-
rary art in North Africa”. . . Will there be jobs in these domains in the decades to
come? Will departments that used to clamor for modernists now look for “con-
temporary” and be willing to accept a subspeciality not in EuroAmerica? That
will be the day when actually existing globalism in the practice of artists is truly
reflected in our putatively “global” histories of art, when we are truly willing to
move beyond the endlessly asserted Euro-American “center” of our discourse to
examine and learn from art of the other three continents.
But of course what we crave is more than an endless nominalism, where
boxes are ticked to register nations, regions, or continents. We want globalism
built into the consciousness of the art object itself. And so Xu Bing’s magisterial
Book from the Sky displays itself as a translational model, where its ideograms will
be verbally empty (and thus aesthetic) on both sides of the East–West “divide.”18
Santiago Sierra’s edgy performance-based works address transnational labor, us-
ing the boundaries of the art world as the perch upon which to pivot an Archi-
medean lever that swivels globalization into view as globalist art.19 Walid Ra’ad

17. WorldCat lists sixty-two publications on
Oiticica in Portuguese, forty-three in English.
18. Xu Bing, Book from the Sky, sometimes
also translated as Book of Heaven, 1987–91.
Now owned by Queensland Art Gallery, Australia,
it is made up of hundreds of books, “sutra”-type
scrolls, and wall-mounted hangings that are
printed with four thousand hand-cut woodblock
ideograms that appear (to the illiterate) to be
Chinese characters. Since the fluent reader of
Mandarin knows them to be “false,” fabricated
precisely to be meaningless, they perform the
impossibility of translation across shifting con-
texts each time the work is installed.
19. In a well-known work by Santiago
Sierra, 250 cm line tattooed on 6 paid people
136 art and globalization

isolates and mimics the visual tropes of “universalizing” informatics, so that its
global “look and feel” will become palpable, even if the contents are open to lo-
cal doubt.20
It is for this reason that the critic must demur: not all global art is globalist.
Elkins’s Kazakhistani bottom-painter—who is certainly “in view” for this global
crowd—will not be successfully in view, and will not be capable of being taught
in the majority of pedagogical situations (which are still mostly in Europe and
the United States) unless his work can be seen to “talk to” our present concerns,
as examined with the analytical tools that we have honed in this discipline over
its century-plus existence. But conversely, actually existing globalism ensures
that the discipline itself is no longer just Euro-American. Its tool kit now incor-
porates many more of the devices from those non-European loci—Susan Vogel’s
contribution to our understanding of Baule aesthetic systems in West Africa, for
example, or renewed theoretical interest in the seven Confucian “arts” (which
didn’t include painting!), or research into the Islamic theories of perception that
fueled the Renaissance.
In other words, I am not interested in adding the objects of “other” cultures
to our survey courses without teaching the epistemological and social systems
that give them value and propel them into global exchange today. Vasari paid no
attention to the cassoni, decorated cuirasses, and majolica plates being made in
Tuscany—even though many of these objects “made to be collected” found their
way around the world. Similarly, we remain uninterested in Elkins’s cruise-ship
palette-knifer or the putatively isolated Kazakh21—until a Riegl comes along to
convey something of the interpretive frames that give them (local) value, discov-
er the (local) knowledge they are able to produce, and learn how such situated
knowledge contributes to a (global) world picture.
The implicit value scheme I am bringing to this discussion can be made ex-
plicit: unless the art historian can use the objects under study to explore modes
of subjectivity we are experiencing under globalization, then they are of no use
to our study of the global. They will lay the groundwork for Kazakh studies, or
the basis of sociologies of kitsch, but they will not have bearing on our histories
from the present. To quote Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay’s admirable challenge to the
old humanist model fueling this area study or that artist monograph: “the void
created by the disappearance of Man (leading to a certain deontologization of
the very category of ‘art’) has not created a deficiency . . . It has led to a prolifera-

(1999), Sierra uses the “lens” of the art world
to train a burning gaze on the global circula-
tion of migrant labor—those bodies willing and
available to earn small sums of money from
what circulates unevenly in a global economy
(here the art world). The workers he pays to
participate in his performative projects literally
loan their bodies to the work of Sierra’s mordant
aesthetic, whether allowing their hair to be dyed
blond (mostly Africans working quasi-illegally
in Venice during the 2001 Biennale) or having a
line tattooed on their backs, temporarily aligned
for the “job” at hand.
20. Walid Ra’ad, The Atlas Group: Fakouri
File, 1999, features some of the elaborate
historical characters Ra’ad creates, producing
materials that inhabit an equally elaborate
archive. The works on display exhibit the clean
typography and ordering characteristic of global
knowledge systems, juxtaposed with handwrit-
ten Arabic and other traces of the “local” knowl-
edge of a lost history of the war in Lebanon
that is Ra’ad’s true subject.
21. But how isolated could he be, if Elkins
could find him?
137 assessments

tion of empirical works, often microstudies, to a resurgence of local knowledges,

and finally, to the writing of philosophical genealogies which show that far from
being an attribute of some mythical Man, ‘art’ is, at its best, a convention.”22
Let us study those conventions! Particularly to address the surge in what I have
called globalist art: let us decode their systematic attributes, their modes of cir-
culation and reproduction, the operations through which they provide such un-
canny mirrors of our globalized existence. The surfactants of globalization that
dissolve the national (while producing it as residue or effect), that propel global-
ist art, and that place the linguistically specific in tension with its translation are
just as full of convention as the art of those “local” microstudies Mukhopadhyay
praises. Thus his call for what Isabelle Stengers terms radical empiricism is surely
a way to empower art history in this globalizing frame. Examining the conven-
tionality of art and its systems at every level is what art history should be doing,
and what the most interesting artists have always done.
Globalism is neither a paradigm nor a master narrative. It is a set of already
existing aesthetic strategies begging to be understood.

22. See Section 3 of the Seminars.

letter on globalization

Karl Eric Leitzel

[Note: when we canvassed for writers to contribute assessments, we did not want to
limit ourselves to academic scholarship. Leitzel is founder and director of Landscape
Artists International, and so he speaks for another kind of international art commu-
nity, one that is bypassed by art fairs, biennales, and academia.—J.E.]

Dear Jim,
I read over the entire seminar packet you sent me, skimming some portions
and reading other parts carefully. I’m afraid this field of art history theory is
something so foreign to me that I would be of little use in attempting to contrib-
ute any specific commentary. I’m totally unfamiliar with the publications and
sources cited, and equally unfamiliar with the various theories and lines of art
history mentioned.
When most artists get together and actually find time to talk about tech-
nique, style, or our own influences, it’s much more in the realm of everyday life
and language. Someone might mention Monet and the palette he is known to
have used, or the glazing techniques employed by the Dutch masters, but there
is seldom any talk of what line of artistic expression one wants to study and then
further develop. Frankly, most of us operate mostly in the intuitive sphere. I see a
pastoral scene in front of me in the early morning light, and I get out my canvas
and paints and begin painting. Certainly, every piece of art I’ve ever looked at
and every painting I’ve completed previously has a bearing on my approach and
execution of the piece, but I seldom think a whole lot about it.
It’s the same with my approach to global art. I’m in e-mail contact with
painters around the world as the director of Landscape Artists International, but
we really don’t think much at all about the country or cultural line of art we rep-
resent. We comment on what we like about the others’ work, perhaps compare
notes on the availability of certain materials in different place, or perhaps discuss
the relative difficulty of making a living as a working artist in different countries.
I think what you have is the world of art historians and art theorists repre-
senting the science of understanding art, and most artists living in the art of un-
derstanding art. A scientist concentrates mostly on understanding a large thing
by taking it apart into little pieces and then studying those pieces to death, hop-
ing to be able to end up with a detailed, accurate description of what is going on.
An artist looks at a big thing, whether it is a subject to be painted or an idea like
the history of all art that has preceded him, and soaks it in, plays it through the
139 assessments

filters of his emotional response and his sensory interpretation, and then decides
what he wants to create out of the whole resulting pot of soup. For many artists,
to be too focused on achieving some precisely defined goal or meeting critical
expectations would get in the way. I’m sure this does not hold true of all artists,
who are a very varied lot, but I think it is typical of most that I know.
letter on globalization

Rasheed Araeen

Dear Alice Kim,

Thanks very much for sending me the transcript of the seminars, which I
find extremely interesting and useful. But why do you expect me to respond to
them? You can only respond to something when there is a common ground.
How can I respond to the debate of which I’m not an active part, not as a subject
but an object which is being looked at by those who claim to possess knowledge?
But do they? What is the source of their knowledge, if not the very institutional
discourse which is under their scrutiny and critique? Do the participants of the
seminars know that they themselves are the victims of the ignorance perpetu-
ated by the very institutional space they occupy? In fact, I’m amazed and baffled
by their ignorance, if not their patronizing attitude. Why are they looking at
faraway India, China, Central Asia, or Latin America? Postwar European cities
of Paris, London, Amsterdam, and so on were transformed into multiracial and
multicultural metropolises by the new immigrants, among them artists, from
Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America—let alone New York, which
has been multiracial since long time ago. Why do they not look at what these
cities have produced? I’m not alluding to multiculturalism or the diversity of
so-called ethnic cultures, but what happened within the central space of postwar
modernism or the avant-garde as a result of the entry of nonwhite artists into
this space. Did they follow the beaten paths of modernism or bring into it their
own innovations by which the canons of history are formed? The participants of
the seminars would say that they know nothing about them. Why don’t they?
Most of the participants are art historians and teachers of art history. What do
they teach? Have they ever doubted that what they have been teaching might be
flawed, that what they teach is at the expense of what has been suppressed? I do
realize that they may not be happy with some of what they teach, this is clear in
the Seminars. But if Eurocentricity of the prevailing art history is the problem,
this problem affects not only what is located away from the metropolises, but,
more importantly, what has happened within its own modernity, particularly
in its postwar period. How can one deal with this problem when those who are
concerned with this problem are looking only away from where the problem
lies? How can one deal with this problem when one is unaware of the fact that
the Eurocentricity of art history has already been challenged and demolished, by
the very people who are not supposed to be within it? The problem now is not
Eurocentricity, but the institutional suppression of what has already challenged
and demolished it.
141 assessments

I’m amazed and somewhat baffled by the fact that no one seems to know
the work of the art journal Third Text, which has been in existence for more than
twenty years and so far has produced eighty-nine issues. The very basis of Third
Text scholarship has been to deal with the issues which the seminars have now
raised. If the participants of the seminars knew about this work, they would have
not looked at the issues as they did. The nature of the whole debate would have
been different. If they did know the work of Third Text but decided to ignore it,
then this raises the disturbing question of the intention and aim of the seminars.
What did they actually want to achieve, beyond an academic exercise that per-
petuates the status of those who are already in power and are unable to see that
the nature of this power is part of the problem? They can use this power to look
at others, but this power cannot allow others to challenge it.
My advice to the participants of the seminars would be that they should
first look at what has been suppressed within and by the institutional space they
themselves occupy, and then set up a framework in which a dialogue can occur
between those who possess power and those who have been excluded from it.
When this happens, I will be happy to be part of the debate and respond to the
questions it wants to deal with. In fact, I will be happy to provide the knowledge
that has been missing from the seminars.
hybridization and the geopolitics of art

Néstor García Canclini

Is it useful to talk of hybridization in the twenty-first century?1 Is it a concept

that can accommodate different kinds of “mixture, coherence, and incoher-
ence”? Or is it inappropriate for the current condition of intercultural and global
artistic development? These questions, discussed in one of the Stone Theory
Institute seminars, prove the need to work on the concept of hybridization in a
similar way to the work required by any other concept whose internationaliza-
tion happens in multiple ways: we must situate hybridization within the various
historical conditions in which it appeared and developed, as well as its differ-
ent geopolitical contexts.2 If we want to avoid the imposition of Occidental (or
Euro-American) models to other regions, as this Seminar attempts, it is crucial
to consider the different periods and sociocultural conditions in which concepts
emerge and are interpreted.
Why has the study of the hybridization processes been on the horizon in
the last decades? Its origins as a concept are as old as the text of Pliny the Elder.
He mentioned it referring to the migrants who arrived in Rome and motivated
exchanges and mixtures. If systematized studies on hybridization began only
twenty-five years ago, it is because globalization increased the interdependences
and exchanges between cultures. But hybridization is not understood in the
same way in the first two books devoted to its study: Hybrid Cultures, which I
published in Spanish in 1989 (it was translated into English in 1995); and The
Location of Culture by Homi Bhabha, published in 1994.3
The understanding of the concept of hybridization was extended by studies
undertaken during the 1990s by Eduardo Archetti, James Clifford, Román de
la Campa, Stuart Hall, Penelope Harvey, and Robert Young, among others, as
well as by the theoretical contributions of Nikos Papastergiadis and Pnina Wer-
ber.4 These works demonstrate the multiplicity of possible uses of hybridization
when analyzing interethnical and decolonization processes, cross-border con-
nections, artistic, literary, and communicational fusions, gastronomical mix-

1. In addition to sources cited below, see
Penelope Harvey, Hybrids of Modernity: Anthro-
pology, the Nation State, and the Universal
Exhibition (New York: Routledge, 1996); Rem
Koolhaas, Delirio de Nueva York (Madrid:
Gustavo Gili, 2004); Pnina Werbner and Tariq
Modood, Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-
cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-racism
(London: Zed Books, 1997).
2. See Section 4 of the Seminars.
3. García Canclini, La globalización
imaginada (Mexico City: Paidós, 2001); García
Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering
and Leaving Modernity (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2005).
4. See, for example, Noel Dyck and Eduardo
Archetti, eds., Sport, Dance, and Embodied
Identities (Oxford: Berg, 2003); De la Campa,
América latina y sus comunidades discursivas:
Literatura y cultura en la era global (Caracas:
Fundación Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos
Rómulo Gallegos, 1999); Harvey, Hybrids of
Modernity; and Papastergiadis, The Turbulence
of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization,
and Hybridity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000). [—J.E.]
143 assessments

tures, and the combination of discursive and museographic strategies utilized

in universal exhibitions.
In the first edition of Hybrid Cultures, I found the concept of hybridization
useful in challenging fundamental conceptions of ethnic, national, or local iden-
tities, and also because hybridization is inclusive in relation to the interethnical
mixtures called mestizations in Latin languages (syncretisms when referring to re-
ligion). Hybridization also helped conceptualize combinations of the traditional
and the modern, the erudite, and the popular. Because the use of the concept
diversified and the debates around it increased, I elaborated the epistemological
debate, and that analysis is included in the new introduction published in Span-
ish in 2001 and incorporated in the English edition in 2005.
Let me consider some of the variations that appear in these heterogeneous
registers.
Angela Miller argues in the Seminar that “hybridity has long been a funda-
mental strategy of cultural survival for indigenous peoples under colonization”;
James Elkins and Michele Greet identify in the Latin American perspectives a
wider use referring to “lived experience” in the societies that articulate the ab-
origine, the European influences “between two or more specific, local contexts,
or else between a local context and a wider regional or global context.”5 Other
constructions of the concept were elaborated by Homi Bhabha referring to the
interrelations of national ethnic cultures with metropolitan cultures, or to the
interrelations of nations with the strategies of global institutions, such as the
1992 Universal Exhibition held in Seville, studied by Penelope Harvey.
It is not easy to establish a single concept of hybridization that could be ap-
plied to all processes, or to be suitable in the various theories of art and culture.
I agree with Darby English on the need to distinguish between hybridity as a
“condition” and as a “process.” To emphasize this last aspect, I argue that it is
convenient to talk about “hybridization” more than “hybridity.”
Some critics of my first version of Hybrid Cultures (John Kraniaukas, Fred-
ric Jameson, and, in the Seminar, James Elkins) have rightly questioned a ten-
dency to celebrate hybridity as a generative state. I still value several processes of
hybridization as movements that allow groups to transcend their fundamental
identity, and allow social scientists to avoid defending nonexistent authentici-
ties. However, in the first edition of my book, as in Bhabha’s book and others,
hybridization did not appear simply as a synonym for easy conciliation. Ulti-
mately, hybridization is a general descriptive notion. It alludes to fusions that
must be examined independently in order to establish if they are hegemonic or
resistant, and whether or not they are fecund. Intercultural studies are wider and
more specific: they consider not only fusions but also other interactions between
cultures, such as conflict, discrimination, or combination without hybridiza-
tion. Research on intercultural mixtures are still undecided on the question of
how to organize social interactions and power relations when monotheistic and
polytheistic religions have to coexist, how to address incompatible conceptions

5. See Section 4 of the Seminars.

144 art and globalization

of humor (as the Danish cartoons of Mohammed), how to think about differ-
ent family models, diverse generational styles in the same society, or what to do
with intercultural misunderstandings. Therefore, I would argue that in contrast
with what occurred in the last decade of the past century, the exploration of the
hybridization process cannot be more than a chapter of the multiple forms of
intercultural studies.
The attempts to build a new, general theory of hybridization are often re-
lated to the framework of postcolonial theory (as was the case of some partici-
pants in the Seminar). Several Latin Americanists from American universities
have attempted to translate postcolonial characteristics to contemporary Latin
America. As a consequence, they redefine conflicts of the late twentieth century
as if they had a structure and political options similar to those of India or African
countries. This theoretical transference has produced attractive reinterpretations
of the period when parts of the Americas were Spanish or Portuguese colonies
and for the time after their independence in the first half of the nineteenth cen-
tury. Such interpretations often analyze the postcolonial situation with more so-
phistication than the classic works from Latin American historians. The same is
true for the ideological debates of the 1960s and 1970s that tried to describe the
fight against Latin American dependency as anticolonialism or anti-imperialism.
The best sociological, anthropological, or cultural studies academic writ-
ing done in Latin America considers postcolonial thinking hardly applicable
to a continent in which many countries will celebrate the bicentenary of their
independence in 2010. Postcolonial theory does not apply if by colonialism we
understand the political and military occupation of the territory of a subordi-
nate population. Latin American societies stopped being colonies two centuries
ago, with the exception of Puerto Rico. Therefore the socioeconomic and cul-
tural conditions should be explained as part of modernity and as a consequence
of our subaltern position in the unequal modern world. What is happening in
this last modern phase called globalization has to be understood using accurate
information; the disregard of the empirical data that reveals how our continent
is in a different situation that Africa and Asia is what has led most postcolonial
analysts to see America Latina as a discursive community oscillating between the
colony and postmodernity.
After two centuries of modernizing development, and after having been
integrated (unequally) to globalization in the past few decades, we not only find
postcolonial hybridizations and traditional mestizations, but also new inequali-
ties and stimulating differentialist reactions.6 At times, corporate and consumer
globalizations are exploited in order to assert and expand ethnic particularities
or cultural regions, as in happening with Latin music.7 Some social actors dis-
covered in these processes resources for resisting or modifying the processes of
globalization and for reformulating the conditions of exchange between cul-

6. Ulrich Beck, ¿Qué es la globalización? lugares Cátedra (Madrid, 1998); and see also
Falacias del globalismo, respuestas ala global- Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural
ización (Barcelona: Paidós, 1998); Ulf Hannerz, Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: Uni-
Conexiones transnacionales: Cultura, gente, versity of Minnesota Press, 1996).
145 assessments

tures. However, the example of musical hybridizations, to mention just one,

demonstrates the inequalities and differences that exist when hybridization takes
place in countries of the periphery: one has only to recall the distance between
the homogenized fusions of Latino culture and the distinct modes of Latin mu-
sic in Miami, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, or Mexico.
Still, the previous argument does not present the decisive theoretical turn-
around needed to theorize art in the era of globalization. Colonial or imperial-
ist conceptions of culture have tended to subsume the development of art in a
scheme of domination from a colonial capital over a nation or a subordinated re-
gion: India depended from London, Latin America from Madrid or Lisbon, and
each region of Africa from some European capital. The world no longer functions
according to this regime of subordination of each periphery to one center. As in
politics and economics, power is articulated in transnational networks more than
it is concentrated in capitals: we have left behind the time when Paris, London,
and New York were the geographical centers that determined cultural power.
Understandably postcolonial thinking is more useful when analyzing coun-
tries that attained their independence fifty years ago, while for Latin Americans
the main question is how to reorient modernity. From the perspective of the
geopolitics of art, the challenge is to consider networks organized in bienni-
als that are held not only in Venice, Kassel, or Miami, but also in Asia, Africa,
and Latin America. There is still an “international division of cultural work,”
in the formula proposed by Toby Miller and George Yúdice when referring to
the cultural industries: the movements of artistic markets and the circulation of
aesthetic prestige are developed in networks with several prestigious points and
many others that, working from their position of disadvantage, propose ethnic
identifications and alternative criteria of evaluation.8
A few decades ago we speculated on how New York stole from Paris the idea
of modern art. Now these capitals share their partial hegemony with Shanghai,
Hong Kong, Madrid, Saõ Paulo, and Johannesburg. There are no universal para-
digms, but the concentrations of power and the risk of totalitarianism prevent us
from sheltering under ethnocentric localisms. There is no reason to celebrate a
global market of hybridizations or the dispersion of the falsely autonomous frag-
ments falsely so exalted by postmodernism. We need an art theory that works
both with these persistent differences and with their intercultural intersections.

7. George Yúdice, “La industria de la música
en la integración América Latina—Estados
Unidos,” in Las industrias culturales en la
integración latinoamericana, edited by Néstor
García Canclini and Carlos Moneta (Buenos
Aires: EUDEBA; Mexico City: Grijalbo/SELA/
UNESCO, 1999); see also Ana María Gautier
Ochoa, “El desplazamiento de los espacios de
la autenticidad: Una mirada desde la música,”
Antropología [Madrid] 15–16 (March–October
1998): 171–82.
8. Yúdice, “La industria de la música en la
integración América Latina.”
the oxymoron of global art

Blake Gopnik

Is it possible that “global art” is a full-blown oxymoron? That the terms “global”
and “art” contain within themselves a contradiction that is simply irreconcilable?
Throughout many of the Seminars’ discussions—and certainly elsewhere
in the art world—there seems to some longing, hidden or less so, for a future
time when Western art will have fully opened itself to the rest of the globe. But
what if the very notion of art, as we understand it in the West, is so peculiar and
particular as to be essentially untranslatable to other cultures?
“Art,” in our Western sense, is an absolutely bizarre game, hedged round
with peculiar, nearly arbitrary rules by which it is both governed and constituted.
If that is definitionally true—that an object is determined to be art only and es-
sentially according to the moves it makes within a set of arcane Western rules of
play—then the only way the Euro-American art world can open itself to the rest
of the globe is by inviting other peoples to play that game and obey those rules.
And that, of course, simply negates the whole idea of a genuine opening up.
In my experience, several decades’ worth of attempts at expanding the West’s
artistic field have simply resulted in the importing of foreign art objects that are
in essence indistinguishable from the art already churned out in the West—they
are the art world’s “signifiers of the local and national,” in James Elkins’s terms,
without much in the way of truly local significance. Or, alternatively, where
the foreign objects don’t seem fully to partake in Western models, they end up
functioning as objets trouvés or ready-mades—as novel art supplies used to satisfy
Western-style looking, rather than as objects that follow a truly different set of
rules. Of course, such a different set of rules would result in the objects simply
not being art at all, according to the West’s peculiar model.
If, as Jameson states, “one form of resistance is to do work that doesn’t want
to be looked at by Americans” (by which I assume Jameson means the entire
Euro-American West), it’s not clear to me that such resistant work could func-
tion as art, according to its normal Western definitions. (Jameson’s example of
a film by Wong Kar-wai seems insufficiently resistant to count as truly non- or
anti-Western art—it could as easily have been made by any number of indie film
makers in North America or Europe.) What if the notion of art that Westerners
use “to isolate certain things from the mass of visual culture in order to grant
them status and prestige” (in Keith Moxey’s words) is simply so idiosyncratic as
to render it incompatible with other cultures’ models for such privileging? (Shi-
gemi Inaga’s contributions to the seminar suggest such a possibility.)
147 assessments

If I am right in suggesting that for the West “art” is in essence a game like,
say, chess, it’s not clear what it would mean for it to go global. More people
might have the chance to play, and that would certainly be a very fine thing: It
would be good because the game itself is worth playing, so new people would
profit (I use the word advisedly) from playing it; and it would be good be-
cause the quality of play might increase with a bigger pool of players. But the
game itself would not, could not be profoundly changed by any foreign influx,
without simply vanishing from view as the game it started out as. Or rather,
even if the rules did end up being changed over the long run—imagine chess
becoming checker-ized—its status as a game would stay the same. That is, the
art game’s fundamental, and fundamentally Western, metastructures would not
have changed.
The contents of works of art can come to address non-Western subject for-
mations, but the “art” such content comes packaged in cannot be anything but
Western, so long as it remains identifiable as art.
And that may be the crucial issue: the very idea of a rule-bound game called
art, whatever those rules might be at any given time, is foreign to most of the
world’s cultures (as it is, in fact, to most of the West’s own domains of image
use). The West could never truly embrace a foreign, nonart model for art, be-
cause then we wouldn’t have art as we know it. There may not be—and perhaps
cannot be—the “art outside of Western categories” that Elkins posits as missing
from the Pompidou’s Le Japon des avant-gardes exhibition.
The best we could hope for—and this is perhaps a perfectly fine hope—is
that, under foreign influence, art as a rule-bound game would absolutely disap-
pear. That images would stop being art at all, that is, and would change—or in
fact revert—to fulfill some fully nonart functions.
I, for one, would badly miss playing the stimulating, sometimes revelatory
game of art. But if we’re to continue, we’d better recognize it as a game, within a
fully and exclusively Western model of game playing.
circulate, but without differences!

Marina Grzinic

There is no border, there is no border, there is no border, no border, no border, no

border, I wish.

This sentence, written by the artist Sejla Kameric, from Sarajevo, Bosnia, and
Herzegovina, addresses the topic of the border, a concept regulated by social,
territorial, and artistic conditions. I claim that today, although although we have
the feeling that invisible borders prevent the space of the global capitalist neolib-
eral world from being truly open and mobile, actually we see a vast circulation
of positions, and it has become impossible for us to think of the space of con-
temporary art and culture as being closed by borders. The capitalist First World
presents positions (such as the Third World positions that are so common in
biennales) that were denied visibility in the past. Third World and First World
works even share a common platform in such exhibitions: borders have become
invisible, and that is a problem.
There is another problem that is related to this one. First World capitalism
has lately been engaged in an attempt to reevaluate feminism as a world process,
but in the boom of recent books, panels, and exhibitions, almost no one has
been invited from what was called Eastern Europe. An example of this is the
exhibition Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: Forty-Five Years of Art and Feminism, curated by
Xabier Arakistain and shown at the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum.1 The exhibition
brought together sixty-nine works by forty-five artists from different countries
that have produced feminist art. None of the forty-five artists were from the so-
called former Eastern Europe, even though a moderate number of the artists in
the exhibition were from the Third World. My thesis is that what is going on has
to be understood strictly on the level of internal developments in contemporary
global capitalism, along with the powerful process, imposed from the outside,
of erasing any sense of a divided Europe. The new appetite for the Third World,
mostly Asia and Latin America, is part of a geopolitical logic that proposes a
redistribution of capital allocations from the present (or former?) axis Europe–
U.S.A. to the supposedly new capital reorientation toward Europe and Asia,
with the shadowy presence of Latin America.
The reasons for this sudden complete lack of interest in the East European
region are varied. My second thesis is that the reasons are connected with finan-
cial capital as the prevalent (and in some states the only) form of contemporary

1. Bilbao, June–September 2007. [See also lona: Generalitat de Catalunya, Departament de

Trans-Sexual Express: A Classic for the Third Cultura, 2001). —J.E.]
Millennium, edited by Xabier Arakistain (Berce-
149 assessments

capital that accumulates differentially through circulation. Past divisions and

the ideology of difference within Europe are seen as an obstacle to this circula-
tion. If you behave as if Europe is already one uniform space, it is not necessary
to advocate for any inclusion: it is enough to behave as there are no longer any
differences. We are all identical through a process of evacuation that David Har-
vey calls accumulation by dispossession.2 That is a process of expulsion from the
possession of any possible difference—if necessary even by means of law. It is a
process that is implemented by institutional, legislative, bureaucratic, infrastruc-
tural, theoretical, and cultural platforms. Accumulation by dispossession might
not be effective anymore in Europe—it has supposedly ceased to exist here—but
it is at work elsewhere, for example in the Third World.
In order to understand fully what is going on at the moment, it is neces-
sary to connect Harvey’s concept of accumulation by dispossession with another
process that is characteristic of financial capital and is described by Michael
Hudson in his Super Imperialism.3 Hudson argues that today, instead of a crisis
caused by gaps in distribution, we are witnessing a contrary process that he calls
the imperialism of circulation. This has to seen not as a simple change of modes
of accumulation of capital (from accumulation by dispossession to the imperial-
ism of circulation), but as the preparation, through dispossession, for the current
domination of circulation. The condition named by Harvey permits the condi-
tion named by Hudson.
Both processes are part of an important debate regarding the question of
accumulation and redistribution of financial capital, which have to be seen as a
larger background for any serious debate about what is to be done in the pres-
ent moment regarding questions of agency for a possible liberation politics, as
Walter Mignolo calls it, in global capitalism.4 Needless to say, this problematic is
part of the new feminist perspective.
Hudson’s concept of the imperialism of circulation, together with an article
by Jelica Sumic-Riha, can help explain why what is impossible in today’s world of
capitalism is impossibility itself.5 Clearly, the imperialism of circulation without
differences is the primary logic of the condition of production of global financial
capitalism. That implies that what is to be produced is money, capital; it also
testifies that capital accumulation reinvents itself in a straightforward manner.

2. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). See
also Harvey, Spaces of Neoliberalism: Towards
a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development,
Heffner Lecture for 2004 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner
Verlag, 2005). [—J.E.]
3. Michael Hudson, Super Imperialism: The
Origins and Fundamentals of U.S. World Domi-
nance (London: Pluto Press, 2003).
4. It is also the case that the recent capital-
ist economic crisis that has been described as
stagflation (differential inflation amid stagna-
tion) is not only the sign but the realization of
these new modes of capital accumulation. Indi-
vidually and institutionally we can detect the ris-
ing prices of goods and services as processes of
differential inflation in the midst of what experts
describe as capitalist stagnation (after more
than a decade of prosperity and deflation!). The
consequences of the crisis are still not predict-
able and will escalate further. [For Mignolo see,
for example, “From Central Asia to the Caucasus
and Anatolia: Transcultural Subjectivity and De-
colonial Thinking,” Postcolonial Studies 10, no.
1 (2007): 111–20; Mignolo, “Delinking,” Cultural
Studies 21, no. 2 (2007): 449–514. —J.E.]
5. Jelica Sumic-Riha, “Jetniki Drugega, ki
ne obstaja” [Prisoners of the Inexistent Other],
Filozofski vestnik/Acta Philosophica 1 (2007):
81–103.
150 art and globalization

Capital has only one agenda—a surplus value—and that is more than a program
or a Hollywood film conspiracy: it is a drive! Human desire is an unequal op-
ponent to this mad drive. In its frenetic striving for more and more possibilities,
the imperialism of circulation prohibits any subversion, any attack. Everything
circulates, and exchange is dispossessed of any difference. No obstacles are to be
seen in the network that structures reality for us. Those once perceived as en-
emies (including both individuals and institutions) behave as if we are all in the
same merde (to use the juicy French word), so that we all have to find the remedy
to our problems and needs—and this is done even while those once perceived as
enemies forget that they themselves generated the problems. Today it is impos-
sible to say that something is impossible.6
With the title of his book Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance,
Jon McKenzie formulated what was supposed to be a rhetorical question but
seems to remain suspended in the air.7 I propose an answer (or perhaps it’s a
command): circulate, but without differences! The act of circulation changes the
very coordinates of impossibility. It is only through an act that I effectively as-
sume the big Other’s nonexistence. I place a border within the cynical situation
where it appears that what is impossible is impossibility as such. And it is neces-
sary to build a framework, a foreclosure that will set the parameters, and give the
coordinates to the political act.
In sum: today what is impossible is not a set of impossibilities, but rather
impossibility as such. This has clear repercussions on the level of resistance. Sumic-
Riha argues that a declaration of existence is the first step, but what follow is
the rigorous practice of consequences, the logics of consequences, where the
impossibility of the foreclosure of capitalist discourse turns into the condition of
a new possibility. It is the act that interrupts the consistency of the situation; it
is, precisely, a step outside.
The question is always to which histories we attach our representational
politics and how we resituate our position within a certain social, economical,
and political territory. Self-organization and self-referentiality are not born from
empty space. The effects of critique should be measured not solely by what is said
but also, according to Garcés, by the grounds on which we base our criticism.8
And finally: universities are the outcome of the modern colonial experience, as
Mignolo has emphasized. What does this mean? The universal is founded on a
fake neutrality in order to hide the bloody histories of colonial violence and the

6. Or to put this differently, in the past a
subversive act was possible if it was a subver-
sion against some clear foreclosure or division
in society. The symbolic network (the big Other)
that structured reality for us also gave that
reality a certain consistency. It presented almost
a guarantee for any possible intervention.
Today the world presents itself as an endless
circulation (imperialism is an excellent concept
to capture this drive) that is seen as a friendly
exchange. Therefore, to get rid of expropria-
tion, enslavement, and neocolonial interven-
tions by capital, one only measure is proposed:
coordination. Of course, those who propose
coordination as the remedy for all the maladies
of capital have a card hidden in their pockets.
In order for things to circulate smoothly, the
process of exterminating those who still bother
us with social antagonism, class struggles, or
unthinkable expropriations and misery needs to
be properly coordinated.
7. McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Disci-
pline to Performance (New York: Routledge,
2001).
151 assessments

looting of local histories, experiences, and knowledge. Today the universality

of knowledge has been cut off from the roots of modernity, and modernity can
only be understood properly if it is seen in connection with the imperialistic
colonial adventures of capitalism.
What is to be done? Instead of presenting ourselves as victims, as the inevi-
table outcome of a regulative policy that comes from the outside, it is necessary
to think about the colonial from the inside. Walter Mignolo, in his endeavor to
establish a new geopolitics of knowledge, talks about a radical proposition: dis-
mantling internal colonialism and validating knowledge and power from the in-
ternal colonial difference. What matters is the construction of a new conceptual
genealogy. Establishing such a genealogy means waking up and rising precisely
when we have been knocked down by capitalism and postsocialist, transitional
power relations and expropriations. Here is Mignolo: “The central issue of the
geopolitics of knowledge is to understand . . . what type of knowledge is pro-
duced ‘from the side of colonial difference’ and what type of knowledge is pro-
duced ‘from the other side of colonial difference.’”9 That task will be different in
Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, Africa, Europe, Germany, Serbia, Slovenia,
or Austria.

8. Marina Garcés, “The Experience of the 9. Catherine Walsh, “The Geopolitics of

US,” Zehar 60–61 (2007). Online at magazines. Knowledge and the Coloniality of Power: An
documenta.de/attachment/000000343.pdf (ac- Interview with Mignolo,” Zehar 60–61 (2007).
cessed May 2009). Online at magazines.documenta.de/attach-
ment/000000345.pdf (accessed May 2009).
a c a d e m i c d i f f i c u l t i e s w i t h “ c o n v e r g e n c e ”:
globalization and contemporary art

Jonathan Harris

The sociology of culture . . . has to be seen as a convergence of very different

interests and methods. Like other convergences, it includes at least as many collisions
and near misses as genuine meeting points. But so many people, in many countries,
are now working in it that it has entered a new phase.
—raymond williams, culture (1981)

Focus on global scope and global intent . . . distinguishes . . . globalization from
yet another history of the world . . . Globalization develops in a jerky, not gradual,
fashion.
—alex macgillivray, a brief history of globalization (2006)

There is a we which emerges, which is not constituted anyplace. That is the utopian
event: the product of these encounters is not yet an official we anyplace.
—susan buck-morss, in section 9 of the seminars

In bringing together the theorists who discussed globalization and art, the 2007
Stone Theory Institute constituted a transient utopian convergence of intellec-
tuals which—though reflecting both traditional academic disciplinary and in-
terdisciplinary interests—happily exhibited little of the intellectual inertia that
characterizes institutionalized teaching and research in universities.1 Beyond Chi-
cago’s brief but effulgent dialogic bubble, the topic of globalization has moved
rapidly towards the center of the concerns of many academics worldwide. This
has occurred because, given that it is a topic—rather than an ideology or a posi-
tion, much less a proto- or neodiscipline—virtually anything can still be stirred
into the analytic mix. Given especially the rapid internationalization of higher
education, in markets for both students and academics, the widespread focus on
globalization became inevitable for some practical reasons. For instance, how
can British university faculty teach effectively the large number of overseas Chi-
nese students who understand English only as their second or third language?
The University of Liverpool’s long-term answer to this question has involved
building a new campus in Shanghai, taking its faculty to China’s students as
well as employing local academics to do the teaching in local languages. As this
indicates, academic industry has itself become a major global state-capitalist
business, though its networks of labor, goods, and capital exchange are like the

1. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Claude Passeron, Academic Discourse: Linguistic Misunderstand-
Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture ing and Professorial Power (London: Polity,
(London: Sage, 1990); Pierre Bourdieu et al., 1994).
153 assessments

ancient trade routes—well trodden and lucrative in certain directions but still
nonexistent across great tracts of the world.
Accounting for globalization exemplifies what Williams called the problem
of intellectual convergence facing the formation of new fields of study. The so-
ciology of art, he remarked, had simultaneously been claimed by scholars work-
ing in, but away, from a range of established disciplines and shunned by others
ensconced in those disciplines who saw the convergence either as some kind
of threat, reductive reformulation or as mere irrelevance.2 Neodisciplines partly
descended from art history, such as visual culture, visual studies, and visual an-
thropology, have suffered much the same fate over the past thirty years or so.3
Though “globalization and art” for now remains a topic rather than a neodis-
cipline—the “and” both connects and disconnects—it is best thought through
as an intellectual problem within a historicized sociology of art, and therefore
constitutes one problem of convergence trickily lurking inside another. If we
set aside for a moment the deeply prejudicial disciplinary histories traditionally
lined up against each other on either sides of the neologism “sociology of art,”4
those interested in the conjunction of specifically contemporary art and global-
ization have to wrestle in addition with the task of making historically intelli-
gible art produced now or in the very recent past. Though art history certainly
has tried of late to incorporate within its curriculum the study of quite recent
artistic production, this usually means the assimilation of those producers, prac-
tices, and products to normative conceptual-disciplinary paradigms—mobiliz-
ing still-dominant received categories such as “originality,” “influence,” “national
style,” “modernist”—or a simple switch from art-historical to equally normative
art-critical modes of explanation, in a move that deftly avoids troubling ques-
tions of general procedure and value.5
A transformation of the topic of globalization and art into the beginnings of
a organized field of study requires the continued generation of novel empirical
research materials—deep knowledge, that is, of actual contemporary producers,
artifacts, organizations, and forms—assessed both within and against the emer-
gent yet conflicted conceptual apparatus of globalization discourse. This heuristic
process has been and remains bound up with long-standing attempts to system-
atize a radical pedagogic project able to provide a new paradigm for making sense
of art and culture everywhere in the world. Two earlier phases within this in-
quiry—problematically divergent rather than convergent, however, in many key
aspects since the 1960s—have been cultural studies and the social history of art.6

2. Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Studies and the
Center: Some Problematics and Problems,” in
Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in
Cultural Studies, 1972–79, edited by Stuart Hall
(London: Unwin Hyman, 1980).
3. Harris, “Putting the ‘Culture’ into Visual
Culture: The Legacy and Challenge of Raymond
Williams,” Visual Culture in Britain 5, no. 2
(2004): 63–75.
4. Anne Bowler, “Methodological Dilemma in
the Sociology of Art,” in The Sociology of Cul-
ture, edited by Diana Crane (Oxford: Blackwell,
1994).
5. See Section 8 of the Seminars. [—J.E.]
6. T. J. Clark, “The Conditions of Artistic
Creativity,” Times Literary Supplement, May 24,
1974, 561–62; Adrian Rifkin, “Marx’s Clarkism,”
Art History 8, no. 4 (1985): 488–95; Clark, “The
End of Left Art History?” in Value: Art: Politics:
Criticism, Meaning and Interpretation After
Postmodernism, edited by Jonathan Harris (Liv-
erpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007).
154 art and globalization

Williams’s eight conceptual and theoretical frames—producers, institutions,

formations, means of production, identifications, forms, reproduction, and or-
ganization—constitute the thematic outline of a historical sociology of culture
and can serve to define the field of study of globalization and contemporary art,
the particular convergence upon which the rest of this essay focuses.

production
A focus on novel types of producers generated by globalizing forces such as tour-
ism and international divisions of labor leads to consideration of various hybrid
cultural practices and practitioners created around the world, a differential pro-
cess creating makers whose complex conditions of production and self-identity
as producers and agents are shaped both by modern Western notions of art and
relations of patronage as well as by local, indigenous traditions and values. Work
in this area includes, for example, Will Rea’s account of such mixed identity and
practice in late twentieth-century and contemporary Nigerian-Yoruban sculp-
ture and Karen Jacobs’s nuanced analysis of how the Freeport Mining Compa-
ny’s recent patronage of sculpture and decorative crafts made by the New Guin-
ea Kamoro people has generated novel redefinitions of the meaning and value of
these artifacts for the social actors involved, with neither local artisan nor mul-
tinational industrial client all winner or loser in this production process.7 Case
studies such as these indicate that all ostensibly neutral terms, such as “sculpture,”
“decorative,” and “craft,” as well as the obviously loaded “artist,” are highly value-
laden and potentially misleading. These empirical analyses begin to shed light on
very basic questions of language use, intelligibility, and translation under condi-
tions of globalized cultural production—concern, that is, for the meanings and
values of words and artifacts produced both by academic researchers involved in
the work of intellectual convergence and village-based artisans working for the
tourist trade and relocated multinational industrial conglomerates.

institutions and formations

The category of institutions serves to identify the new kinds of transnational
public/private agencies of many kinds created and radically expanded around
the world over the last twenty years or so—biennales, art-commissioning bod-
ies, art fairs, and competitions such as the UK Tate Turner Prize (open to all
artists working in Britain) and offers to evaluate their global, as well as continu-
ing national and regional, significance. The notion of producers’ self-generated
formations intersects to a degree with the category of institutions—the former
term nominating novel kinds of artists’ groupings developed since the 1970s,
though important also is the task of tracing their relationship to earlier kinds of

7. Will Rea, “Finding Your Contemporaries: The Cultural Colonization of Contemporary Art,
The Modernities of African Art,” and Karen edited by Jonathan Harris (Liverpool: Liverpool
Jacobs, “‘United Colours of Papua’: Kamoro Arts University Press, 2008).
and Cultural Appropriation,” in Identity Theft:
155 assessments

more familiar formation within, for example, Western avant-garde culture since
the late nineteenth century. The question of the increasing interpenetration of
commissioning and exhibiting agencies with artists’ own independent and au-
tonomous groupings is crucial here. Has globalization helped to produce new
kinds of social incorporation of art and artists reminiscent of the pre-twentieth-
century epochs of European arts patronage dominated by church and state?
What examples of artists’ formations from outside the European and North
American models might there be? Documenta 11, held in 2002 in a number of
cities around the world, presents a significant case study: it was one of the first
self-globalizing hybrid arts organization—events that intersected with and of-
fered to reshape artists’ individual and collective work as producers and explain-
ers of their own activities. Caroline Jones’s Assessment identifies a set of key
problems and issues.8

means of production
With what range of physical and intellectual materials and resources do artists
work in our era of late capitalist globalization? The Marxian notion of means of
production allows consideration of a number of connected historical and theo-
retical questions. For instance, how has the recent rise of super-museums like
Tate Modern and Beacon in New York State, and multinational museums such
as the Guggenheim chain, affected the materials, scale, and working processes of
some influential contemporary artists? How might the historic displacement of
painting and conventional sculpture media be a consequence of, and contribu-
tion to, emerging global capitalist and state corporatist economic conditions?
Brandon Taylor’s recent analysis of super-large art projects, such as Anish Ka-
poor’s 2002 Marsyas construction, built for Tate Modern’s Unilever series in the
Turbine Hall, examines such issues. Are these types of commissions introducing
a novel kind of meaninglessness into contemporary art—a Merleau-Pontian ef-
fective nonsense of form and genre?9

identifications
This concept opens up discussion of the global reconfiguration of art writing in
the period since the 1960s—identifying its changed, multiple, hugely expanded
discursive forms, the internationalization of contemporary art publishing, and
the impact of postcolonial movements upon received practices of both criticism
and “postcriticism.” Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe is a key text
within the study of transforming globalized identifications. However, it is also
important to stress continuities and inertial forces active in art-critical production

8. In addition, thirty-five essays based on 9. Taylor, “Virtuosity and Contrivance in the

Williams’s eight themes will be published in New Sculpture,” in Harris, Value: Art: Politics,
Globalization and Contemporary Art, edited 397–423.
by Jonathan Harris (Malden, MA: Blackwell,
forthcoming).
156 art and globalization

and their interdependence with the globalized art market and the institution of
the art museum. Other topics for discussion include marginal forms of art writ-
ing surviving around the world and the enormous yet differential impact of the
Internet. Chin-tao Wu’s recent account of corporate art investment strategies
offers important empirical studies, as does Diane Rankin and Karen von Veh’s
new work on feminist art writing in South Africa.10

forms
This notion really starts from an examination of the fate of now residual yet
foundational art-historical concepts such as style, idiom, genre, type, meaning,
and intention, reconceived in relation to globalizing culture produced around
the world. In what ways, for instance, have tourism, work and retirement mi-
gration, corporate investment, and market penetration transformed artistic and
objet d’art production and consumption in the West, Asia, and Africa? Empiri-
cal work on this theme ought to analyze local instances of globalized conditions
as well as evaluate connected major conceptual problems of definition—in what
ways, for instance, might notions of art or fine art have become redundant terms
to use about much cultural production taking its cue from mass media or folk
rituals rather than from the legacies of traditional painting and sculpture? How
are forms and their critical identification determined by multiple, often contest-
ed, contextual, historical, and institutional factors? This is not simply a pressing
question about contemporary or twentieth-century art—the British Museum,
its director recently acknowledged, was one of the first results of a global econo-
my, while a genre of Chinese pottery produced in the mid-seventeenth century
replicated English porcelain, mirroring the contemporary cult of Chinoiserie
with which Westerners are much more familiar.11

reproduction and organization

Reproduction concerns the macroprocesses and mechanisms through which the
globalized art world is able to carry on, although the concept must acknowledge
alteration as well as continuity in expanded development. Pedagogy in art and
art history is a core issue, relating to matters including the modes and extents of
internationalization, higher education’s relationship to world capitalism and po-
litical neoliberalism, and higher education’s varied degrees of openness around
the world to democratic and multicultural discourses. These were themes em-
phasized valuably by Zhivka Valiavicharska in Chicago when she raised devel-
opments in eastern Europe. The related category of organization is concerned
above all with theorizing and anatomizing what is meant by the “globalized art

10. Chin-Tao Wu, Privatizing Culture: Corpo-
rate Art Intervention Since the 1980s (London:
Verso, 2002); Elizabeth Rankin and Karen von
Veh, TAXI 013—Diane Victor (Johannesburg:
David Krut, 2008).
11. Joseph N. Newland, “The Global Publica-
tion of Asian Art: The Role of the Museum,” Art
Book 14, no. 2 (May 2007): 54–55.
157 assessments

world.” In what ways, and through what mechanisms or processes, does such a
single system exist, if indeed it does? Globalization, to stress the point, remains
a heuristic conceptual tool—a useful, generative hypothesis.
In what ways do, or can, or should continental, national, or regional cul-
tures, societies, and art traditions persist or actively struggle against globaliza-
tion’s homogenizing systematization? Is this characterization still tenable? How
and why has the art world in the West become a part of the global capitalist
economy? Key art world system phenomena include international biennales, bi-
ennale-hopping guest curators, and international dealing-auctioneering houses.
These require explanation via subtle theoretical and detailed historical accounts
of contemporary global economy, global society, and global culture. It is as well
to remember, however, MacGillivray’s stricture—how can we be sure that the
convergent phenomena we identify are truly global in scope and intent, and not
just part of a continuing but narrower process limited in its extent, purposes,
and effects? After Chicago’s own utopian convergence, how do we proceed to
fashion analytic tools adequate to this difficult but exciting task of basic clarifica-
tion and explanation?
art, globalization, and imperialism

Anthony D. King

Having read the hundred or more pages on art and globalization, I feel I must
have missed out on something. With the exception of a few intriguing, though
usually curtailed, comments and footnoted references to discussions of the day
before, some not included in this account of the seminars, the general impres-
sion gained from these pages is that art is being understood in its most con-
ventional, Western sense, as an occupationally specialized practice, whether of
painting, photography, or cinema (that is, image-making or “pictures”), pro-
duced or performed by designated individual “artists.” This is a notion of art that
is not only separate from craft, as Shelly Errington suggests, but also separate
from the social and spatial conditions in which it was produced. (I am ignor-
ing here the issue of the origin of the concept of fine art itself in the West, on
which there are some interesting comments.) Only occasionally, as when Susan
Buck-Morss speaks of “visual urbanism” and, with Harry Harootunian, refers
to the different temporalities found in the socialist and capitalist city, are we
reminded of the essentially urban context in which art in this sense, irrespective
of its different media and manifestations, is not only most frequently produced
and consumed, but also of the actual city that art just as frequently takes as its
subject matter. That is also the case, even if its subject is ex-urban as in the West
in the nineteenth century.
Yet quite apart from this question of context, the city, as others have pointed
out, is itself a work of art (and also science, technology, culture, politics, among
other things) and one that needs a different descriptive and theoretical vocabu-
lary to address it. This obviously includes architecture (to which there are per-
haps two or three passing references), but also a language of physical and spatial
urban form, of built form and type, of spatialization, the built environment,
urban design, urban culture. Discourses of “modernity” (a central and stereo-
typical trope in the armory of the analysis of visual culture) are inconceivable
without invoking the urban fabric of the city and the part it played in the for-
mulation of artistic as well as social and cultural concepts of the modern. Where
would discourses on modernity, postmodernity, globality, and cosmopolitanism
be without reference to notions of public and private space, of the iconic status
of buildings, of architecture and urban form and their symbolic potential as
forms of representation? The spatialities of the city formed and represented in
the city’s built environment are central to any conception of visual culture, rep-
resented by the built environment. Buildings, architectural and urban form, as
markers of specific places, are both objects of design and subjects of desire. They
159 assessments

provide spatial mechanisms for social inclusion and exclusion. Like any clock or
calendar, the built and spatial environment of the city and its continuous trans-
formation not only signal the passage of time but, as indicators of the present,
the past, and an undetermined future, act as a store of collective and personal
memory.
Any understanding of globalization has to recognize its earlier historical
phases, including postcolonial globalization,1 as Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann
implies with his reference to French, British, Dutch, Spanish imperialisms and
their impact on urbanization worldwide. This necessarily includes the colonial
cities created as part of that process, in Asia, Africa, the Americas. Whether or
not the concept of race was invented as part of this process, as suggested, it was
certainly institutionalized by the facts of “racial” and social segregation in colo-
nial cities worldwide. Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay cites Fanon’s Black Skins, White
Masks to make a powerful point about the psychological conditions of colonial-
ism. Yet one of the most glaring holes in our contemporary knowledge con-
cerns the present urban situation—social, spatial, ethnic, and racial—of those
one-time colonial towns and cities made infamous by the well-known passage
in Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, originally published in French almost half a
century ago—in particular his representation of the “colonial world” as being
epitomized by the racially and spatially segregated colonial city: “The colonial
world is a world divided into compartments . . . of native quarters and European
quarters, or schools for natives and schools for Europeans.”2 Despite a growing
body of too often unrelated studies of postcolonial cities, no one has yet pro-
duced a study to demonstrate, half a century after the “independence” of these
once colonial states, how far the racially and spatially segregated colonial city has
been transformed, or whether the world “divided into compartments” between
races has simply been transformed into one divided by classes.
As for the imperial and colonial roots of contemporary globalization in the
West, these are to be most visibly found in the so-called global cities, what Zhiv-
ka Valiavicharska refers to, citing the work of Saskia Sassen, as the “global spaces
of exchange of information, flows of money, sites where a transnational financial
capital is concentrated.” Yet, as recent literature on the global city has shown,
many of these “global cities” in Europe (as well as elsewhere) developed from
the one-time imperial capitals of Europe (Paris, London, Brussels, Amsterdam,
Madrid), each linked into their colonial port cities and capitals in America, Asia,
Africa, and elsewhere (New York, Rio de Janeiro, Calcutta, Bombay, Colombo,
Hong Kong, Shanghai, Cape Town, Mombasa), which provided resources, net-
works, and infrastructure long before the recent concept of the “global city” was
ever thought of.3

1. A. G. Hopkins, Globalization in World His-
tory (London: Pimlico, 2002).
2. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New
York: Grove, 1968), 37–40.
3. Anthony D. King, “World Cities: Global?
Postcolonial? Postimperial? Or Just the Result
of Happenstance?” in The Global Cities Reader,
edited by N. Brenner and R. Keil (London:
Routledge, 2006), 315–24; King, Spaces of
Global Cultures: Architecture Urbanism Identity
(London: Routledge, 2004).
160 art and globalization

Today, the globalization of the art world, irrespective of whether we are

speaking about theater, music, mixed media, film, television, performance arts,
artworks, art markets, architecture, sculpture, or urban design, is inseparable
from these global and postcolonial connections.
narratives of belonging:
on the relation of the art institution
and the changing nation-state

Nina Möntmann

Several speakers in the seminar, including Keith Moxey, Thomas DaCosta

Kaufmann, and Shelly Errington, touch upon the historical role of the first
public museums in relation to the emergence of the nation-state and its colo-
nial power. In the following, I elaborate on this role of the early museum as a
showcase for the national narrative and juxtapose it with the contemporary situ-
ation, which I describe as a corporate turn in the institutional landscape. This
corporate turn runs parallel with the disengagement of the nation from the state
within globalized superstructures.
By their very nature, institutions relate to the general value system of a soci-
ety. Art institutions, as distinct from other institutions such as state authorities,
parties, and trade unions, are not given any direct participation in political pro-
cesses. Instead, they are given the indirect commission to produce images of re-
alities that make those realities easier to consume, or to design parallel universes
that either appear as spiritually separated or are supposed to entertain visitors.1
The fulfillment of this tacit commission is generally accompanied by the reward
of simplified fund-raising. Art institutions, however, in contrast to other institu-
tions, have a more individual, changeable profile that gives their actors a certain
amount of room to maneuver.
Alongside the current developments toward a managerial function of the
state, one can see a corporate turn in the institutional landscape. If we look back
to when the public museum was founded, there is a coherent relation of mu-
tual legitimation between the museum and the state. One could say that at the
beginning of the museum in the eighteenth century, alongside the power of the
nation-state in forming the social order, the museum was a national project. The
first example of the public museum was the British Museum, opened in 1759.
Its mission was to create the narrative of a representative national history and
heritage. In accordance with this, its ideal audience was educated in being the
model citizen: patriotic, conscious, and proud of a rich history that was taken as
superior to the history of other nations.
Benedict Anderson’s influential book Imagined Communities refers to a mu-
seumizing imagination that translates the fictive and symbolic concept of na-
tionalism into an environment of objects and images. Such a public institution
is constitutionally open to everybody but in fact provides a limited and encoded
accessibility that confirms the bourgeois and patriotic subject as the ideal citizen.
It also imagines the world order from the perspective of the colonizer by show-

1. See my “Art and Its Institutions,” in Art

and Its Institutions, edited by Nina Möntmann
(London: Black Dog, 2006), 8–16.
162 art and globalization

ing a collection of the “masterpieces” of national artifacts, plus acquired trophies

from the cradles of culture and art like Egypt or Greece, which are thereby put
in a direct lineage with the contemporary national culture. In contrast to this,
we find an ethnicizing presentation of artifacts from the colonies, which in the
context of the imperialistic narrative appears as folk art, the practical value of
which in spiritual as well as everyday contexts highlights the achievement of civi-
lization, and then gives way to the autonomous masterpiece. The initial project
of the museum was accordingly “the authoritarian legitimation of the nation
state . . . through the construction of a history, a patrimony, . . . and a canon.”2

the changing role of the nation-state

Therefore, the fate of art institutions is closely linked to the development of
the nation-state. With the first museums the ideological construct of a national
unity of culture, language, and ethnicity was then concordant with the political
and military boundaries of the state. Today there is no doubt the nation-state is
changing rapidly, following global mechanisms of migration and economy, but
to what extent and with what effects is subject to a competitive discourse. Fred-
ric Jameson notes in the Seminars:

Everybody says the nation is disappearing. On the contrary, it is dia-

lectical: on the one hand there are places trying to be nations (the fa-
mous “failed states” that never make it); and nations that seem to be in
crisis, and are weaker than others, and so forth. But then, on the other
hand—and this is very important for our topic—there’s this thing that
we’re in that is not really a nation . . . The United States, which is not a
nation in the traditional sense, which is really central, and toward which
everything moves, but which you are trying to describe not in terms of
imperialism or power but in some new way.

Apart from Jameson’s nostalgic misconception of the United States as the linch-
pin of the world, it is crucial to analyze the “new way” the Western nation-
state and its institutions are undergoing globalization. Especially in relation to
“failed” and weak states, globalization processes have not been able to abandon
the categories of imperialism and power—but this is not my issue here.
The fate of the changing nation-state has only recently entered cultural dis-
course. For example, Gayatri Spivak, who in 2001 still related the fundamental
importance of the nation-state in geopolitics to the way letters relate to the alpha-
bet, now sees the “decline of the nation-state” as a “result of the economic and po-
litical restructuring of the state in the interest of global capital”—or, as Jameson
puts it, the reason lies in the changing scopes of competency of the state that are
reduced to the role of the government taking care of the economic balance.3

2. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflec- 3. Spivak and Judith Butler, Who Sings the
tions on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging
revised edition (London: Verso, 1991)(1st ed. 1983). (London: Seagull, 2007).
163 assessments

If we want to describe the new set of national and transnational structures

and the institutional changes they are bringing about, it seems crucial first to
have a look both at the concept of the nation as an ideological construct and
the state as a political, juridical, and military entity with territorial claims. This
is because the phenomenon of the declining nation-state exactly correlates with
the disengagement of the two concepts of the nation and the state.

the state
While the apparent decline of the nation-state is a symptom of its declining
power, we nevertheless have to recognize its continuing existence and describe
its renewed function, which is newly defined as postsovereign in its multiple
involvement in supranational contexts and those of a global society. The new
globalized state is becoming part of powerful supranational structures, which
appear to establish the new world order, like the wto or saarc on the eco-
nomic level, nato on the military level, and the un on a political level. In these
contexts the old state is taking on management functions, while its social and
welfare functions are more and more thrown back onto the individual or non-
governmental organizations.
In parallel to the new responsibilities of the state in its role as a “free-market
global managerial state” within transnational state-collectives, the increasing im-
pact of biennales as institutionalized regional art events becomes apparent, and
the administration of museums and Kunsthallen is being privatized. In current
neocapitalist societies, where managerial states are determined by the postna-
tional character of global capital, art institutions are becoming branded spaces.
The ideal audience is accordingly a mass of anonymous consumers. This corpo-
rate model of an art institution, by which we can describe not only all the major
museums, including the Guggenheim, the Tate, the moma, but also more and
more midsized Kunsthallen and smaller institutions, has a peer group of specula-
tors who may feel more affiliated to the brand than to the programming, and a
public audience that is evaluated by its numbers. Therefore, one could say that
the corporate turn in the institutional landscape mirrors the general power rela-
tions of a late capitalist, neoliberal constitution. Alongside the privatization of
budget politics, it also involves a changed profile of curators and directors, who
focus increasingly on management qualities and the ability of populist politi-
cians to promote the program of the institution.

the nation
These phenomena, which are taking place alongside the changes in the state, are
becoming apparent not only on an administrative level in the institution but
also in programming that is increasingly turning to media events. But the central
question still revolves around the concept of the nation: what is happening to
national ideology, and how does it appear in the institution?
164 art and globalization

In answering this question, I would like to refer to Boris Buden, who men-
tions the important fact that nations, though they still exist, have lost their com-
mon narratives.4 There is, for example, the narrative of an anticolonial national-
ism, which responds to Fanon’s “wretched of the earth” and aims at a common
interest in liberation, with the hope of finding a common agency. Today we
witness instead what Arjun Appadurai calls a “narcissism of minor differences,”
which leads to every ethnic minority wanting its own nation.5 (Note the way
new national identities are forming in eastern Europe after the decline of the
Soviet Union and state socialism, most violently in former Yugoslavia.)
So what is the new postnational narrative and legitimation of the institu-
tion, after its corporate turn? One key element of the dominant postnational nar-
rative can be described as a global (and in this case clearly Western) competition.
Global competition is most apparent in institutions that are trying to maintain a
standard canon of objects, and also attempting to maintain a spectacular exhibi-
tion program following a populist consumer-oriented model that has to compete
with event culture and prioritizes profit over experiment or critique. Therefore,
we can say that when the museum changed its role from adjunct to the colonial
nation project to global consumer mecca, its narrative changed accordingly: an
educated patriotism that legitimated the nation-state was displaced by a narra-
tive of the value of competition, event consumption, and profit that legitimates
the state under global capitalism.
We can find a subversive potential of art institutions only in those that are
not as clearly linked to the official societal narrative as other institutions are, but
rather act from a more reclusive position, enjoying periods of withdrawal and
closure during which they can research and prepare before opening up to public
activities. In an article in Public Culture, Charles Taylor brings out the role of
the social imaginary, speaking of institutions as places where people can imagine
their existence as part of a larger social structure, fashioning their social relation-
ships and discovering what normative pressure these relationships are subject
to. This is particularly true for art institutions, where the visitors’ framework for
action is negotiable.

belonging and participation

In the current situation of unstable postnational narratives of belonging, the art
institution could serve as a platform for rethinking the fundamental issues of
belonging and participation. These kinds of progressive institutional practices
have to make use of the institution’s participation in semipublic spheres, as well
as emancipating the institution from the branded structures of the globalized
state with its neoliberal agenda and management functions. Thinking an eman-

4. Boris Buden, “Why Not: Art and Contem-
porary Nationalism?” in Contemporary Art and
Nationalism, edited by Minna Henriksson and
Sezgin Boynik (Prishtina: Institute for Contempo-
rary Art, 2007), 12–17.
5. See Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers:
An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2006).
165 assessments

cipatory sense of belonging has to occur in contrast to a historical belonging that

lies in national identity. This is how Suzana Milevska formulates the question
in the Seminars: it is a matter of “how to reconcile the historic belonging with
participation that tends towards belonging without belonging.”6 In tying future
perspectives to the notion of “belonging without belonging,” Milevska is recall-
ing Jean-Luc Nancy’s inoperative community: a community that doesn’t allow
itself to be exploited, because it is antiessentialist.7 Belonging to this commu-
nity merely requires a being-in-the-world, or a “singularity without identity,” as
Giorgio Agamben puts it.8 This definition of belonging is linked to the hope for
a transnational idea of participation in democratic processes.
The art institution is a space to involve particular groups, to find allies for
interventions in the public domain, and to build up lasting relations with pub-
lics who have sympathy with the institution’s approach. The institution is there-
fore a place not only for social events where a public receives and appraises, but
also for public thinking and acting that is shaped by its guests and its publics as
well as its staff.
Those progressive ones among art institutions are, with only a few excep-
tions, usually to be found among smaller or midsized institutions, which are
more changeable and thus able to develop an institutional avant-garde whose
potential resides in maintaining a closer proximity to artistic practice and oper-
ating more closely with a critical agenda and encouraging a close public interac-
tion, instead of being merely the executive organ of a neoliberal government or
its major companies, respectively. One must be satisfied with this opposition; it
would be naÏve to believe that there could be a critical institution at the center of
attention with a reliable economic basis. This is inconceivable, and perhaps even
a necessary antithesis in the age of global capitalism, that produces “free-market
global managerial states” led by economic interests.

6. See Section 1 of the Seminars. 8. See Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Com-
7. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Com- munity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
munity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) 1993.
Press, 1991).
originality, universality, and other
modernist myths

Ming Tiampo

In a spirited debate during the closing roundtable, James Elkins comments that
modernist painters such as Jamini Roy “cannot be described in texts that will be
read in western Europe and North America in such a way that the artists appear
necessary to modernism. They are representable as local, but not as necessary.”1
In order to examine the contours of a canonical modernism and who defines
it, I turned to the Tate Artist Timeline of the twentieth century, which I pur-
chased on my last visit to the Tate Modern after noting with some surprise and
delight that the Gutai group had been included. Not just a gift shop souvenir,
perfectly priced for bringing home to friends and colleagues around the world,
this timeline is inscribed on the body of the museum, a mural that runs along
the concourse walls of levels 3 and 5 outside the collection galleries. Despite its
claims to being an evolving road map, handwritten and open to change, it is in
fact part of the museum’s architectural and intellectual structure.
An update of Alfred H. Barr Jr.’s infamous genealogy of modern art, this
new timeline seeks to be less deterministic, less teleological, more open, and
more international, reflecting the globalism (to borrow a term from Caroline
Jones) of art in the latter half of the twentieth century. It will not be a surprise to
anyone that, for example, Cai Guo-Qiang, Mona Hatoum, William Kentridge,
Takashi Murakami, Doris Salcedo, Rikrit Tiravanija, and Yinka Shonibare fig-
ure prominently at the end of the timeline. Between 1964, the year marked by
Warhol’s Brillo Box exhibition, which prompted Danto to declare the “death of
modernism,” and the explosion of the global contemporary art market, we find
artists such as Ana Mendieta, Anish Kapoor, and Hiroshi Sugimoto. The most
interesting part of the timeline is, however, the period from 1900 to 1964, the
narrative of modernism that seems to resist internationalization, even under the
pressures of a contemporary globalism seeking progenitors. In the period before
1964, we find few non-Western artists, diasporic or otherwise. Yoko Ono and
Nam June Paik hover in the early 1960s with the Fluxus group, and Hélio Oiti-
cica and Lygia Clark are listed as representatives of the neoconcretists. Manuel
Álvarez Bravo and Frida Kahlo are included in the 1930s, Wifredo Lam and the
Mexican muralists Siqueiros, Orozco, and Rivera punctuate the 1920s. In the
entire period before 1920, the only non-Western artist included in the Tate Art-
ist Timeline is Foujita Tsuguharu, who is included in the school of Paris. Gutai,
Yayoi Kusama, and On Kawara, all active in the 1950s and 1960s, are curiously
postdated, with Gutai and Kusama located around 1980 with performance art,
and Kawara in the early 1970s under conceptual art.

1. See Section 8 of the Seminars.

167 assessments

Like Barr’s diagram, this timeline raises two major issues that I would like
to address: originality and universality. The first, the concept of originality, theo-
rizes the mechanism used to determine what is necessary to that universalizing
narrative. The second issue, which Zhivka Valiavicharska brought up in the final
discussion of the closing roundtable, concerns the “immense universalizing drive
of the discipline of art history.”2

originality
In order to conceive of what is necessary to a global narrative rather than simply
being “representable as local” in the context of modernism, we need to reexam-
ine modernism’s most fundamental and persistent myth: originality.
Unlike Rosalind Krauss’s famous analysis of the originality of the avant-
garde, my concern here is not the construction of originality, but the consistent
failure of its construction in sites of non-Western modernist production. Like the
Tate Artist Timeline, the narrative constructed by Art Since 1900 (the discipline’s
most important recent pedagogical canon) acknowledges the internationaliza-
tion of art production at the end of the twentieth century, but leaves modernism
intact. Despite modernism’s deep transnational investments, it is only the West’s
consumption of other cultures that is acknowledged: primitivism, japonisme,
Orientalism. Where the existence of modernism beyond the West is narrated, it
is framed as proof of the West’s hegemony. Headed “the dissemination of mod-
ernist art through the media and its reinterpretation by artists outside the United
States and Europe,” the only chapter on non-Western art before 1989 posits the
Japanese Gutai and the Brazilian neoconcretists as evidence of the international
ripple effects of Euro-American modernism.
Clearly, modernism continues to be a politicized story of invention and
origins at the center disseminated to the periphery. Despite their innovations in
what would later be called performance art, earth art, and installation, and thus
their necessity to modernism, Gutai artists are characterized as local, producing
“competent yet rather provincial versions of European” art. It is not surprising,
then, that discourses on modernism in Japan, and for that matter any non-
Western nation, struggle to articulate a modernism that resists being seen as
derivative. As Karatani Kōjin has noted, this task is rendered nearly impossible
due to the perception that “since the ‘origin’ of modernity is Western, the two
cannot so easily be separated.”3
This narrative assumes two things: that modernism was a closed system,
located in the West and relentlessly disseminated to its territories with no recip-
rocal exchange; and that once “transplanted,” modernism was replicated around
the world, resulting in no contributions that were necessary to modernism. As
Edward Said suggested in Culture and Imperialism, modernism needs to be re-
evaluated as a transnational movement that is inextricably linked to its history

2. See Section 9 of the Seminars. nese Literature, translated by Brett de Bary

3. Karatani Kōjin, Origins of Modern Japa- (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 192.
168 art and globalization

of colonialism, imperialism, and war and the outcomes of travel, commerce,

media, immigration, and imagination.4 In order to cope with the multidimen-
sional art history that emerges out of that fractal view of cultural space, it will be
necessary to rethink modernism’s motors of change, to move away from blunt
instruments such as originality, influence, and derivation that remain embroiled
in discourses of domination. How is Gutai derivative of Pollock, but Pollock not
derivative of Kandinsky or Masson? What is the difference between derivation
and family resemblance?
Even the conservative critic Harold Bloom would agree that the concept of
originality is itself flawed, and that all participants in a creative discourse have
some relationship to their predecessors that they try to overcome in one way or
another. Motivated by the anxiety of influence, artists from Picasso to Pollock
to Gutai’s Yoshihara Jirō sought ways of negotiating the relationship between
their work and that of their progenitors through creative acts of misprision. One
major hurdle we need to overcome before attempting anything approaching a
world art history, or even a transnational history of modernism, is a reassess-
ment of the Manichean terms “influence,” “derivation,” and “originality.” In
their place, we need to articulate new interpoetic relations to describe the variety
of creative relationships that artists use to assert their own voices.

universality
Returning to the Tate Artist Timeline, let us examine the construction of this par-
ticular universalist narrative on the microlevel of its representation of the Gutai
group. Given that the Gutai group were active from 1954 to 1972, and given that
the European rediscovery of Gutai did not take place until after the 1983 Dada in
Japan exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, the Tate’s periodization begs
the question: why 1980?
The answer to this question is tied up in Gutai’s categorization as perfor-
mance art, which began relatively late in Britain. Here, Shigemi Inaga’s com-
ments on admissible heterogeneity and the compromise with acceptable ho-
mogeneity (enough sameness to be legible within the European canon, enough
difference to avoid being derivative) are illuminating. Although Inaga cites Gutai
as an example of the ideal ratio between heterogeneity and homogeneity, making
them the darlings of the French art press in the 1986 Japon des Avant Gardes, we
need to ask what Gutai is being embraced by modernism’s narrative, how is it
represented, and why it is still peripheral.
While Gutai is increasingly appearing in pedagogical, museological, and
scholarly canons of art history, the period that is cited is almost always 1954 to
1957, before the group’s first encounter with the French critic Michel Tapié. This
precontact period is mythologized for its experiments in art outdoors and art on
the stage, and, despite its transnationality, is characterized as a period before they

4. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism

(New York: Knopf, 1993).
169 assessments

were “contaminated” by the West. Not just admissibly heterogeneous, with its
experiments that are later “translated” into the vocabulary of installation, earth,
and performance art for the consumption of Western art history, early Gutai
is constructed as untouched by the West, allowing it to escape the problem of
always-already lateness described by Karatani. Early Gutai predates any of the
movements that it resembles, making it legible and necessary to the narrative of
modern art in the West, without any risk of being derivative. Focusing on early
Gutai and constructing this period as pure, however, obscures Gutai’s “actually
existing global production” (as Caroline Jones puts it in her Assessment), which
extends to four continents.
By placing Gutai in the performance art cluster, the Tate Artist Timeline
translates Gutai artistically, but also temporally, narrating it as a contemporary
of artists working twenty years later. Curiously, it is not even cited as a contem-
porary of Happenings, which is antedated to the early 1950s. Rather, it is placed
in a group that begins with the British Gilbert and George, who are located
around 1975. This periodization points to the dangers of expanding the canon
by inserting voices from outside the West into a Western narrative, and also to
the situatedness of that canon. Although it makes claims of universality, the Tate
Artist Timeline speaks from a particularly British perspective, including into this
narrative the British Surrealist group, the St. Ives school, the school of London,
and New British Sculpture.
As Inaga notes, Gutai was “authenticated a posteriori” for the Parisian art
scene.5 Similarly, Gutai is typically cited as a precursor for installation, earth,
and performance art, again translating it into the timeline of metropolitan mod-
ernism. Despite the fact that the Gutai artists were the first to cross the finish
line in multiple modernist races, however, Gutai remains characterized as a sec-
ondary movement, precursory to Happenings, for exampple, or derivative of
Informel and abstract expressionism. For this reason, Gutai is an important test
case for what it means to be necessary to modernism. With no time lag, Gutai
demonstrates that chronology is not the real issue at stake. Even in this case of
anteriority and transnational engagement, Gutai’s necessity to the narrative of
modernism is in question.
Thus, although the universality that Valiavicharska and Buck-Morss pro-
pose is seductive, possibly even emancipatory, as Ngugi wa Thiong’o has writ-
ten, I think that the risks of making the claim of universality are too great. My
preference is for the articulation of a sphere of discourse identifiably situated in
a historical response to transnational phenomena, not unlike Mary Louise Pratt’s
notion of the contact zone, but enlarged and made more complex.6 For that rea-
son, Caroline Jones’s proposal to use the term “globalism” to refer to the cultural
response to globalization is, for me, very promising. I am hopeful that over time,
standards of evaluation and the language of globalism can be negotiated between

5. [See Shigemi Inaga’s remark about the 6. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel
Gutai 具体 group in Section 2 of the Seminars. Writing and Transculturation (London: Rout-
—J.E.] ledge, 2008).
170 art and globalization

stakeholder parties, but before that, that the discourse of globalism can at least
problematize the power politics and translations at work in the specific historical
conditions of globalization in the twenty-first century.
As Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann points out, globalism and globalization
have a history that has been obscured by the limitations of our discipline. Even
if, as Frederic Jameson argues, globalization after 1980 is somehow different than
the transnational contacts and international imaginings that took place before
it, there is an entire history of contacts and resonances (to quote Reiko Tomii)
that could be written.7 That history of interconnection, dialogue, translation,
struggle, war, colonization, imperialism, trade, understanding, and hope is the
emancipatory space that we increasingly call global art history, assuming its uni-
versality. It is a valuable history, but, as so many have pointed out over the course
of these penetrating seminars, it is an incomplete history. Indeed, it is not in
competition with the notion of world art history but a fundamental part of it—a
few very large fragments of what Michael Ann Holly described as the shattered
vase of world art history.

shibboleth
Our structures of analysis, taxonomy, and narrative are inadequate to the ques-
tion of what to do with our fragments of vase. Clearly, world art history and
even global art history cannot be an additive project that leaves the architecture
of modernism intact. Rather, like Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth (2007), which I
encountered as I descended into the bowels of the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall,
we need to crack open its very foundations.

7. See Reiko Tomii’s Assessment in this

volume.
c o n t e m p o r a r y a r t , “ c o n t e m p o r a n e i t y ,”
and world art history

Reiko Tomii

My commentary is made from the position of an art historian narrowly focused

on postwar Japanese art yet keenly aware of the urgency to “globalize” our disci-
pline itself, particularly when it comes to modern and contemporary art.
Japan in the 1960s offers an intriguing point of reference from an earlier
but no less complicated time when the decade’s internationalization prefigured
today’s globalization. Together with some other recent studies of “prehistories”
mentioned in the seminars, the close examination of 1960s Japan can serve as a
corrective to “the amnesia about that prehistory on the part of contemporary art
writers” (as James Elkins puts it).1
One key concept for understanding today’s contemporary art that is absent
from the seminars is contemporaneity, as theorized by Terry Smith.2 Concurrently
but separately from Smith, I have made a historical examination of interna-
tional contemporaneity, an idea articulated in Japanese art discourse during the
1960s, when the distinct area of practice called gendai bijutsu (contemporary
art) emerged, separate from the modern practices of nihonga (Japanese-style
painting) and yōga (Western-style painting).3 Importantly, Japan’s prescience
in articulating the sense of “international contemporaneity” was shaped by its
perceived position at the periphery of modernity, vis-à-vis the putative center,
Euro-America. Thus, 1960s Japan can also offer an insight into issues that are
still unresolved—and sometimes compounded—in today’s globalizing world,
such as center versus periphery, East versus West, original versus derivative or
imitative, and Eurocentric viewpoints versus multiple viewpoints. These are at
once conceptual, theoretical, and methodological issues in the attempt at world
art history.
Three often practiced but not always ideal options to write the history of
multiple modernisms are observed by Elkins in the Seminars: (1) a “sensitive, in-
formed, contextualized account of some non-Western modernist practice” that
will “contribut[e] to the slow accumulation of mutually intelligible texts that
comprise the world practice of art history or criticism”; (2) a study of “socioeco-
nomic contexts” with “art objects as examples” by “deconstructing or deleting
the apparently transhistorical categories such as value and the avant-garde, jet-
tisoning the judgment of lag or belatedness”; and (3) an idiosyncratic writing
“in some new way” that “articulate[s] the particularity of the art,” which may
possibly have no “contact with other people’s narratives at all.”4

1. See the First Introduction. 3. Reiko Tomii, “‘International Contempora-

2. Terry Smith, “Contemporary Art and Con- neity’ in the 1960s: Discoursing on Art in Japan
temporaneity,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 4 (2006): and Beyond,” Japan Review, no. 21 (2009).
681–707. 4. See the end of Section 5 of the Seminars.
172 art and globalization

It is clearly not enough for individual art historians to write individual ac-
counts of non-Western modernisms, no matter how sensitive, informed, or well
contextualized, because the resulting “accumulation” often appears to have failed
to engender “contacts with other people’s narratives”—the most important part of
world art history. A fundamental question must then be asked: what can be done
to truly “globalize” our discipline in this respect? At the same time, as slow as such
an “accumulation” may have been, it has already prompted the idea of multiple
or alternative modernisms. Suppose, as I will outline below, “contacts” should be
made and result in a layered matrix of local stories. Would it then follow that the
supposed center will eventually be provincialized, turned into just another locale
in our formulation of world art history? If not, how firmly would the center hold?
Let me begin with the first question. I came to realize the need to actively
create “contacts with other people’s narratives” through my own work. An ex-
emplary attempt at the first option was a multiregion survey exhibition, Global
Conceptualism (Queens Museum of Art, 1999), for which I was one of the re-
gional curators.5 It gave “sensitive, informed, contextualized accounts” of ten
Western and non-Western regions. I heard some criticism that the organizers
failed to show examples from different regions that would resonate with one an-
other. Obviously, once each area’s history was understood on its own terms, that
would have been the next logical step. But it was amazing to see some viewers
starting to perceive and identify resonances on their own.
Seeking and comparing instances of resonance methodologically creates
“contacts” between different locales and accompanying narratives. Moreover,
“contemporaneity” frequently manifests itself through similarity in appearance,
idea, and strategy. Works that reveal a certain resonance (which I define as simi-
larity with little or no evidence of actual connection, influence, or knowledge)
can form a subset within the “slowly accumulating region-based texts,” which
would otherwise be a vast unordered catalogue raisonné, if you will. It is akin
to creating some sort of mapping. As there is often more than one kind of reso-
nance, the efforts will result in a matrix of layered mappings of diverse practices,
in this case practices of conceptualism. Since we cannot narrate more than one
story at a time, this will help defy the linearity of the master narrative, with
conceptualism serving as a unifying framework for all these mappings. Further
analysis of the similarities will necessitate the articulation of differences. (For ex-
ample, how did Japan’s Akasegawa Genpei and Germany’s Gerhard Richter both
come up with the idea of “capitalist realism” just one year apart from one an-
other?) This will simultaneously prompt us to examine each work more closely,
and send us back to look again at the local contexts, whether they are historical,
social, economic, political, cultural, or purely aesthetic. (This exploration could
form an extended chain of similarities and dissimilarities, because contempora-
neity may encompass a number of hidden degrees of similarity.)

5. Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin,

1950s–1980s (New York: Queens Museum of Art,
1999).
173 assessments

Such a project, no doubt, is too enormous for a single person to undertake.

To offer ten regional stories, Global Conceptualism required three project direc-
tors and eleven regional curators. More collaboration and dialogue may also be
needed in the ensuing stages, because few individual scholars can be expected to
know multiple aspects of disparate regions in depth, in addition to their primary
areas of focus.
This collaborative model of scholarship, admittedly idealistic, is predicated
upon certain larger concepts or values that are transhistorical, transnational, or
transcultural, and that afford common grounds. It should be noted, however,
that when such unifying ideas are deployed, locally specific situations need to
be taken into consideration. For example, the concept of zen’ei (avant-garde) is
effective in studying 1920s Japan in reference to 1920s Europe, but another lo-
cal concept, shinkō geijutsu (new art), is crucial to understanding the vanguard
expansion into popular and commercial culture. In the case of 1960s Japan,
the concept of the avant-garde is effective only as a way of aligning Japanese
practices to similar practices outside Japan, thus creating an art-historical con-
nection with counterparts in Euro-America. Even so, there are better concepts,
such as conceptualism, performance, and dematerialization, for understanding
interregional connections. Furthermore, the application of the concept of the
“avant-garde” to 1960s Japan is problematic, because the idea lost relevance to-
ward 1970, when it began to be replaced by the notion of gendai bijutsu (con-
temporary art).
The local discourse is an important part of art-historical contextualization.
However, discursive sophistication on its own right is a hallmark of 1960s Ja-
pan. The formation of gendai bijutsu was theoretically tied to the art-critical dis-
course on gendai (the contemporary), and the preoccupation with the modern
constructs of geijutsu (which can be translated as “Art,” uppercase) and bijutsu
(“art,” lowercase) has dictated the art-historical formulation of Anti-Art (Han-
geijutsu) and Non-Art (Hi-geijutsu). These are aspects that mark certain 1960s
practitioners as “Japanese,” while the same practitioners’ orientation toward
“dematerialization,” among other characteristics, simultaneously marks them as
“international.” (I wonder if, in a similar vein, what makes the work of some
contemporary Chinese artists “Chinese” is their manners and strategies of en-
gagement with what they perceive to be globalization and postmodernity.)
The “judgment of lag or belatedness”—or rather, the frank acknowledgment
of those properties—is also crucial. Nineteen-sixties Japan was able to articulate
“international contemporaneity” precisely because of its peripheral, or latecom-
er, status. Unfortunately, however, the perceived belatedness has often resulted
in exclusion from the art-historical narrative. The challenge today thus remains
how to fully inscribe 1960s Japan in world art history.6 As we endeavor to narrate
world art history, we also need to make a historical corrective to the so-called
canon of modern and contemporary art, which is undeniably Eurocentric. By

6. See the discussion in Section 5 of the

Seminars.
174 art and globalization

the 1960s, the locale of Japan readily offered more than a few instances of “great-
est hits.” For example, from the subset of “performative collectivism,” we may
want to select Hi Red Center’s Cleaning Event, Zero Dimension’s naked rituals,
The Play’s Current of Contemporary Art, and Niigata gun’s Event to Change the
Image of Snow.7 Within the local contexts, the 1960s (or more generally, the
period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s) constituted a breakout moment
for Japanese art, as did the 1990s (from mid-1980s onward) for Chinese art.
It follows then that the presumed greatest-hit roster (which remains especially
useful and necessary in pedagogy) would feature Xu Bing’s language works and
Cai Guo-Qiang’s explosion events, among other contemporary Chinese works.
Perhaps one benefit of globalizing contemporary art may be to offer tangible op-
portunities for “breakouts” to latecomers.
It seems, problematically, that the discipline of art history itself is bound by
the local/center binary, which is a variation of the traditional/modern binary in
the Asian context. Art history is unable to clearly think through where to locate,
say, 1920s Japan. Is 1920s Japan part of traditional art history or modern art histo-
ry? Whereas the former is tied to the area of Japan or Asia, the later is more often
than not linked with Euro-America. Neither should be a closed, fixed discipline;
they both are in need of globalization, with 1920s Japan bridging the two.
The need for the globalization of the discipline is more urgent for 1960s art
than for 1920s art, because contemporaneity was more widespread in the 1960s.
In this respect, lessons drawn from the discursive study of international contem-
poraneity in 1960s Japan are instructive. First, the perception of international
contemporaneity at a given locale at a given time and the actual state of interna-
tional contemporaneity are not always the same. Second, different locales may
embrace differing perceptions of contemporaneity. A salient example is the com-
parison between Tokyo and New York: if Tokyo saw the international tendency
of gestural abstraction as a shared experience of many regions of the world, New
York saw it as a sign of American triumph.
The gap between perception and fact is often historically informed. On
the one hand, the American triumph was all the more triumphant because of
New York’s long-perceived peripheral status. On the other hand, the similarly
marginal place Japan long occupied made it highly self-conscious of its alter-
ity and belatedness. When its path finally converged with that of the center,
some Japanese critics accused Japanese artists of making imitations of Euro-
American counterparts. Imitation is a form of learning: copying old masters or
model books was long an integral part of the artist’s training, East or West. The
sins of imitation nonetheless haunted the Japanese as their country underwent
the stages of modernization from the late nineteenth century onward, and the
matter was complicated by the modernist myth of originality. Granted, 1960s
Japan was not devoid of instances of imitation that deserve the criticism of being

7. See Tomii, “After the ‘Descent to the After Modernism, edited by Blake Stimson and
Everyday’: Japanese Collectivism from Hi Red Gregory Sholette (Minneapolis: University of
Center to The Play, 1964–1973,” in Collectivism Minnesota Press, 2007), 44–75.
175 assessments

merely lazy, conspicuous, or mindless and unable to transcend their originals.

The comparison of Claes Oldenburg’s and Sekine Nobuo’s hole-diggings in 1967
and 1968 respectively (Sekine was accused of imitating Oldenburg) illuminates
more than the futility of the still-common yet often tedious discussion in art
history about “Who came first?” and “Which work is original and which is de-
rivative?” (In this respect, the value judgments of originality and derivativeness
themselves needs deconstructing.) The comparison of Oldenburg and Sekine
also shows that it is essential to articulate differences within similarities, because
a prior example is bound to turn up somewhere in this vast world characterized
by “contemporaneity” and “multiplicity.”
speaking of modern and contemporary
asian art

C. J. W.-L. Wee

In a response to Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay on how the global biennial was eroding

the comparative autonomy and agency that India had in producing “interesting
art,” James Elkins says that while he did not disagree about the “overwhelm-
ing effect of biennial culture,” Mukhopadhyay’s “advocacy of Indian modernist
painting is problematic”: key painters such as Jamini Roy “cannot be described
in texts that will be read in western Europe and North America in such a way
that the artists appear necessary to modernism. They are representable as local,
but not as necessary.”1
Elkins’s response is part of a general question he had earlier raised as to
whether the art of non-Western Others (now more noticeable because of the rise
of multiculturalism in the Euro-American West) can actually be incorporated
into a “global art history”—into “an art history which would treat all parts of
the world as interconnected.”2 He goes on to contend that while he himself was
working on “this problem,” he “knows it will take more than exhibitions and
books to create a narrative of [globally inclusive] modernisms . . . It takes a foun-
dational criticism of the terms of art, history, and the global.”3
There are two immediate responses, in turn, to Elkins. Zhivka Valiavi-
charska states that, in contrast to getting away from center/periphery models
of “significant” cultural-artistic production, she “sides with . . . emancipatory
knowledges that are emerging”—a pitch for “alternative” or, to expand upon her
point, local knowledge taken positively. Suzana Milevska adds that she is “not
completely convinced by the irrelevance of the issue of inclusiveness”—a pitch
for the ongoing opening up of the canon.4
These varied positions taken in toto are proof of the lasting recuperative
capacities of center/periphery models of both knowledge and modern cultural
production, even when such dichotomies now have supposedly been shattered.
Elkins unexpectedly—given his generous inclination toward opening up art
criticism—repeats an old argument that the creation of modern culture came
about without any cultural or other interaction with the economic periphery or
the colonial-era frontier, ignoring the fact that “locality” can also be produced,
say, in the “home” colonial and metropolitan society, such as when modern and
urbanizing industrial England in the nineteenth century reinvented itself into a
rural and traditional society.
While there are also limitations to the “alternative” argument and the de-
mand for inclusion that counter the center/periphery binarism, these remain

1. See Section 9 of the Seminars. 4. These discussions are in Section 9 of the

2. See Section 5 of the Seminars. Seminars.
3. See Section 9 of the Seminars.
177 assessments

important strategic moves through which the modern and contemporary art
of others can gain both self-representation and recognition in the metropolitan
academy and cultural institutions. Such strategic approaches are inevitably and
perhaps even unavoidably ambiguous and fraught, and the problems—but also
the strengths—become apparent when we examine, even briefly, how the mod-
ern and contemporary art of a “globalizing” East Asia (taken to include South-
east Asia) struggles to gain representation. This, then, is the focus of my essay.
Let me offer one indicative example of an “alternative modernity” that de-
manded inclusive recognition. In 1997, then-Paris-based, mainland Chinese
Hou Hanru curated with Hans-Ulrich Obrist the touring exhibition extrava-
ganza called Cities on the Move: Urban Chaos and Global Change—East Asian
Art, Architecture and Film Now. They proclaimed that “a kind of mixture of
liberal Capitalist market economy and Asian, post-totalitarian social control is
being established as a new social order [in capitalist East Asia]. Culture, in such
a context, is by nature hybrid, impure and contradictory. Accordingly, the new
architectures and urban environment are being renovated and transformed into
a sort of ‘Theme Park’ oriented cityscape . . . This [urban modernity] incarnates
perfectly the image of the post-colonial and post-totalitarian modernization in
the region: the impulsive and almost fanatical pursuit of economic and mon-
etary power becomes the ultimate goal of development.”5 This breathless prose,
with a vocabulary that indicates “critique” but with a tone that suggests “celebra-
tion,” proclaims the latest version of the new—now available in East Asia. The
critical vocabulary is drawn from postcolonial theory of the 1980s and globaliza-
tion cultural theory of the 1990s, and the passage evinces a hint of Asian one-
upsmanship. It revives aspects of postwar modernization, but now updated to
include the warm reception of the free market in more developed Third World
regions. This embrace of the new oddly surprised Fredric Jameson, even though,
given Euro-American economic hegemony, the reception is not unpredictable:
“[Modernity] is in fact back in business all over the world, and virtually inescap-
able in political discussions from Latin America to China, not to mention the
former Second World itself.”6
Hou’s work is both illustrative and representative of an interest in showcas-
ing the New Asian cities and their urban cultures in relation to the more estab-
lished metropolitan centers. He elsewhere claims a distinct difference amid the
commonalities with the West for the dynamically creative Asian urban zones:
“In different parts of the world, especially in ‘non-western’ regions like the Asia-
Pacific, new understanding and models of modernity, or different modernities,
are being experimented with and provide the most active platform of creativity.”7
There is a claim for a culturally distinct and alternative modern-urban identity,

5. Cities on the Move: Urban Chaos and
Global Change—East Asian Art, Architecture and
Film Now, edited by Fiona Bradley, exh. cat.,
Hayward Gallery, London, May 13–June 27, 1999
(London: Hayward Gallery, 1999).
6. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity:
Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London:
Verso, 2002), 7.
7. Hou Hanru, “Z.O.U.—Zone of Urgency,”
Yishu 2, no. 2 (2003): 21. He is here writing of
his independent exhibition at the 2003 Venice
Biennale, Zone of Urgency.
178 art and globalization

one that has transformed its Western colonial origins and has become significant
enough to be presumably included in metropolitan art culture.
The “arrival” of this other modernity has been announced in a more bluntly
commercial manner in the sale by Sotheby’s in April 2008, in Hong Kong, of
Zhang Xiaogang’s Bloodline: The Big Family No. 3 (1995) for U.S. $6 million, the
highest amount paid thus far for a contemporary mainland Chinese artwork.
We have to be careful of simply accepting celebratory representations of
alternative contemporary Asian culture, even while we recognize that something
called “modern East Asia” does exist in a putative sense in a way it did not, say,
in 1970, given regionally shared visions on economic development. Apart from
the fact that “Asia” is historically a problematic term, we need to pay attention to
this “happening” New Asia’s connection to the reinvented free market (one that
the Manchester School in England in the nineteenth century would have rec-
ognized), which in turn is linked to versions of the (commodified) postmodern.
Problematic as some of Hou and Obrist’s positions may be, their work and
the emergence of regional Asian biennales and museum exhibitions since the
1980s showcasing modern and contemporary Asian art indicate that there also
exist, at the same time, self-reflexive investigations from within the region on
how “the rest of the world” produced and still produces its modern culture out
of related quasi- or directly colonized experiences, even if the ability to investi-
gate such questions is still hamstrung by a lack of cultural and academic institu-
tions and still-dominant Western-oriented intellectual frameworks for discussing
modern culture. These exhibitions and biennale-type events possessed an “Asia-
centric paradigm replaced Euro-American centricity,” as Thai art critic Apinan
Poshyananda observes.8 They played their part in at least partially decentering
a hegemonic cultural history, creating a cultural agenda that more consistently
catered to regional-local concerns. This is so even though biennale culture is tied
to an art market that national governments in the region use to boost their cre-
dentials as noteworthy world cities in East Asia. What might be called the East
Asian exhibitionary imaginary has contributed to the way the “Them” (of the
Us/Them opposition) now attempt to speak across divisive national boundaries
within the region, to speak among “themselves.” The gaining of representation
is an ambiguous and contradictory process. In the discussions in the Seminars,
the biennialization of the world appears primarily in a negative light, and does
not entirely take into account the positive opportunities for representation that
accompany it.
There is general agreement that Asian art—contemporary art, primarily—
drew noticeable international interest from the 1990s through the increased
number of international and regional biennials and exhibitions that decade saw
worldwide. However, what may not be recognized enough is the significance
of the founding of the Fukuoka Art Museum in 1979, and the two shows that
jointly formed the first “Asian Artists Exhibition”: Modern Asian Art—India,

8. Apinan Poshyananda, “Asian Art and the “Asian Art: Prospects for the Future” Report, ed-
New Millennium: From Glocalism to Techno- ited by Furuichi Yasuko and Hoashi Aki (Tokyo:
Shamanism,” in International Symposium 1999: Japan Foundation Asia Center, 2000), 165.
179 assessments

China and Japan (1979) and Festival: Contemporary Asian Art Show (1980), key
moments in which the regional representation of its own art was enabled.9 The
founding of the museum—with the extensive programming in Asian art that
developed at a time when interest in Asia was uncommon internationally—and
then, in 1999, of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum were the marks of a com-
mitment to fostering cross-cultural dialogue within the region. The museum’s
opening was itself part of the result of the complex economic empowerment
of the cultural margins—or at least the cultural semiperiphery, in Japan’s case.
Increased wealth has assisted the partial institutionalization of the exploration of
the visual and other contemporary arts.
What must be inserted into the account of the postmodern multicultural-
ism that arose in the 1990s is the added story of nonmetropolitan locales starting
to represent their own modernist and contemporary art. The Fukuoka Museum
is but one of a number of newer cultural institutions in Japan, Korea, Taiwan,
Singapore, and, increasingly, China that participated in exhibiting Asian art by
2000. Even if an institution such as the newly created Singapore Biennale of
2006 is caught up in the government’s goals to forge a business-oriented, global-
regional-local spectacle of multiculturalism, it is still good to have the institu-
tions that can better support research and the interpretation of the work of East
and Southeast Asian artists.
Regional art institutions in the region have more of a stake in attending
to what modernism was in Asia and to the presence of regional contemporary
art than would the more “international” institutions in the metropolitan West.
What matters here is that the art institutions and curators in, say, Korea or Sin-
gapore actually pay close attention to the practices of East Asian artists, rather
than mainly participate in an endless round of critiques of Orientalism and
Eurocentrism, which often has the negative results of continually returning art
and cultural discussions to Western artists and institutions.
The challenge of how to think through historical modernism also applies to
the “arrival” of contemporary art. This, indeed, was thematized in a special pro-
gram of the Singapore Biennale 2006, Telah Terbit (Out Now): Southeast Asian
Contemporary Art Practices During the 1960s to 1980s, curated by Ahmad Mashadi
and held at the Singapore Art Museum. Ahmad’s work is itself made possible by
pioneering studies in Indonesian contemporary art by critic-artist-curator Jim
Supangkat.10 The exhibition shows the near-simultaneous emergence of concep-
tual art and the return to figuration (often but not exclusively in a social-realist
manner) in the 1970s to be first, a reaction to the Cold War and the authoritar-
ian regimes that arose and were tolerated in the region by the advanced West be-
cause they were anticommunist; and second, a critique of the “formal, un-reflex-
ive . . . repetitiveness of ‘international abstraction’ and ‘provincial lyricism’ [such

9. Kindai Ajia no bijutsu = Asian Artists Exhi-
bition [henshū Fukuoka-shi Bijutsukan] (Fukuoka
City: Fukuoka Art Museum, 1979).
10. See Outlet: Yogyakarta Within the
Contemporary Indonesian Art Scene, edited by
Jim Supangkat et al., translated by Landung
Rusyanto Simatupang and Ruth Mackenzie
(Yogyakarta: Cemeti Art Foundation; The Hague:
Prince Claus Fund, 2001). [—J.E.]
180 art and globalization

as the watercolors of Singapore’s Chinatown and the Singapore River] which

had become the dominant conventions across the region.”11 Ahmad’s point is
that “the re-emergence and preoccupation with the ‘figure,’ associated with the
radical left, need not be seen as simple counterpoints to conceptual practices.”12
Out of a dominant U.S.-style modernist abstraction arose conceptualism and
figuration as contemporary art practices in Southeast Asia, even if others may
not see figuration as contemporary. Thus, by implication, the region has no need
to be in sync with Western narratives of such art forms.
If contemporary and postmodern art forms seem to be the basis for current
global art, this in itself does not give us an understanding of global art history:
we must continue to ask careful questions as to how an earlier modernism that
was absorbed in complex ways into, say, modern and modernizing Japanese and
Chinese art in the first half of the last century was then transformed into con-
temporary art practices. Such questions constitute part of the process of trying
to know ourselves better.

11. Ahmad Mashadi, Telah Terbit (Out Now): 12. Mashadi, Telah Terbit, 11.
Southeast Asian Contemporary Art Practices
During the 1960s to 1980s (Singapore: Singa-
pore Art Museum, 2007), 10.
a distant view

John Clark

It may be flattering to be invited to respond, but it is also frustrating. I have

been asked to read 102 pages of single-spaced text, which are very short summa-
ries of apparently complex and extended lectures and the edited versions of the
transcriptions of verbal exchanges about them in 2007, followed by 111 pages of
double-spaced written assessments.
These are mostly about the function of art and its producers, together with
some other art institutions or role players in the structures of power controlled,
generated, and perpetuated by forces called variously those of globalism or glo-
balization. There is quite a bit of reference to certain methodological approaches
or dominant interpretive concepts, but these are referred to casually and come
from a set that is recognized and largely held in common by many of the partici-
pants. Nearly all of these texts fail to clearly distinguish between units and levels
of analysis, or types of inferential rules about causation processes between them.
All are subsumed under notions of process, tendency, and degrees of hegemony.
There is very little discussion of art in all this, as mentioned by a response from
an artist. The general approach is anti-institutional, with the exception of men-
tion of the museum and occasionally the archive. There is very little discussion
of the artists’ friend and bête noire the mediator-curator, who is actually the
figure whose analysis might have told us much more about globalization in art
than top-down and often empirically controvertible assertions from theory.
The structure of discourse, despite many admissions of originality or provo-
cation, is largely phatic. This socially confirming and mirroring feature of the
discussion became more prominent as I read the responses [questions posed
during the Seminars] as a whole, which are highly repetitive. Most of the invited
speakers and respondents seem to be working with the same discursive practices,
which unthinkingly—for all the emphasis on thought or dialogism—replicate
and reinforce each other. Some of the interesting exceptions come in the Assess-
ments, some of which make claims for a radical empiricism or a refined applica-
tion of previously deployed concepts such as hybridity.
The non-Euramericans who were admitted to this self-privileging circle of
discourse were those from, or concretely discussing, Japan, China, India, and
Singapore, who knew how to argue in these modes. The subject of those who
did not know how to discuss in these modes and did not use their dominant lan-
guage, English, was barely indicated, even if some Japanese specialists did make
valiant attempts to draw attention to them. The notion that modernity and
globalism might be thought of in a large variety of ways, and from very different
182 art and globalization

historical positions (as we were reminded by an example from Latin America),

hardly came up.
In short, this was another case of discussion in Euramerica which will end
up being for Euramerica, and its very inconclusiveness points to an aporia that
will become more apparent with time.
globalization and transnational modernism

Iftikhar Dadi

While many varieties of globalization characterize premodern eras, I confine

myself to making a few broad remarks on the modern era since the late nine-
teenth century. To outline a few basic assumptions: “Art” (modern art in par-
ticular) cannot exist by itself as an autonomous formalist practice, but requires
an elaborate set of requisite institutions to be legible—academies, galleries and
museums, catalogues, criticism in journals and newspapers, collection and pa-
tronage structures, publics and audience. These institutions gathered force and
acquired new valences in the West with the advent of industrial capitalism and
colonialism. In the increasingly colonizing world of the nineteenth century,
whose peoples were subjects rather than citizens, the colonized territories lacked
the ensemble of institutions that could render a similar legibility to art. In the
case of India, for example, its classical art was rendered monstrous by Hegel and
Ruskin, and as recently as the early twentieth century, colonial cultural adminis-
trators were asserting that India did not possess any worthwhile tradition of high
art. Ongoing “traditional” material and visual practices were made visible only as
timeless, anonymous, and disappearing craft, and the artisan was subalternized,
as Arindam Dutta has shown in his recent study.1 Popular prints and objects that
had circulated in bazaars since the late nineteenth century were not considered
art either. The non-Western world thus enters the discourse of “modern art” in
the twentieth century under the sign of colonialism, Orientalism, primitivism,
and institutional and historical lack. The relationship between art and globaliza-
tion therefore needs to understood historically and discursively. Starting with
the late nineteenth century, one can broadly schematize modern art in much of
Asia, the Middle East, and Africa as marked by two overlapping phases.

first phase: twentieth-century modernism

The founding of art schools and academies and of salons and art societies, and
writings on art in journals and newspapers mark the first phase. These processes
were fitful and interrupted; nevertheless, they signify the emergence of precisely
the kinds of institutions that modern art requires for its framing. In formalist
terms, as is evident from recent studies, the advent of cubism was immensely
liberating for art practice in much of the non-Western world, as modern art was
no longer encumbered by Eurocentric post-Renaissance visual codes of perspec-

1. See Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty:

Design in the Age of its Global Reproducibility
(New York: Routledge, 2007). [—J.E.]
184 art and globalization

tive and realism. Finally, modern artists were imbricated in complex ways with
the rise of nationalism and decolonization, but we need much better accounts of
these artistic valences than have been provided by many nation-state-based art
surveys so far. Briefly put, the concept of the nation in much of Africa and in the
Muslim world does not possess an adequate referent: the persistent and multiple
crises of the postcolonial nation-state in these regions only serves to underscore
the epistemic violence by which the nation-state was enacted as a dominant
political and social framework during the twentieth century. Many artists how-
ever, refused narrow nationalist framings in their practice: the importance of
négritude and calligraphic modernism since the mid-twentieth century might be
understood in this manner as transnational developments. Andreas Huyssen has
recently noted that postcolonial theory and globalization studies are enabling
new ways of writing histories of modernism that are transnational, rather than
national or even international, and that he terms “modernism at large,” by which
he refers to “cross-national cultural forms that emerge from the negotiation of
the modern with the indigenous, the colonial, and the postcolonial in the ‘non-
Western’ world.”2 (The term “modernism at large” is very apt, as it sidesteps the
increasingly fruitless debate on whether modernity and modernism are singular
or multiple and vernacular.) I further argue that the role displacement and travel
play in the construction of even a “national” or local modern art clearly requires
a better understanding than has been available as yet.
Canon formation, however, is linked to global power imbalances, capitalist
accumulation, and institutions in complex ways that require analysis rather than
tacit acceptance of its a priori status.3 Doesn’t the modernist canon, via primitiv-
ism, Orientalism, and patriarchy, appropriate for itself the collective aesthetic
labor of the rest of the world, in a maneuver eerily reminiscent of the ongoing
patenting by Western transnational corporations of the Third World’s cultivated
commons in the arena of genomics today? Nevertheless, modernism, by fos-
tering new imaginations globally, also offers critical and affirmative potential.
(Here I parenthetically note that the artist and writer Rasheed Araeen and writ-
ings in the journal Third Text, which he edits, have addressed these issues with
cogency for some time now, and at the very least, further work in this area needs
to be cognizant of arguments already made.)
Modern art in much of this region emerges via a complex negotiation with
“tradition,” with a resonant and affirmative encounter with transnational mod-
ernism, and with the need to situate itself in relation to colonial and postco-
lonial impasses and possibilities. In many cases, in the absence of developed
art-historical methodologies and concepts, artists developed their practice with
reference to other modalities of “tradition,” such as oral and written literatures.
More importantly, investigating artistic practices at the peripheries of canoni-
cal modernism (or better, of modernism at large) demands careful and patient

2. Huyssen, “Geographies of Modernism in a 3. Tabish Khair, “Modernism and Modernity:

Globalizing World,” New German Critique 34, no. The Patented Fragments,” Third Text 55 (Sum-
1 (2007): 194 [—J.E.] mer 2001): 3–13.
185 assessments

work, including an awareness of social and political history, languages and litera-
tures, and other cultural conceptions the artists engaged with—in short, a writ-
ing of artistic practice that respects the formalist properties of the art, but also
situates it with reference to the intellectual history of the time and the region,
and along the artists’ experiences of physical and metaphorical travel. To further
demonstrate the complexity of terms such as “tradition” and “nation,” I offer a
few remarks from a book-length study I am presently writing on South Asian
Muslim artists. These artists are (problematically) associated with Pakistan, but
my study situates them within a narrative of transnational Muslim South Asian
modernism rather than viewing them within the older straitjacket of a national
art history.
My study looks at the emergence of modern art among Muslim South Asian
artists by examining in some detail the work and intellectual concerns of a select
number of artists from the 1920s to the present. The idea of tradition embraces
intellectual and cultural resources of the Persianate cosmopolitan world of the
Mughal Empire since the sixteenth century. It also encompasses the reformist
movements allied with the rise of print culture that flourished in the wake of the
Indian Mutiny of 1857, and sought to shape Muslim life in India by religious and
educational reform and by modernization of Urdu language and literature. “Tra-
dition” further included the rise of progressive cultural politics in South Asia
during the 1930s, and the growth of literary journals and criticism. Urdu poetry
and literature further provided many of the artists with imaginative tropes. Tra-
dition also partially encompassed the rich iconography of Hindu and Buddhist
South Asia.
“Islamic art” was clearly a key facet of tradition the artists wrestled with. The
term usually refers to artistic practices over a specific geographic area (primarily
the Middle East) before the advent of modernity, but as scholars have observed,
this definition is not indigenous to Muslim intellectual history, but is a categori-
zation that developed in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European Oriental-
ist art-historical scholarship. This term is clearly catachrestic, referring neither to
purely religious art nor to art made exclusively by Muslims, while excluding art
made by Muslims in the modern era and also in major regions such as Southeast
Asia. The term therefore marks an allochronism: the artists in my study “decolo-
nized” Islamic art via their artistic practice, by selectively reworking threads and
fragments of classical Islamic art into modern formulations. “Islamic art” was
available to these artists as received and lived practice in some cases, but, as a
result of modern scholarship, was also furnished to them as a discursively articu-
lated conception. Beginning in the 1920s, artists reworked fundamental catego-
ries that characterize the study of classical Islamic arts—architecture, miniature
painting, ornament, and calligraphy—via the formal and procedural openings
afforded by transnational modernism. It must be reiterated that international
modernism itself drew upon artistic practices of the non-West, in which “Islamic
art,” the decorative arts, and primitivism in general have played a foundational
186 art and globalization

role—these crossed paths complicate questions of originality and derivativeness

by defying any simple ascription of linear causality and temporality.
The artists’ work also needs to be set in relation to the larger rubric of de-
colonization, as it made a certain type of claim to a “national” art. However,
the “national” in modern Muslim South Asia since the late nineteenth century
is a highly fragmented and overdetermined concept that cannot be neatly cap-
tured in a concise definition. The later nineteenth century witnessed the growing
awareness by Muslim intelligentsia of their minority status in India, and led to
the rise of Muslim identity in relation to wider pan-Islamic ideas. The celebrated
poet Muhammad Iqbal, whose philosophy of subjectivity greatly influenced art-
ists, was a persistent critic of territorial nationalism from the early years of the
twentieth century until his death in 1938. Artistic practice therefore adopted a
studied distance from Pakistani nationalism, and largely eschewed direct iden-
tification with it. Even in cases when the artist was patronized by the state, the
addressee of the artwork was hardly ever the nation in a simple sense. Rather, art-
ists availed themselves of the opening towards reflexivity and articulation of an
alternative universe offered by modernism, and simultaneously also investigated
transnational cosmopolitanism modalities in early modern and modern South
Asian Muslim culture.
The reasons for the absence of the avant-garde in much of the developing
world might also be briefly mentioned here. In the absence of powerful but out-
dated institutional and academic codes to rebel against, the avant-garde simply
cannot exist. Innovation in sites without such established values, therefore, con-
sists in creating new institutions (rather than in attacking nonexistent ones). It is
striking that all the artists I study devoted considerable effort to establishing new
institutions, by publishing journals, creating exhibition spaces, teaching, and
running art foundations. One needs to underscore the powerfully affirmative
potential of modernism itself in fostering new imaginations during the decolo-
nizing era, rather than conducting a futile search only for formalist experimen-
tation or even for works that carry overt sociopolitical charge. If modernism is
understood to refer to cultural production that is experimental and reflexive,
inhabits new patronage arrangements, seeks new audiences and venues, and is
generally concerned with exploring the predicament of the subject in modernity
by drawing on a ruined tradition, the artists I examine certainly undertake that
project, and they do so not primarily as national figures but as participants in a
framework of a networked, cosmopolitan imagination.

second phase: contemporary globalization

The second phase of globalization is of course the one we now commonly refer
to, which has been unfolding since about 1990 and is characterized by the incor-
porative trajectory of the communist world and independent nation-states into
global finance and transnational capitalism, and the corresponding rise of a spec-
187 assessments

tacular global installation art enacted in biennials. Here the artist is frequently
seen as deterritorialized and is accused of making work that smoothly translates
difference and alterity into a homogenizing globalized sameness. Even worse,
the artist is said to serve as an unwitting vector for capitalist penetration into the
peripheries. There is undoubtedly much disturbing truth in these observations,
but are we really willing to trade the globalized art world for the pre-biennial
nationalist era, if such were possible? I would argue rather that analogous to
modernism, globalism possesses contradictory valences, and that newer media
and intensified exchange possess possibilities for fostering new imaginations and
solidarities that are not reducible to capitalist logics. It is striking to note how
the negative effects of biennialization discussed in the seminars mainly impact
easel-based oil painters. In Central Asia, for example, painters appear to have
become more isolated. But one wonders why that medium should continue to
be valorized today, especially by artists possessing Soviet-era training that shaped
their artistic consciousness by bestowing upon Central Asian peoples a secular-
ized, bureaucratized modernity while denying them mobility. If artists working
in older modes have suffered isolation, important work in newer media that rei-
magines Central Asia as a region and a crossroad is also emerging, as the recent
exhibition curated by Leeza Ahmady has demonstrated.4 Similarly, the recent
assertion by a painter that “after Picasso, painting, for Africans, is impossible”
flies in the face of important work African modernists such as Ibrahim El-Salahi
have been creating for some fifty years.5 And given that easel-based oil painting
was not an “authentic” African medium to begin with, might reversing that
claim be more accurate, that “painting for Africans is possible only after Picasso”
recodes painting, making it available for global appropriation? One wonders
why newer media are not more capable of expressing African concerns today,
especially if performative tropes that are said to mark “African aesthetics” might
find better expression in new forms. Caroline Jones’s intervention in this volume
has cogently addressed the affirmative possibilities engendered by contemporary
globalization. Here I further suggest that the effects of biennialization on the lo-
cal itself are profound, and probably incalculable in the medium and long term.
Globalization and biennialization are clearly beginning to open up isolated re-
gions to new imaginations and practices that include venturing beyond painterly
modernism to create work in new media that might well possess considerable
transformative potential for the local itself by enabling a more direct social ad-
dress. Furthermore, it might productively reconfigure the otherwise disjunctive
relationship between a seemingly local Kazakh studies and a global art history
of the modern and contemporary era that cannot be decolonized without writ-
ing careful studies of the intellectual and aesthetic concerns of modernist and
globalist artists at large.

4. See the review of the exhibition Parable 5. Reported about Garth Erasmus by Claire
of the Garden: New Media Art from Iran and Pentecost, Section 9 of the Seminars.
Central Asia. Benjamin Genocchio, “Surprising
Sophistication,” New York Times, March 23,
2008.
art history and architecture’s aporia

Mark Jarzombek

I would like to pick up on the theme of nationalism, since it featured so promi-

nently in the discussion, but draw my thoughts around something that was not
addressed, namely the problem (if I can use that word for a moment) of archi-
tecture as it relates to the disciplinary formation of art history. I feel somewhat
conflicted in raising this issue, since, as an architectural historian, I am already
working within the grain of certain presuppositions and historical constructions.
But I am speaking here not as an architectural historian, but as a historian of
the discipline of art history, and it is from that point of view that I would like to
insist that a discussion about art history and “the global” is changed considerably
when seen from the perspective of architecture.
Let me start with a point made by James Elkins. Art history, he claimed,
“grew up along with the rise of the modern nation-state,” and because of this its
current practices may “still be in thrall to the nationalist impulses that seem in
retrospect to have driven so much earlier scholarship.” There are several ways in
which one can agree and disagree with this claim, but my intention is to expand
on it laterally not by looking more closely at the phenomenon of the modern
nation-state, but by comparing the modern (and here I have to add what was
missing in the phrase, namely the word “European”) nation-state of the nine-
teenth century with the modern, non-European nation-state of the twentieth
century. If European nations were created with attachments to a history that
could be scripted to reach back to ancient times, the situation in India, Brazil,
Africa, and elsewhere was very different. There, nation-building was allied with
modernization and not preeminently with a demand for art-historical continu-
ities. The new nations of the twentieth century created any number of universi-
ties, technical institutions, and even some museums, but did not create major
institutions for the study of art or architectural history. The twentieth-century
modern nation-state was anticolonial and, to state it perhaps too bluntly, anti–
art history.
In the Seminar, much was made about the absence of art history programs
in non-European countries. But it can be debated whether this is really an issue
at all, or whether what Anglo-European art historians see as a crisis of disconti-
nuity, others could see as something quite different, especially if one takes into
consideration that the relationship to architecture was a powerful one and in
a sense ushered in the first phase of global modernism. Think of capital cities,
and all that they entailed, like Ankara (late 1920s), Chandigarh (1950s), Brasilia
(late 1950s), Tel Aviv (1950s), Islamabad (1960s), Dacca (late 1970s), and Abu-
189 assessments

ja (1970s). These cities can be compared with an earlier global national style,
namely the beaux-arts, examples of which can be found in South American,
Egypt, and Japan. Beginning in the second decade of the twentieth century, that
mistake, so to speak, was not to be made again.
I am not here to defend modernism, but to suggest that non-European
modernism was not only a fundamental challenge to the European nation-state
model, but an event in history that could not be registered—overtly at least—in
the disciplinary structure of art history. Stated in simpler terms, at the very mo-
ment in time when architecture was engaging the global (for better or worse), art
history was becoming ever more a fixed as a nonglobal discipline (for better or
worse). Georg Friedrich Hegel promised that art was a much stronger carrier of
the history of civilization than architecture, tied down as architecture was to the
presumably deadening realities of economic need. But for a period of time, and
one that is today hugely relevant to the question of how we frame the global, it
was architecture, not art history, that dominated the national narratives in the
non-European world. As a result, art history lost contact with and control over
its privileged, philosophically mandated connection to the history of nation-
states. It became self-foreclosing at the very moment it was set apart from his-
tory. It has never acknowledged this most fundamental of realities.
Compare the Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis with his contemporary,
Erwin Panofsky. Doxiadis, who designed Islamabad, had a global practice—per-
haps even the first such practice—and was a leading architectural theorist of the
age, promoting what he called ekistics, a theory about landscape, resources, and
design. Panofsky was equally prolific and created a theory that was to become
the mainstay of art history, namely iconology, a theory that was obviously Eu-
rocentric. Still today, a book like Methods and Theories of Art History can claim
without any ambiguity that Panofsky developed “modern iconographic theory.”1
But “modern,” in this case, refers to the institutional structure of art history,
which could only be pursued in the art history departments of Europe and the
United States. It was very different from the “modern” as understood by Doxi-
adis, which was also based on expertise, but was not dependent on the conven-
tions of historical production.
One of the innovations of the Bauhaus, one must recall, was that it had
no library, and still today in the non-European world, architecture is to a large
extent taught without what we might consider adequate library facilities. This
is not necessarily a question of resources. Certainly the school of architecture
at Hong Kong, which I recently visited, could afford a library. Most of these
schools were born in the modern nation-building era and still carry the imprint
of their modernity. Today we see this as a deficiency, but that could be debated,
and I am certainly not claiming allegiance to the implicit anti-intellectualism
that attached itself to the tropes of architectural practice. The point is to see in

1. Anne d’Alleva, Methods and Theories

of Art History (London: Laurence King, 2005).
[—J.E.]
190 art and globalization

what way this absence (the absence of history in the modernist project) not only
ran counter to the shaping of modern art history in the Anglo-European world
but was not necessarily a negative.
The problem is therefore not architecture, but an art history that—despite
its attempt to now think globally—still cannot see the consequences of its anti-
global, antimodern, “modern” retrenchment, even though this retrenchment is
encoded, and even preserved, in its disciplinary structure. Art history’s absence
in the nation-building formations of the twentieth century is registered as an
absence of history itself! Just look at how many books there are on Islamic art
architecture that end in the eighteenth century, supporting the image of non-
European modernism as not having a history worthy of the past. The otherwise
magisterial book Islamic Architecture of the Indian Subcontinent ends in 1839.2
Furthermore, the last chapter is called the “The Final Phase of Mamluk Archi-
tecture,” as if this final phase was a historical predictor of the arrival of the new
colonial masters who ended the flow of Islamic architectural history in India.
Though this may to some degree be true, the presumption is that history ends
because art history ends and that a new era begins that is basically history-less.
Art history disguises its exclusion from the global other in the form of silence,
but basically admits that it doesn’t know what to say. The solution is to interpret
the “end” of art history as a transition to a completely different disciplinary
framework, known as contemporary art and art criticism. The phrase “contem-
porary art” is, from this perspective, the semantic indicator of art history’s alien-
ation from the global modernist history and its belated attempt to reconstitute
its legitimacy in that arena, by making everything into an endless modernity.
Art history has yet to deal with the two very different meanings of the word
“modern” when discussing the “modern nation-state”: one from the nineteenth
century and the other from the twentieth, one operating with art history and
the other opened up—and in opposition to—the former through the medium
of global modernist architecture. It is fine to critique the former, but the real
work is to recognize the latter and to see the all important difference between
modern architecture, which began in Europe but which received no nation-state
mandate, and the global modernist architecture, which did. Historians in both
art and architecture have tended to validate the former, whereas I am trying to
validate the latter—not the politics, of course, but its historical reality in disci-
plinary historiography.
Seeing this distinction will not be easy, since art history, symptomatically,
lashes out at architecture without realizing why. Hal Foster, for example, who
obviously speaks from a certain position as art critic, accused Frank Gehry of
making bad sculpture—“regressive” is the word he uses—and of caving in to
the global spectacular.3 But it is quite possible to see not architecture but art
history from the 1950s onward as “regressive” (making “bad” global history).

2. Bianca Maria Alfieri, Islamic Architecture 3. Foster, “Why All the Hoopla?” London
of the Indian Subcontinent (London: Laurence Review of Books, August 23, 2001, 24–26.
King, 2000).
191 assessments

The antagonism is particularly noticeable when Foster protests against the false
“license” that Gehry ostensibly had in making his designs, by which Foster
means that Gehry operates outside the bounds of art history and its presumptive
avant-gardist (that is, European) iconographies. Foster also sees as postmodern
what is actually architecture’s modernism. Postmodernism, a largely architec-
tural innovation, was actually only a second global wounding of art history. The
real wound happened earlier, for it was not postmodernism that freed architec-
ture from history’s disciplinary constraints, but modernism—and not European
modernism, which is still the favorite subject of art history, but non-European
modernism.
After a passage of time, many non-European countries, as we all know,
moved into a post-nation-state phase, which championed the call for local and
regional identity, a phase that is still strong today. This in turn created a need
for a history that not only supported the legitimacy, retroactively, of the nation
state, but that came also be seen—officially or not—as a form of resistance to
both the earlier ideas of national modernism and the growing specter of global-
ization. Nothing has been better for the global expansion of art history than the
globalized claim for a local resistance to globalization.
Art history, born in the service of the European nation-states, now rises up
in the service—implicitly, of course—of a latently antimodern view of the non-
European world. Today’s nation-state must—so the sentiment makes clear—
have a civilizational history that reinforces its political legitimacy as a world
nation. Global art history thus risks becoming a code word, on the flip side of
the chart, for a highly questionable globalization of identity in alliance with a
rapidly expanding museological culture. Just think of the huge expansion of cu-
ratorial space from 1810 to 2010, and of the expansion in the last ten years alone!
What major city around the world today does not have at least one museum
designed by a so-called avant-garde architect? These buildings and institutions
are, however, only a very small fraction of the exponential growth of museologi-
cal space. Large swaths of landscapes, replete with buildings and even towns, are
being set aside by the UN as cultural preserves. In the late 1970s there were only
a few so-called heritage sites as sanctioned by the United Nations, which, after
the destructions of World War II, was eager to preserve culture in the name of
“civilization.” Today there are over seven hundred heritage sites of different types
all around the world, with countries everywhere eager to have as many as pos-
sible so as to rake in tourist revenue.
And where there is no nation, one can be easily simulated. The Dogon in
Africa are, for example, now a protected culture, which means that a whole array
of modern bureaucratic structures will be created on their behalf and imposed
upon them. Their land has become a vast anthropological zone, as if the disaster
of the Indian reservations in the United States has been forgotten. Ironically,
it is the landscape they inhabited that is being “protected,” their architecture
being seen as little more than an extension of the natural world. The Romantic
192 art and globalization

age lives on, but now as a major global and financial institution. According
to the official text: “The Bandiagara site is an outstanding landscape of cliffs
and sandy plateaux with some beautiful architecture (houses, granaries, altars,
sanctuaries and Togu Na, or communal meeting-places). Several age-old social
traditions live on in the region (masks, feasts, rituals, and ceremonies involving
ancestor worship).” The unesco efforts, though meant to forestall the modern-
ist eradication of history, bring into play an industrialization of cultural history
that returns to the conventions of the static, “modern” nation-state. Art history
has long adjudicated contemporary Dogon art as a contemporary variation of
tradition, some of it high-priced, some of it kitsch. But don’t tell that to the
unesco officials, who view the Dogon as still real and very much in need of our
protection. Twenty-first-century Dogon society is, in fact, so valuable that we
have to make it into a quasi-nation-state frozen against time to become a culture,
landscape, and museum all in one. (Dogon coffee cups are sure to come.)
I raise this because the operations of unesco were not mentioned in the
seminar, and yet it this institution that is the globalized front of art history
today, normalizing the image of static nationhood. It is important to challenge
this form of globalization, but it is equally important to realize that it shares its
Eurocentric origins with art history’s beginnings.
One cannot but help notice, therefore, that art history—even as it tries to
go global—repeatedly falls victim to the crisis of a double negative in which its
Eurocentrism was inscribed, first as a nineteenth-century discipline and then
again as a twentieth-century discipline, and perhaps now for the third time as a
global discipline where it hopes to finish its original mandate, history and con-
temporary art being the two mutually orthogonal vectors by which it operates.
The literalness of this was recently laid bare in the Leeum Samsung Museum of
Art, which opened a few years ago. It has one building for Korean traditional art
and another one some ten feet away for contemporary art. The sober art histo-
rian is paired with the tortured, postcolonial contemporary artist, a person who
is fated to have no history in the presumptive historylessness of global capital
unless assisted by the techniques of art curatorship. The timelessness of tradition
meets the timelessness of the contemporary compared to the timefullness of the
modern art history project.
The difference between tradition and the contemporary, and between a
global history that ends before modernism and begins again with art’s encoun-
ter with modernity, is clearly a false dichotomy, and one of the reasons why a
putatively global art history has so many strikes against it. The pattern is already
visible in the first generation of textbooks that follow what I call the “Euro+
model” of history writing. This approach reaffirms the familiar linear narrative
for Europe and then adds—or rather includes—free-standing chapters on Chi-
na, India, and Africa, as if these places have an unbroken history largely separate
from global realities until their fateful encounters with modernism, which is
where their history and their art history ends and magically switches to contem-
193 assessments

porary history. In one textbook, Africa is divided into two time periods, “an-
cient,” which goes from 2500 B.C.E. to 1700 C.E., and “modern,” which goes
from 1900 to today. One should not stumble over the word “modern,” since the
antimodernity of the split is what is to be noticed. The consequences are bizarre.
Why would the highly sophisticated architecture and engineering accomplish-
ments of the fifteenth-century Mamluks, not to mention the twelfth-century
churches of Lalibela with their complex hydroengineering, belong to ancient
history? Can one really go from Saharan rock art to a thirteenth-century statue
from Zimbabwe in the span of a few pages without falling prey to the ever-
present suggestion that Africa is defined by the continuity of its presumptive
primitiveness? The book also “disappears” the history of the colonial occupation
of Africa in the late nineteenth century. This is not to say that the authors are
unaware of this but to point to the fact that once again art history presumes that
its history is History itself.
In the Euro+ model, the burden of European (perhaps I should say
non-Afro-Asian) history is its modernity (and the legitimization of history and
its nation-state constructions), whereas the burden of the history of the non-
European world is, apart from its ostensible separation from Europe, its satura-
tion with tradition. This two-part model remains resolutely Eurocentric while
fulfilling the liberal promise for an alternative to the history of the West, the
main purpose of which is to allay Western anxieties about its modernity while
reserving the sanctity of the modern idea of the political border as protected by
the international laws that were set in play following the Congress of Vienna in
1815. It is thus the timelessness of modernity that makes the illusion of timefull-
ness possible.
The basic rule is that nations are entitled—if not actually urged—to be
not-global in their historical outlooks while being globalized in their economic
outlook. The progenitor of this duality was, of course, the Romantic age, which
has now, one can almost say, become both international and global. The non-
European world has to a large extent accepted this neo-European modern nation-
state view. This was brought home to me when an Indian publishing company
asked us to change the name of our textbook, A Global History of Architecture,
to A History of Indian Architecture. We were also expected to thin it to empha-
size the importance of India. The editors of the press saw Indian history—and
perhaps the real market here was Hindu history—as a site of resistance, even
though their model for history writing most obviously derived from colonial-age
history. This view cannot be stopped, wrapped up as it is in the advancements
of museology and the globalized bureaucratization of space, not to mention the
heritage-ization, touristification, and global UN-ification of culture.
Art history is now in a position that it can begin to explain—even, finally,
to itself—its own aporias. Clearly, it has the obligation to reassess its disciplinary
status and its attachments to Eurocentrism, but it also needs to reassess the fate-
ful negative consequences of some of its more cherished philosophical impera-
194 art and globalization

tives, which are twice over Eurocentric. Ultimately the problem is, of course, not
about architecture, but rather about what architecture brings out of disguise in
this respect. Never allowed into the inner sanctum of history, architects already
in the nineteenth century were well aware that their field’s attachment to history
was constructed, that history could be manipulated and its meanings made re-
ducible to a range of simulacra. It was this that made architecture so successful in
the nation-building phase of the twentieth century once its historicist skin was
finally rejected. It was this aesthetics-with-no-history that finally burst through
outside of Europe in the early twentieth century as an early formation of a global
other to art history’s Eurocentrism—a no-history that was, however, a historical
and epistemological project unto itself. In the face of this crisis, art historians
may have wanted to affirm a European civilizational model of history and con-
tinuity, but they are now, perhaps, slowly waking up to the realization that even
their field’s history—like that of architecture—has long been disconnected from
a presumptive civilizational mandate.
so what might be solved here?

Tani Barlow

“So what might be solved here?” is a question that was raised early in the original
meeting. I have cited it because the sentence is not exactly a question, and if it
were, it would be an improper one. The question presupposes a split between the
historical and the personal registers. It is posed in relation to some stories that
Shigemi Inaga has just told. The story is that Tanizaki actually loved flush toilets
and movie stars and that his infamous writing about the “sensual beauty of dark,
wood-lined Japanese toilets” is just so much literary chit-chat. Some idiot at
Critical Inquiry had rejected an essay Inaga submitted years ago, calling it “pa-
rochial” and “ethnographic” because it concerned Japanese art. Inaga related his
shock at the racialist selection criteria for the art at a major Pompidou show on
the Japanese interwar avant-garde. Yet at the end of all these illustrative stories
Inaga was asked to explain his feelings.
The demand for a solution is posed in such a fashion that the only pos-
sible recourse has to be more disclosures of more personal feelings. This makes
what Inaga actually asked—can nonspecialist scholars learn enough about actual
existing world practices and art history to ask a proper question of it—into a
presumption of identity and narcissistic wounding. The problem Inaga encoun-
tered did not seem to have anything to do with either hurt feelings or “affect”
(not a substitute for the word “emotion”). An interlocutor’s demand for a solu-
tion not only does not ask anything. It averts us from a focus on thinking that
really matters.
I received a series of primary responses to these transcripts, too. The re-
spondents tried different strategies, but their goal seems the same as mine. Like
a good historian, Caroline Jones goes right for the level of assumptions: the
debates addressed an imaginary autonomous object called “art”; the conveners
posed social science questions without consulting any social scientists; the con-
veners assumed culture and nation are isomorphism. Her sample—Oiticica’s
career and art—suggests ways of sidestepping the shortcomings, as his life and
art are a “solution” waiting to be noticed. (This was Inaga’s ultimate point too,
of course.) Mark Jarzombek notes that the common event has already occurred
and that it was global modernism. Thus, while Doxiados designed Islamabad,
the discipline of art history consolidated around a méconnaissance of “world art,”
and is stuck now in a timeless void of self-reference. Jarzombek calls on art his-
tory to climb out of its mummy bag and see what is front of its face.
Historian Iftikhar Dadi notes that the twentieth-century interwar years had
already globalized a canonical “modernism-at-large,” which, like the moment of
196 art and globalization

“globalization” in the immediate post–Cold War 1990s, is over. Now is a moment

to consider the postcolonial “affirmative possibilities” of bygone eras, or else this
project of addressing unasked questions will go on forever in relation to a blank
abstraction called “global capital.” Why not, Dadi says, address catachresis in art
criticism, starting with “Islamic art.” C. J. Wee furthers this orientation to the
historical catachresis, raising the issue of regionalism and a Hegelian politics of
recognition (“this politics of recognition leading to an ultimate radiance,” in the
blazing words of Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay) as a still valuable form of work. Many
echoes of regionalism in our immediate post–Cold War “nonmetropolitan lo-
cales” are referred to by Rasheed Araeen, the founding editor of Third Text. In the
last of the commentaries I was sent, Anthony King pokes a hole in this presump-
tion that context or region is the royal road out of the impasse. Look, he says, the
“modernity thing” is a shibboleth, a labyrinth. The point is that the physicality
of the modern city is both unprecedented and tangible and that is the historical
event at stake, not “capital,” because, “the city . . . is itself a work of art.”
The first wave of commentators actually disposed of the half-asked nonques-
tion “So what might be solved here?” quite handily. They declined the offer to
play that game. In Jones’s words, “already existing aesthetic strategies” are every-
where “begging to be understood.”
So why do the Stone Theory Institute debates so often appear as set formula?
Here is the one clear rationale. Whether “art-historical, historical, or political,”
intellectual work on globalization and art needs to “struggle to put together
some kind of stage or form where these kinds of discussions can be imagined.”
Alas, this proffers, again, another solution. It is not an appropriate question,
and if it were asked—say for instance, “Where are all the critical theorists who
are providing new ways of seeing art in our time?”—then it would still be an
improper question because it would ignore the actual names of contemporary
critical theorists and knowledgeable art historians like Yin Jinan, Dai Jinhua,
Jason Wong, Kyung Hyun Kim, and Wu Hung, just to mention a few whose
work is easily available in English on Amazon.com for a few bucks.
Stock social science descriptions of globalization, transnationalization, re-
gionalism, localism do not provide a platform for better questions because they
do not encourage better questions to be asked. The better, fresher questions are
emerging, have emerged, are already deeply established in the tsunami of work
that is sweeping formulaic debates away. Returning to the impasse over Inaga’s
work, a fresher question is “Why did Tanizaki have a crush on Colleen Moore?”
or “Why did Tanizaki go on about the erotics of latrines, when he knew very
well that flush toilets are nicer and he preferred them himself?”
So let me make my first point as unmistakable and clear as possible. Tani-
zaki, Oiticica, Doxiados, Lu Xun, Na Haesuk, and so on are not integers on a
larger platform or project about globality or global art. They are critical and in-
ventive actors in the historical events of modernism-at-large and most certainly
in 1990s economic, neoliberal globalization as well as this as yet unnamed space
197 assessments

where we find ourselves as the U.S. centrality in the global order has simply
begun to collapse. This is a view literary theorists and comparativists like Haun
Saussey, Emily Apter, and Gayatri Spivak had canonized as early as 2004.
My second point is to inform the art historians that theirs is a false impasse.
This will involve a bit of play acting, so bear with me. In the transcript we hear
tell about a bleak world. It seems that the academy places such enormous politi-
cal obstacles on what can and cannot be staged as art criticism that resistance
is futile. The evidence presented for this view is anecdotal. Two experiences are
offered; each one is a feminine impasse. First, there is the instance of a “young
scholar [who] cannot get a job at a major university by explaining Renaissance
altarpieces in terms of Peruvian huacas,” and, second, there is “a senior scholar
who does” explain Renaissance altarpieces that way and who “is likely to be ig-
nored because her narrative will be idiosyncratic—it won’t speak to an engaged
interpretive community.”1 At stake is the effort to resist being assimilated into
the stale world of contemporary art education. If I am interpreting this point
correctly, it seems that neither an eccentric young woman scholar nor an eccen-
tric old woman scholar has any hope of getting traction in the academic study of
art because their work will be (or will be considered, it is not exactly clear which)
frivolous, amorphous, and extraneous to the real debates. They will send their
messages, but no one will receive them.
Speaking bluntly, this has not been my experience at all. Third Text is not
the only alternative to the art world. There are three good journals in the world
of English language studies of East Asia topics, including politically engaged art,
contemporary art criticism, and histories of poetics and aesthetics. (This is not
even to raise the obvious problem of language access to critical projects in po-
liticized art criticism outside the United States.) The journals are the seventeen-
year-old journal Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique; Traces; and Inter-Asia Cul-
tural Studies.2 Any of the primary discussants at the Stone Theory Institute can
put down their copies of Third Text and begin reading any of these three journals
if they are concerned to know about the contemporary theoretical politics of
Asia-engaged intellectuals. There is no mystery here.
After seventeen years of publishing a critical journal in “Asian” humanities,
I see precious little danger to even the most rarefied aspirants to even the best
universities if they write across disciplines. Inaga’s story about Critical Inquiry
is about ignorance loitering behind the masks of reputation and anonymity.
Rather than those lady professors whose oddly undisciplined speculations about
Renaissance altars leave them unemployable at “leading universities,” I prefer the
scary hero who arises in Zhivka Valiavicharska’s summary remarks: “You are ab-
solutely right,” she says to Susan Buck-Morss. “You are arguing precisely for the
subject’s radical displacement from the context of her own self-understanding. I
would call this displacement a confrontation—and a violent one—if not violent
in the ordinary sense.” I think what Valiavicharska is saying, and let me repeat

1. These are Elkins’s comments; see the

close of Section 6 of the Seminars.
198 art and globalization

that this is my second point, is that the radical disidentification of art historians
from art history is a good start.
I will end on a matter raised in Section 5 of the Seminars, concerning the
question “Why write about art?” or the singularity of the art object as opposed
to “any other cultural product that resulted in interesting socioeconomic con-
texts.” James Elkins says that those of us confronted with writing “historical
narratives of modernism” have only three scholarly strategies: (1) contextual-
ization, (2) economic reductionism, and, most interestingly, (3) idiosyncrasy.
“In that third case, you are taking the risk that your writing does not make
contact with other people’s narratives at all, that it appears outside history or
criticism—that it appears as poetry.” Why demonize poetry? For me the poem
is a precisely a problem in universality. I am not at all comfortable with the as-
sumption that poetry is amorphous, gnomic, or disengaged. In his Handbook of
Inaesthetics, Badiou argues precisely for the truth value of poetics and also, in the
same discussion, explains why comparativity cannot rest on contextuality, simili-
tude, regionalism, location, linguistic similarity, but must confront and take up
critically discrepant and inaesthetic interpretative strategies.3 It is the ideas, he
argues, that are at stake here, and not aesthetics or design or prettiness or even
goodness.
Once I accept the gamble on universality in poetics, the stake lies with the
problem of future anteriority, “what art will have been” outside the metropoli-
tan market. This question is never raised in the Stone Theory Institute debates.
That is peculiar. After all, from the position of art makers (even “art” makers),
futurity has to be recognized, because we craft into our work the expectation of
the future, of readers or viewers. In any case the work will always (Irigaray shows
this with her poetic language) replay, with reiterated difference, the nonsolidity
of the name and the thing. This point is not congruent with Harootunian’s pre-
occupation with temporality, and it cannot be folded into the quotidian. Even
from the critic’s position there must be attention to future anteriority because
in the activity of making these objects they are calling art there is encoded evi-
dence that value is not unitary. Again, as Inaga points out, there are admissible
homogeneities and there are impermissible ones, and to grasp the impermissible
is to see how calculating art has to be if it is going to be “universal standard” as
defined by power holders. I would add that to grasp the dynamic of the admis-
sible and the impermissible in the context of an art that is not familiar, not yet,
perhaps even “art,” is precisely to ask begin asking a fresh question that might
matter.
I too seek to affirm the visibly existent in the “historical catachresis” or the
linguistic neologism. I think the colleagues whose comments I extrapolated
above might agree with me here. The double binds afflicting so-called global art
are resistant to everything except thought. The “transformative power of cog-

2. Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique (Dur- 3. Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans-
ham: Duke University Press, 1993–); Inter-Asia lated by Alberto Toscano (Stanford: Stanford
Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 2000–). University Press, 2005).
199 assessments

nition in the historical process” (which is how Apter phrases this point) is an
exhilarating way to spring the trap that the nonquestion of globalization and art
set. Badiou’s point is that, ethics of space aside, the poem “thinks” universality
and consequently comparativity is an open invitation and not a hermeneutic
problem. And he invites those concerned with generalization to begin from the
thinking rather than any other place. So to ask “what is a poem” is to ask what
is universal in the appreciation of this thing called art.
perspectives on scale:
from the atomic to the universal

Esther Gabara

I find I must respond to these seminars on globalization and art through a medi-
tation on Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles’s sculpture Cruzeiro do sul (Southern
Cross, 1969–70), a 9 × 9 × 9 millimeter wooden cube composed of a piece of pine
and a piece of oak glued together, which fits perfectly onto the tip of a finger.1
The artist asks that this work be exhibited in a space at least two hundred square
meters, effectively occupying the entire space of a standard “white box” gal-
lery with this one work. This is admittedly a perverse response to the invitation
to discuss globalization, one that may stem from my sympathy with Rasheed
Araeen’s polemical response to the same invitation. As I dwelt on my desire to
write about Meireles’s sculpture rather than launch my own contribution to the
theory of the globalization of art, I found that his little cube generated a great
deal of knowledge about the debates at hand.
The title Cruzeiro do sul refers both to the small sculpture and an essay by
the artist written for the groundbreaking Information exhibition, held at the
New York Museum of Modern Art in 1970.2 While the small cubic sculpture was
not exhibited in the museum, the book accompanying the show, which included
Meireles’s essay, was more an additional conceptual project than an exhibition
catalogue.3 Curator Kynaston McShine invited artists worldwide working in a
conceptualist vein—including ten from Latin America—and created an inter-
nationalism beyond the traditional circuit between Paris and New York. Beyond
this broader inclusiveness, the work shown engaged technologies of global com-
munication, knowledge, and politics. We can thus consider the exhibition an
early start on the work James Elkins proposed for these globalization seminars.
The artists investigated the “historical outcomes of developing global capitalism”
and “alternative modernities,” performed “critical space studies,” and explored
subject formation in disparate sites experiencing globalization.4
Meireles’s brief essay and minuscule sculpture reveal that scale is a crucial
means by which to understand and intervene in the processes of globalization.
It was the sculpture’s scale that relentlessly inserted itself in my mind as I read
the transcript of the seminars. Cruzeiro do sul uses disproportion as a philosophy

1. In addition to the sources cited below, the sculpture: www.artnet.com/Magazine/news/

see Jaqueline Barnitz, “Conceptual Art and Latin
America: A Natural Alliance,” in Encounters/
Displacements: Luis Camnitzer, Alfredo Jaar,
Cildo Meireles, exh. cat., Archer M. Huntington
Art Gallery, College of Fine Arts, University of
Texas, Austin (Austin: Archer M. Huntington Art
Gallery, 1992), 35–48; Cildo Meireles: Geografia
do Brasil, edited by Paulo Herkenhoff (Rio de
Janeiro: Artviva Produção Cultural, 2001). See
ntm4/Images/ntm6-1-21s.jpg.
2. Cildo Meireles: Geografia do Brasil, 88.
3. Information, edited by Kynaston McShine,
exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, July
2–September 20, 1970 (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1970).
4. See Valiavicharska’s Second Introduction
to this volume.
201 assessments

of space and so enacts its own form of global expansion, even as the essay of the
same title critiques the violence of globalization. These works from 1970 help
us to think about sculptural scale and aesthetic power as much as economies of
scale under neoliberalism.
In the Information catalogue, McShine describes the world as a “global vil-
lage” constituted as much by the media as by the “general social, political, and
economic crises that are almost universal phenomena of 1970.”5 Information
brought conceptualism to the premier institution of modern art in New York,
and foregrounded global politics and aesthetics rather than an international
style. Describing the circulation of art through “television, films, and satellites,
as well as the ‘jet,’” McShine suggests that “those far from the ‘art centers’ con-
tribute more easily, without the often artificial protocol that at one time seemed
essential for recognition.”6 What is more, the show focused on a defining vio-
lence that moved between the “center” and “periphery”: “If you are an artist in
Brazil,” McShine noted, “you know of at least one friend who is being tortured;
if you are one in Argentina, you probably have a neighbor who has been in jail
for having long hair, or for not being ‘dressed’ properly; if you are living in the
United States, you may fear that you will be shot at, either in the universities, in
your bed, or more formally in Indochina.”7 Artistic strategies for taking on this
violent globalization would not emerge exclusively from Europe and the United
States, but rather required the presence of Latin American and Asian artists.
“Cruzeiro do sul” (the essay) pinpoints global violence on a number of
scales, from the local to the national and even the planetary. The titular Southern
Cross is a constellation of stars visible only south of the equator; it was mapped
by Amerigo Vespucci during his trip to South America in 1501. In the North-
ern Hemisphere, where the Information show took place, that constellation is
invisible. The minute size of Meireles’s cube within the immense space required
emphasizes this dynamic of visibility and invisibility. Grounded in the history
of colonial expansion, it offers a kind of prototypical global positioning system
that allows the viewer to know precisely where she stands depending upon what
she can or cannot see. Meireles uses the most basic attributes of art or visual cul-
ture—visibility, scale, and position—to reveal that the contemporary violence of
globalization does not exist in strict distinction from its colonial forms.8
These same stars of the Southern Cross also appear on the flag of Brazil, a
nation under the rule of military dictatorship when Meireles made these works;
they refer to the nation even as they defy the ideology of nationalism that pro-
claims each nation to be unique and integral. The small cube may answer Harry
Harutoonian’s question about the national: “What other kinds of units might
be entertained?” Its scale displays that there is no “national content” per se, for
what content could this tiny cube contain?9 The size counters the monumental-

5. McShine, Information, 138.
6. McShine, Information, 140.
7. McShine, Information, 138.
8. Here Meireles emphasizes more Thomas
DaCosta Kaufmann’s “conditions of continuity”
than Fred Jameson’s “difference between the old
imperialisms” and globalization. See Sections 3
and 1 of the Seminars, respectively.
9. See Section 1 of the Seminars.
202 art and globalization

ity of state-sponsored art, revealing how, if not scaled down, art can contribute
to the very forms of violence that nations engender.10 Indeed, Meireles begins
the “Cruzeiro do sul” essay by proclaiming that he is “here, in this exhibition,
to defend neither a career nor any nationality.”11 He rejects both militaristic na-
tionalism and the art-historical structure of national art schools, by which the
market tracks an artist’s production as a career and assigns value to his work.
That same year, Meireles made Tiradentes: Totem-Monumento ao Preso Políti-
co (Tiradentes: Totem-Monument to the Political Prisoner, 1970), in which he
tied live hens to a stake with a thermometer. He doused them with gasoline and
set them on fire as the audience watched. While the title protested the dictator-
ship’s abuse of political prisoners, it also referenced national hero Joaquim José
da Silva Xavier, known as Tiradentes, who organized the first major uprising
against Portugal in 1789 and was hanged and quartered as punishment.12 Meire-
les has called such contradictory references to Brazil “antagonistic”; in them, a
national icon like Tiradentes paradoxically reveals the disproportionate power of
the very state that deploys his image.13
By exercising the experience of disproportionate scale, Meireles engages
particular Brazilian histories without representing what the Seminar conversa-
tions discussed as “cultural heterogeneity.” In Shigemi Inaga’s view, heterogene-
ity “must be represented,” and so the art market finds ways to make it accept-
able. While avoiding foundational narratives of cultural heterogeneity—such
as anthropophagy, postcolonial hybridity, and mestiçagem—Meireles abandons
neither the symbolic register nor the indigenous peoples of Brazil. Like the stars
of the Southern Cross, the wood used in Cruzeiro do sul is nonetheless highly
symbolic. Meireles explains that “with the Southern Cross there is a symbolic rep-
resentation, but it can also be read as a political work. My primary approach in
this work is poetic,” and he continues: “the trees [used in the sculpture] were sa-
cred [to the Tupi] because of the friction between them: by rubbing a branch of
oak against one of pine, the pine would burn. What was sacred was the knowl-
edge that fire could be produced in this way, as fire was a divine manifestation.”14
Shunning the brazilwood featured in Oswald de Andrade’s 1924 modernist
manifesto celebrating national heterogeneity, he instead sculpted with materials
particular to Tupi cosmology and found throughout the Eastern and Western
hemispheres. Meireles demonstrates that cultural heterogeneity may not neces-
sarily be offered to the eye. He avoids the trap that Elkins encounters: the art
market’s desire both for markers of local identity and for visual art legible with-

10. While U.S. minimalist artists—who
shared Meireles’s interest in cubes—were also
deeply involved in the antiwar movement, the
scale of their sculptures tended to the monu-
mental rather than the microscopic.
11. McShine, Information, 130.
12. Interview by Gerardo Mosquera, in Cildo
Meireles, edited by Paulo Herkenhoff, Gerardo
Mosquera, and Dan Cameron (London: Phaidon,
1999), 6–35, quotation at 15.
13. Cildo Meireles and Paulo Herkenhoff,
Cildo Meireles: Geografia do Brasil, exh. cat.
(Rio de Janeiro: Artviva, 2001), 80. The same
stars of the Southern Cross emblazoned on
the Brazilian flag also appear on the flags of
Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, and
now even MERCOSUR, the free-trade coalition
of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. And
despite its national references, Meireles also
described Tiradentes as his personal reflection
on Vietnam, napalm, and war imagery generally.
14. Cildo Meireles (1999), 29.
203 assessments

out translation. The cube contains a particular and still sacred theology that is
untranslatable, while its pine and oak are too common to sustain the exoticism
of markers of identity such as samba and carnival. Neither marketing nor erasing
the diverse social groups in Brazil, Cruzeiro do sul forces a dramatic experience of
difference as the disproportion of inequality.
Meireles’s sculpture displays the cosmological, economic, and geopolitical
expansion of that detail of Tupi life: lighting a fire with pine and oak. Cruzeiro
do sul belies the presumption that the experience of globalization, at the level of
daily life, is more profound today than in earlier periods of global colonialism
(see the discussion between Joyce Brodsky, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, and
Keith Moxey15). Struggling against the ongoing impact of the arbitrary and vio-
lent division of the Americas into eastern and western territories by the Treaty
of Tordesilhas (1494), Meireles designates Brazil as “this West.” European owner-
ship of “Western culture” falls into doubt, and he warns further that “the jungle
will go on spreading itself over the East of no matter what region.”16 As Paulo
Herkenhoff affirms, Cruzeiro do sul operates like a spark in a flammable space,
simultaneously providing a vital human need and threatening to burn the place
down. Like an atomic bomb, it shrinks down to the nuclear and explodes into
the planetary, sparking globalization from this place “west of Tordesilhas.”
The works Meireles exhibited in the MOMA in 1970, both part of the series
Insertions in Ideological Circuits, developed this philosophy of scale and directly
engaged the economics of globalization in their reintroduction of altered objects
back into the circulation of the market. Coca-Cola Project consisted of glass Coke
bottles stenciled with political messages in white, such as “Yankee go home,”
which appeared only when these bottles were recycled, refilled with the dark-
brown drink, and redistributed in stores, as is done throughout Latin America.
Cédula Project was made up of Brazilian bills stamped with messages demanding
answers, for instance, to questions regarding the death of imprisoned journalist
Wladimir Herzog. Small, almost invisible communiques engaged global finan-
cial circuits, such that the drink that represents U.S. cultural and economic
power carried contestatory messages, and a bill worth just one cruzeiro directly
addressed dictatorial might.17 Meireles considered the series’ political impact
successful, explaining that “it is practically impossible to achieve anything on an
individual scale through this work. The contribution of each individual inser-
tion is minor in comparison with the potential scale of the work. At the time I
felt great about the project, because it was at least feasible, even if it raised this
issue of disproportion.”18 I suggest that its political and conceptual impact was
made precisely through its disproportion.
Meireles concludes that scale drives both the political and symbolic func-
tions of Cruzeiro do sul: “As well as dealing with symbolism, it addresses issues

15. This occurs mainly in Section 3 of the
Seminars.
16. McShine, Information, 85.
17. As in Argentina and Chile, the dictator-
ship in Brazil originated today’s neoliberal eco-
nomic strategies. The direct address to the dic-
tatorship on the one-cruzeiro bill in the Cédula
project makes this connection quite clear.
18. Cildo Meireles (1999), 12.
204 art and globalization

of scale in the art object. By simply being there, it introduces an inevitable com-
parison with the space in which it is displayed . . . Its ‘insignificance’ opens a
dialogue with the cultural hierarchies which position art in the world.”19 Not
surprisingly, the sculpture remains in the artist’s collection, although it would be
easy to sell. Imagine the news of the highest price for the smallest work of art.
Meireles’s implicit refusal to allow the work to enter the art market acts as a point
of tension similar to the contrast with the two-hundred-square-meter space that
ideally holds the piece. One senses the vast pressure of the market reaching for
this small work, eager to consume it, value it, insert it into the global economic
circuit. Meireles’s restraint cannot be ascribed to a moral purity that keeps him
outside the art market; to the contrary, he successfully sells work internationally.
However, that this particular piece remains in his collection is part and parcel of
how the work reveals and intervenes in the operations of globalization at stake
in the seminars: in politics (nation-state and otherwise), the market (artistic and
otherwise), and knowledge.
The sculpture Cruzeiro do sul, like the work Claire Pentecost discussed, is
a form of theorizing that presents scholars with serious challenges. How do we
confront the scale of globalization today? How can we measure the scope and
depth of its impact? Might we too deploy philosophical disproportion strategi-
cally, to explode its logic from the particular to the planetary? Can we measure
scale within globalization theory, such that it addresses the inequities of the
current global condition without operating as a form of epistemological om-
nipotence? In other words, can we spark globalization theory from some other
“west”? Here I have tried to start small, in hopes of paying attention to those
minute details of art and life that have formed a continuous presence, politically,
aesthetically, conceptually, even as they threaten to inflame institutions, states,
and philosophies.

19. Cildo Meireles (1999), 29.

a remark on globalization in
(east) central europe
Ján Bakoš

It is a truism to say that there are three main kinds of globalization: global com-
munication as a consequence of new electronic media; global economic integra-
tion; and world mobility including cultural tourism. All three kinds also refer
to art and art history. New electronic media result not only in new forms and
genres of art but also in the international community of artists and the global-
ized art world.1 Irrespective of the legitimacy of skepticism concerning the scope
and quality of global intellectual discourse (and according to Hans Belting, a
common discourse is a fiction2), electronic communication combined with per-
sonal initiatives and direct contacts helps to establish a cosmopolitan “republic
of letters” in art history: The Art Seminar, organized by James Elkins, may serve
as one of the best examples.3 As far as economic globalization in the field of art
is concerned, economic integration also opens the door to establishing an inter-
national (and possibly a global) art market. Nevertheless, the intensified trans-
national artistic communication as materialized by international exhibitions is
not in agreement with the situation of the art market.
While global communication within the art world is expanding and has
became gradually more polyphonic, both a monopoly and a hegemony seem to
govern the globalized art market supported by art criticism. According to statis-
tics published by Kunst Kompass dealing with the most successful contemporary
artists, at the beginning of this century the world art scene was dominated by
American artists (Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Cindy Sherman, and Don-
ald Judd; Louise Bourgeois, Joseph Beuys, and Christian Boltanski are there-
fore only exceptions), and since the middle of the first decade of this century
American hegemony seems to have been replaced by German dominance (for
example, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, and Georg Baselitz), even though that
dominance is still shared by American artists (Bruce Nauman, Cindy Sherman,
Louise Bourgeois, Donald Judd, Mike Kelley).4 According to Alain Quemin,
“both the art market and the recognition accorded by art institutions remain
the preserve of . . . the United States and Germany . . . it is the artists from

1. See Noel Carroll, “Art and Globalization:
Then and Now,” in “Global Theories of the
Arts and Aesthetics,” special issue, Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 1 (2007):
131–43.
2. Belting, “Eine globale Kunstszene? Marco
Polo und die anderen Kulturen,” in Belting,
Szenarien der Moderne: Kunst und ihre offenen
Grenzen (Hamburg, 2005), 108.
3. The Art Seminar, in 7 vols. (New York:
Routledge, 2005–8).
4. See Alain Quemin, “The Illusion of the
Elimination of Borders in the Contemporary Art
World: The Role of Different Countries in the
‘Era of Globalization and Métissage,’” in Artwork
Through The Market: The Past and the Present,
edited by Ján Bakos̆ (Bratislava: VEDA, 2004),
275–301; and see further www.de.wikipedia.org./
wiki/Kunstkompass.
206 art and globalization

these top countries which occupy the dominant positions in the international
contemporary art scene.” Quemin also observes that “the current globalisation
does not present any challenge whatsoever to the US–European and US–Ger-
man duopoly, or even to the US hegemony in the international contemporary
art world.”5 That is why, in Hans Belting’s words, “von einer globalen Kunstszene
sind wir einstweilen noch weit entfernt” and “der westliche Kunstmarkt ist das
einzige Szenarium, über das wir reden können.”6
In art history, something similar can be observed in the frequency with
which art historians are quoted. In the 1950s and most of the 1960s the most
frequently cited art historian was probably Erwin Panofsky, and he was probably
replaced by E. H. Gombrich in the 1970s. Since the 1980s, T. J. Clark, Michael
Baxandall, and later also David Freedberg have been cited alongside Gombrich.
And from the 1990s to the present, citations in art history seem to be dominated
by Michael Baxandall and Hans Belting. Belting’s strong influence on contem-
porary art-historical discourse can be regarded not only as a consequence of the
historization of the identity of art7 and the questioning of the identity of art
history,8 but also as the outcome of the fact that he was among the first who
responded to globalization. In order to adjust his theory to the new situation,
he replaced his former contextual sociohistorical approach with an attempt to
formulate the anthropological art history in his book on the anthropology of
image.9
Nevertheless, at the moment the mainstream of Central European art his-
tory does not seem to be focused on the problems of globalization at all. The last
attempt by Central European art historians to initiate a world art history project
was probably the multivolume series Propyläen der Kunstgeschichte, the first vol-
umes of which were published forty years ago.10 Since the end of the 1990s most
efforts in (east) central European art history have been concentrated on over-
coming the nationalist model of the history of art that had dominated central
European art history since the 1930s. Simultaneously with the recent expansion
of the European Union and the process of the political and economic unification
of Europe, an art-historical project has been launched that conceives of the his-
tory of art in central Europe as a polyphonic multinational organism, and of the

5. Quemin, “Illusion,” 297. lated as by Christopher Wood as The End of the

6. Belting, “Eine globale Kunstszene?” 119.
“We are still far away from a global art world”
and “the Western art market is the only one
that we can speak of.” The reason, according to
Belting, is that “Der Universalismus . . . möge
unter Kontrolle bleiben, weil sonst die Kurse
fallen.” [—J.E.]
7. Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History
of the Image Before the Era of Art, translated by
Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994); originally published as Bild und
Kult: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeital-
ter der Kunst (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1990).
8. Belting, Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte?
(Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1984), trans-
History of Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1987); and Belting, Das Ende der Kun-
stgeschichte? Eine Revision nach zehn Jahren
(Munich: C. H. Beck, 1995), translated by Caro-
line Saltzwedel and Mitch Cohen with additional
translation by Kenneth Northcott as Art History
After Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2003).
9. Belting, Bild-Anthropologie: Entwürfe für
eine Bildwissenschaft (Munich: W. Fink, 2001); a
translation is forthcoming from Columbia Univer-
sity Press. [—J.E.]
10. Propyläen Kunstgeschichte, 18 vols.,
edited by Kurt Bittel et al. (Berlin: Propyläen
Verlag, 1966–77).
207 assessments

countries themselves as a cultural and artistic megaregion. Models are available

in the transnational empire of the late medieval and early modern Jagellonian
dynasty, and later the Luxembourg dynasty and its empire. To formulate such
a model, a Jagellonian project initiated by Robert Suckale and carried out by an
international team of central European art historians at GWZO (Geisteswis-
senschaftliches Zentrum Osteuropas) in Leipzig is an example of such an at-
tempt.11 The aim was to replace the nationalistic model of the history of art, as
well as the statist patriotic paradigm of the history of art conceived as the history
of nation-states, with the idea of the history of art considered as the history of
dynasties. The rejection of the bourgeois idea of the nation as an artificial and
abstract construct, and the restoration of premodern and precapitalist histori-
cal structures (such as international courts, cloisters or multinational cities, and
metropolises) as the proper art-historical entities, can be regarded as a radical
revision of chauvinist nationalism and associated conceptions of history. But at
the same time history is seen here through the matrix of a former global age, that
is, by projecting characteristics and structures symptomatic of late globalized
capitalism dominated by global communication and transnational commercial
corporations into the past.12
The latest national art-historical project published during the time of global-
ization, the volumes of the series History of Art in Germany,13 seems to confirm
east-central European art history’s limitation to regional European problems by
art historians. Nevertheless, the volume dealing with Gothic art attempts to tran-
scend national and nation-state frames by means of the international team of
art historians participating in the “national project.” Moreover, the editor of the
volume, Bruno Klein, conceives of the history of art in Germany as the history of
“international exchange and communication” on the one hand, and as the story
of inventing and developing new media of communication on the other.14
No doubt that cannot be conceived of as a direct and explicit contribution
to the globalization of art history. Nevertheless, it can be regarded as a projection
of topical problems of the age of globalization into the past, and consequently, as
their implicit affirmation. Thus, we have to distinguish two paths into the new
global art history: the explicit project of the new world history of art and plural-

11. See Die Jagiellonen: Kunst und Kultur einer
europäischen Dynastie an der Wende zur Neuzeit,
Beiträge des internationalen wissenschaftlichen
Symposiums im Germanischen Nationalmu-
seum Nürnberg 1999, edited by Dietmar Popp
and Robert Suckale (Nuremberg: Germanisches
Nationalmuseum, 2002); Karl IV., Kaiser von
Gottes Gnaden: Kunst und Repräsentation des
Hauses Luxemburg 1310—1437, edited by Jir̆ í Fajt
(Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2006); Sigismund
von Luxemburg: Ein Kaiser in Europa, edited by
Michel Pauly (Mainz am Rhein: Philipp von Zab-
ern, 2006); and Sigismundus Rex et Imperator:
Kunst und Kultur zur Zeit Sigismunds von Luxem-
burg 1387–1437, edited by Imre Takács (Mainz am
Rhein: Philipp von Zabern, 2006).
12. More about this is available in Bakos̆,
“From National to Dynastic History of Art,”
a paper read at the international conference
“Praha a velká kulturní centra Evropy v dobĕ
lucemburské 1310–1437” (Prague and Large
Cultural Centers of Europe in the Age of the
Luxembourgs, 1310–1437), Prague, March 31–
April 5, 2008.
13. Geschichte der bildenden Kunst in
Deutschland, 8 vols. (Munich: C. H. Beck,
2006–).
14. Gotik, edited by Bruno Klein, vol. 3 of
Geschichte der bildenden Kunst in Deutschland
(Munich: Beck, 2007), 8–33.
208 art and globalization

ist, global art history as attempted by American and British art historians, and
the implicitly globalist approach to the regional or national history of art.
The possibility of a response—or rather a resistance?—to the challenges of
globalization mounted by a local art-historical community is another story.
globalization and (contemporary) art

T. J. Demos

The Seminars present, in my view, a very provocative and timely series of dis-
cussions around key cultural, historical, geographical, and temporal aspects of
globalization. Most fundamentally, they enjoin us to consider globalization as
bearing not only an extended history of international trade and imperial con-
quest stretching back hundreds of years to the beginnings of modernity—from
the sixteenth century onwards, contends Thomas Kaufmann1—but also a com-
plex formation that is specific to the contemporary period, particularly since
1980, as Fredric Jameson argues: “I would want to insist on the difference be-
tween the old imperialisms, which involve colonies, armies, and so forth, and
whatever you want to call these forms of influence that take place after decolo-
nization.” Jameson continues: “‘Cultural imperialism’ is not enough; I think we
need wholly new words. ‘Globalization’ replaced ‘cultural imperialism’ and other
terms, and I think that’s very welcome, because it suggests not only different
power and economic relations but also a different politics.”2 This seems to me es-
sentially correct, and more, the danger of avoiding this contemporary definition
is to blind ourselves to the singularity of recent developments, which we must
consider without losing sight of their historicity.
To this end, the Seminars propose several useful ways to comprehend the
specificity of such “power and economic relations.” Zhivka Valiavicharska, for
example, argues that globalization encompasses new sets of operations between
power and life, which she explains have been so usefully theorized by Foucault
in relation to what he terms biopolitics and emergent forms of governmentality.3
One could add here that with his conceptualization of the “state of exception”
and “bare life,” Giorgio Agamben has provocatively extended Foucault’s insights,
bringing them to bear on the growing conditions of migration, statelessness, and
new forms of sovereignty that, according to him, define our globalized present.4
Other sections of the discussion consider various innovative methodological
proposals for thinking and writing about globalization. Exemplary in my view
are the framing texts for two of the seminars, particularly Jameson’s “Globaliza-
tion as a Philosophical Issue,” which addresses globalization as an ongoing eco-
nomic and cultural conflict between identity and difference;5 and Susan Buck-

1. See Section 3 of the Seminars. en (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

2. Section 1 of the Seminars. [—J.E.]
3. Section 7 of the Seminars. 5. Cited at the beginning of Section 1 of the
4. Agamben, Homo sacer: Sovereign Power Seminars.
and Bare Life, translated by Daniel Heller-Roaz-
210 art and globalization

Morss’s “Hegel and Haiti,” which develops a comparative historical analysis that
treats the contradictions between the Enlightenment’s revolutionary discourse of
freedom and its simultaneous practice of colonial slavery (namely that of Haiti
and the early nineteenth-century slave rebellion in Saint Dominique).6 Buck-
Morss’s essay strikes me as a model elaboration of the comparative methodology
advanced in Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, which called for a “contra-
puntal” approach—at once aesthetically sensitive and politically engaged—that
would place culture in relation to imperialism.7 As Buck-Morss shows, Said’s
proposal has lost none of its urgency or promise.
In addition, the Seminars present intriguing ways to challenge one frequent-
ly feared effect of globalization: the homogenizing force of cultural imperialism.
I found especially noteworthy Pedro Erber’s suggestion that we retrieve the “an-
thropophagic” tradition from the Brazilian context, where local practictioners
would “cannibalize” foreign cultural forms, thereby assuming an active role in
the creative negotiation and reinvention of imported commodities and represen-
tations; as well, the closing roundtable’s discussion of the case of the Slovenian
artistic group IRWIN offers a compelling—if inevitably incomplete—account
of how one model collective has based itself in a “peripheral” geographical loca-
tion (although globalization disrupts precisely such clear oppositions between
centers and margins), and has thereby been able to generate an exceptional
historicization of eastern European artists that contests Western genealogies of
modern and contemporary art.8 These discussions—and several others—repre-
sent sparks of thought that may have never been fully developed, problematized,
or elaborated; however, such spontaneity, incompleteness, and fragmentation is
the inevitable fate of seminars, which provoke for precisely these reasons.
That said, for a book on art and globalization, and particularly for one that
makes a case for globalization as a periodizing term, the text was sorely lacking
in its treatment of the relation between contemporary art and globalization,
largely because contemporary art came up so infrequently with any degree of
specificity and extended treatment. Several possible reasons for this oversight
come to mind. One reason might be that the Faculty included no specialists
in the field of contemporary art, such as critics, curators, or artists. Among the
Fellows, of course, there were participants such as Darby English, Pamela Lee,
and Suzana Milevska, who do possess such expertise, but they appeared to be
in no position to direct the course of conversation. Another reason may owe
to the fact that certain contributors (Kaufmann in particular) appear insistent
on contesting the strictly contemporary definition of globalization in favor of
its four-hundred-year-long history; consequently, the conversation ended up
giving recent developments short shrift. Reading the transcript, I frequently
felt as if the discussants mostly accepted the fact that there’s nothing particular
or discrete about contemporary forms of art, media, and technology, or about

6. Cited at the beginning of Section 6 of the 8. At the end of Section 9 of the Seminars.
Seminars.
7. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York:
Knopf, 1993).
211 assessments

art’s current exhibition and distribution systems—in relation to which one

could make a case for contemporary art’s global definition. Similarly, there ap-
peared to be nothing historically specific and unprecedented about the circula-
tion of representations and peoples that for many define globalization—what
Arjun Appardurai calls “mass media and mass migration”; or, again, about the
contemporary world system of economy and power—what Jameson terms the
“difference” of globalization since 1980. The result is a series of seminars that
addresses a variety of largely abstract, theoretical aspects of globalization—
Jameson’s on globalization as a philosophical issue; Kaufmann’s on past global-
isms; Elkins’s on the problem of global art history; Shigemi Inaga’s on cross-
cultural interaction; Buck-Morss’s on postcolonial theory; and Valiavicharska’s
on the transnational creative economy—but that fails to engage contemporary
art and its institutions.
What about questions specific to contemporary art? How does artistic
practice, for example, define, negotiate, and challenge the cultural, economic,
and political forms of globalization? What new structures of media have been
initiated in the last few years—such as digital imaging and video techniques,
or spectacular forms of architecture—that increasingly seem to define our now
globally dominant modes of representation? What role do the institutions of
contemporary art, such as megaexhibitions and international biennials (and par-
ticularly cases like Documenta 10 and 11) play in the expression, critical analysis,
and contestation of globalization? How has the Middle East exerted a recent
and growing impact on global expressions of contemporary art—for example,
via the massive investment in and developments of cultural institutions in the
Gulf states, including the construction of new outposts for the Guggenheim and
the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, and of art auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s in
Dubai, as well as the inauguration of new biennials in the region, such as the
one in Sharjah? How has geopolitical conflict—such as that between Western
powers and Middle Eastern states—defined new global forms of the image, re-
invented documentary genres, and provoked innovative strategies of resistance,
particularly in response to globalization as the now prevalent mode of cultural
and economic imperialism? How have artists responded to political and military
crises and wars, the growth of refugees, environmental destruction, all of which
are key to our growing understanding of globalization? I would like to hear
discussion of these pressing concerns. Of course, all cannot be said within the
limited scope and time frame of a weeklong seminar—particularly when consid-
ering a subject as vast as that of globalization—and moreover, the transcripts, I
understand, represent a fraction of the doubtlessly expansive discussion. Still, if
the topic is dedicated to globalization and art, then perhaps more representatives
of contemporary art would have helped develop that important aspect of the
conversation.
When questions about contemporary art did come up, moreover, they were
met, for the most part, with untenable generalizations: artists are merely the
212 art and globalization

instruments of capital, we are told; biennials and the art market are simply the
affirmative expressions of neoliberalism; and whatever critical potential an art-
work might be said to possess in the global environment of biennials and com-
mercial institutions is merely wishful thinking, or worse, a naïve expression that
is unwittingly in league with the very marketing of subversive avant-gardism as
consumerist product. For example, take Isla Leaver-Yap’s comment that “a key
question to think about would be how biennales such as Documenta [sic] and
Venice, but also the ones that are founded in cities in decline or in economic
crisis, or in cities that want to establish themselves as international hubs such
as Johannesburg—how they all begin to feed into a kind of political-economic
order that Hardt and Negri have termed Empire.”9 This is indeed a very relevant
topic to examine; but to raise it only to leave it at that—as it was, seemingly with
murmurs of affirmation from the other participants—suggests that this reading
is not contentious. Consequently, artists, exhibitions, and art are all tacitly re-
duced to being the mere effects of the political-economic order of Empire.
In a similar train of thought, Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay complains about the
ramifications of cultural globalization on India: “As the biennial culture comes
in, we are confronted with works which are Indian in name only. I am not being
judgmental. I am merely recounting where the force of global capitalism takes
us. The indigenous, ‘small’ tradition has been completely obliterated by the glo-
balization of Indian contemporary art. Yet nothing has come up to compensate
for the loss of our autonomy and agency.”10 But while this view may be partly
accurate, what about the practices of the Raqs Media Collective, Subodh Gupta,
Shilpa Gupta, Sonia Khurana, and Amar Kanwar, and a host of others, which re-
main committed to the exploration of Indian histories, regional urban contexts
and conflicts, and conditions of local identity? What of Appadurai’s notion of
cultural indigenization, which posits an inevitable differentiation and localiza-
tion of global forms and practices? What about the cultural heterogeneity dis-
cussed by Jameson as one of the potential outcomes of the conflicted processes
that define globalization?
Rather than opening up the complexity of cultural globalization, which
contemporary art at its most ambitious moments demands, the discussion tends
to reduce artists to “businesspeople with managers, agents, and high-tech labs”
and “commercial performers rather than cultural resisters”; similarly, their audi-
ences are consigned to “a well-heeled, global jet set, who practice deterritorial-
ized belonging on the basis of exclusive access to what has value.” Why do these
comments not meet with some critical response, such as: Are there no potential
forms of resistance possible even in the most commercial of contexts? Are all
artists who are represented by commercial galleries merely sell-outs, devoid of
any resistant agency? Is the market really so monolithic in its forces and effects?
It appears so, for, as Buck-Morss argues, “Together artists and their publics are
unwitting collaborators in shutting down possibilities for escape from neoliber-
alism’s self-proclaimed freedom, which is in fact highly regulated—all the while

9. Section 7 of the Seminars. 10. Section 9 of the Seminars.

213 assessments

they are supposed to be having fun.”11 What I find objectionable here is the total-
izing tendency that reduces all culture to economic reason.
In my view, there is a pressing need—and one that exists beyond this single
text—to develop a more complex recognition of the art market and its institu-
tions, one that makes it clear that all participants within the realm of global
contemporary art inevitably face a contradictory field. Institutions and markets
are not homogeneous forces, and neither are the agents that act within them.
To participate in the art world—or rather, the multiple worlds of art—means to
operate within and between commercial forces; but that doesn’t mean that one
must surrender to them, nor that critical and creative forces can’t carve out places
within even the most spectacular of biennials. Indeed, even the word “spectacle”
needs to be challenged and rescued from its reified definition as a Situationist
term of derision, as if it isn’t capable of alternately designating an unstable field
of visibility that is at once a space of the commercial image as well as a zone
of contestation and battling representations, as Jacques Rancière compellingly
argues. Even an artist such as Paul Chan—whom Buck-Morss mentions in a
positive light, referring to his video Baghdad in No Particular Order—has been
known to participate in biennials.
It is true that Keith Moxey, in a much needed intervention, counters the
general current of discussion by insisting on the significance of the notion of
“imagination” to contemporary culture, notably as developed by Appadurai, for
whom it plays a key role in relation to struggles for “liberation.” Moxey explains
that even commodities “are clearly products of the imagination, and what we do
with them is way more complex than a Marxist analysis of production allows
us to imagine.”12 The point is difficult to argue with, though few would ac-
knowledge it. Buck-Morss, appropriately, credits the idea: “Keith’s optimism has
merit—if somehow the entire apparatus of the art world can be turned inside
out. It is hard to imagine . . . but that is just the point. Imagination freed from
the cynicism and defeatism of neoliberal hegemony is precisely what is at stake
in this discussion.” Yet this train of thought is unfortunately never developed in
relation to contemporary art, and instead marks the conclusion to Buck-Morss’s
otherwise engaging seminar. However, can we not say that the first step to liber-
ate ourselves from this position, which finds it so difficult to dissociate imagina-
tion from economic determination, is both to challenge the notion that there is
a single “art world apparatus” and to demonstrate that the imagination is never
solely located within “the cynicism and defeatism of neoliberal hegemony”?

11. These comments are Buck-Morss’s; see 12. End of Section 7 of the Seminars.
the end of Section 7 of the Seminars.
thinking through shards of china

Chris Berry

I have been carrying the transcripts from this fascinating series of seminars
around with me for several months now. I have had them with me at home
in London, but also in Hong Kong and Helsinki, Beijing and Marrakesh, and
now in Mexico City. Along the way, they have come to form an ironic counter-
point to my own global wanderings, or perhaps it is the other way around. This
response is probably best considered as fragments—or maybe even shards. (In
my mind, that famous vase, urn, or whatever sort of jug it was, is being dashed
across the floor in slow motion again, and again, and again.)
First, the problem of a discipline grounded in Eurocentric blind spots, un-
able to respond adequately to the global reconfiguration of the objects it studies
and the discipline itself, is a problem that is by no means confined to art history.
In June of 2008, the University of London Screen Studies Group held a two-
day conference called “Geographies of Film Theory.” This was initiated as an
appropriate event to mark the group’s new administrative home at the Institute
of Germanic and Romance Studies in the School for Advanced Study. But it
soon became clear that focusing on how and when the work of Balazs, Kracauer,
Epstein, Pudovkin, and all the other usual suspects was translated into different
languages and how it was taken up in various parts of the world was not going
to satisfy the expectations raised by an idea like “Geographies of Theory” in the
age of globalization and its vicissitudes.
It was a remarkable first day of new insights into the origins, circulation,
and uptake of European film theory within Europe, but the second day did not
follow the spread of those theories around the world. Instead, it turned into a
more reflexive and challenging event in which the presumptions propping up
the discipline were challenged. Why, we asked, have the journalistic writings of
Europeans been canonized as “early film theory,” whereas the equally copious
journalistic writings from the rest of the world that attempt to think through
the new medium in its relationship to modernity, colonialism, and more have
remained just that—journalistic writings? Once we found out in our conversa-
tions that, for example, Pudovkin had been translated into Chinese before his
work was translated in other European languages, we also began to feel the ques-
tion of just whose modernity was really belated.
So, I believe in the project that the Seminars undertook and interrogated,
and I believe it is part of a larger topographical reconfiguration that is underway
and will continue—problems notwithstanding. Having said that, we should not
underestimate the obstacles. At a party a couple of weeks before the event, some-
215 assessments

body involved in the organization was overheard extolling the prospect of the
papers that were due to be delivered the second day at great length but confess-
ing that it was something they “did not give a shit about, really.” I suspect this
grudging accommodation of the troublesome demands of the rest of the world,
coupled with a refusal to see that it is of any real importance, still dominates
thinking in the West. It’s an emerging question how much longer the rest will
care what the West thinks. This seems like a good moment to turn to China.
I am an outsider to the art scene. In Beijing this year, I went to Caochangdi
and Songzhuang for the first time. Caochangdi is not only where to find Ai Wei-
wei, but also Wu Wenguang, the man sometimes called the “father” of indepen-
dent documentary in China since he made Bumming in Beijing (Liulang Beijing)
in 1990. He has what he calls a “station” at Caochangdi, where he pursues an
amateur aesthetic, holding workshops for young documentarians from all over
the country, and encouraging them to work as a sideline activity, in a low-budget
manner, on the basis of mutual agreements rather than contracts.
One of the anxieties haunting the institute’s discussions seems to have been
about the value of art—in every sense from pecuniary to aesthetic and politi-
cal—and a yearning for some sort of autonomous, resistant, critical art in the
modernist mode. (Of course, I noted James Elkins’s repeated reminders that
resistant art was far from being the only kind that does not circulate in the global
markets, and that many of the other kinds that do not are both not resistant
and worthy of attention. But the fact that he had to keep returning to this point
seems to underline the persistence of that nostalgia for critical and resistant art
that I noticed running through the Seminars. And here I agree with Bhaskar
Mukhopadhyay’s inability to accept Susan Buck-Morss’s interventions.)
Out at Caochangdi with Wu Wenguang, I could not help thinking that it
is much easier to resist being taken up by the markets if your very mode and
genre resist it. DV documentaries can be cheaply made and easily reproduced
at minimal cost, making them unlikely to be collector’s items for the neoliberal
elites with literally more money than they know what to do with. I do not mean
to idealize Wu Wenguang—he has had enough of that already—nor do I want
to pretend that he operates in a world totally untouched by the market. But he
and his colleagues are producing work that by its very nature is not easily taken
to market.
Songzhuang (literally, Song Village) is on the outskirts of Beijing. I went
there to visit another friend from the world of documentary film, Zhu Rikun.
So far, when the Financial Times does a piece on Chinese contemporary art (per-
haps for its shamelessly named magazine How to Spend It), the 798 district is al-
ways the focus, perhaps with a side trip to Caochangdi as the cutting edge. They
rarely make it to Songzhuang. But that will probably have changed by the time
you read this. I was told there are five thousand artists out at Songzhuang now,
not to mention a museum and various galleries. The village is being transformed
under the aegis of the artist and critic Li Xianting. One of the early Chinese
216 art and globalization

modern artists in the 1980s, and still much admired, Li is also helping Zhu Ri-
kun through Li Xianting’s Film Fund. While I was there, we made a quick visit
to Li Xianting himself, during which I began to wonder about our assumption
that art should be resistant to commodification, even or maybe especially in the
era when everything down to our DNA is being commodified.
As we walked up to the house, I noticed there was a silver Jag parked out-
side. I know Li Xianting is not a poor man now, but somehow I imagine that
even if he did decide to buy a Jag, he would not leave it parked outside for all
to see. Sure enough, a wealthy couple were also visiting Li and discussing art
projects. The most important change in the Chinese contemporary art scene in
recent years has been the entry of newly rich Chinese into the cultural market-
place. Before, they were only interested in antiques. Partly, this is the problem
of having so much money that some of them do not know what to do with it.
As always, there are artists on hand to help them out. But why would they want
to go along with those schemes? Friends suggested two reasons. First, I was told,
contemporary art has become the cutting-edge bribe—sorry, gift—in China to-
day. At a time when money is too traceable, it is convenient to buy a nice paint-
ing for a government office; no one knows the value of it, and it can disappear a
few months later without anyone really caring or noticing.
Second, and perhaps more important, art elevates suzhi. Roughly translated
as “quality,” suzhi has emerged as an important discourse in an age of social up-
heaval. Money and connections alone cannot be guaranteed as reliable proof of
a person’s suzhi. The ability to appreciate contemporary art has become one of
the signs that one has suzhi. And the more radical, seemingly offensive, and cer-
tainly incomprehensible, the better. I mention this because it seems to me that it
captures something new and something very old about art. Art has always been
produced to satisfy patrons and the rich. In some sense, art is the ultimate com-
modity. In the age of mass production, of course, its much vaunted uniqueness
(no matter how radically questioned by artists) can make it priceless, in every
sense of the word. But that has not stopped artists from producing works that
do more than flatter their patrons, and indeed many patrons expect and want
them to exceed those limits. In an age when commodification is so all-pervasive
in our world, perhaps we should not be looking to art as a way out of that, but
as a way to discover what more we can do within commodification. And for that,
we might also turn to worlds outside Europe, where there might not be so much
anxiety about purity.
Finally, I would like to say something about translation. Throughout the
discussions, a continuing theme was translation and mistranslation as a prob-
lem, or maybe as something hopeful in its incommensurability. I particularly
enjoyed the discussion about Xu Bing’s resistance to being called a hybrid artist.
I suspect this is because “hybrid” translates in such a way that it suggests “bas-
tard” to many in China.
217 assessments

However, what interests me even more than tracing these complicated itin-
eraries of translation is the question of power. Who gets to decide if the transla-
tion is correct or not? Earlier this year I was at a large conference that brought
together speakers from the Chinese art world with European counterparts in a
nonacademic context. The papers and speakers spent much of the day at cross-
purposes, speaking past each other because they were using the same theoretical
concepts (hybridity, postmodernity, postcoloniality) but with totally different
and often contradictory meanings.
I am still wondering why the Europeans did not “correct” the misunder-
standings that had occurred as so many of these concepts have traveled into
Chinese discourse. Was it because they held their Chinese colleagues in con-
tempt, because they “did not give a shit about it, really”? Or was it because they
knew that there were so many deals, so many opportunities, and so much new
Eastern promise in contemporary China today that they did not want to risk it?
Is the current interest in Chinese contemporary art a passing phase? Or is power
reconfiguring the determination of meaning in such a way that soon Westerners
will be straining to understand what things mean in their Chinese context, and
where authority lies? I guess only time will tell.
in and out of the local

Hyungmin Pai

As I waded through the pages of sometimes perceptive, sometimes confusing

statements about the issue of globalization and art, the central problem for me
was that of knowledge, and, as Rasheed Aereen bluntly put it, that of ignorance:
so much that is seemingly known, so much to know, and so much that is clearly
not known. At a sheer quantitative level, we seem to be confronted with an
unprecedented range and diversity of work, languages, and cultures. It would
seem that we (and this is a very problematic “we”) are now obliged to learn
the languages, respect the local and the mundane, and understand the issues
of translation. We are to know of artists working on cruise lines and all corners
of the world. We are to transform the unknown into the known. At the same
time, as already noted in discussions of historical precedent, this is not a wholly
new situation. It was similarly so in earlier periods of expansion, colonialism,
and imperialism. A key problem in Western intellectual production since the
eighteenth century has been the sheer abundance and the excess of things that
were gathered, stolen, and recorded. Much of what we understand as modern
science (including art history, archeology, anthropology, and museology) was
based on attempts to organize excess into knowledge. A recent 780-page anthol-
ogy on the idea of the museum edited by Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago is
appropriately titled Grasping the World.1 For communities on the other side of
the spectrum, the modern often presents the problem of lack and absence. No
matter how much money institutions and nations have spent to buy back and
conjure up a lost history, this absence cannot be ignored for it is fundamentally
different from what Mark Jarzombek characterizes as the “absence of history in
the modernist project.”
Hence the different historical projects of the different historical and imag-
ined communities. Is the theoretical project, then, of the most influential cen-
ters of intellectual work—and I would include the Stone Theory Institute and
the academic institutions of many of its participants—to grasp the globalized
world, to produce knowledge that will encompass these vast phenomena? Is this
a search for a global theory in a globalized world? With these questions, one
must emphasize that there are centers and peripheries; divergent communities
defined through language, ideology, nationhood, financial interests, wealth, and
connectedness to a global world. These are not the only lines of division, and
with globalization they are in a state of flux. And perhaps that is why we are
talking about them.

1. Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago, eds.,

Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum
(Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2004).
219 assessments

Quantity and density are of course not the only characteristics of the global
condition. The issue of the global is also one of relative position. If the central
terms in thinking about position are the global and the local, perhaps the most
important idea is that knowledge is a function of place. In simplified terms, the
global and local involve a tension between the objective and universal, on the one
hand, and the situated and particular, on the other. For example, Zhivka Valia-
vicharska asks, “How can we think of possibilities to write art history through
events, through alternative experiences of time, and through the ambiguities of
the everyday?” But isn’t the everyday, even in its varied uses, defined as some-
thing that is practiced rather than thought? Valiavicharska’s question is couched,
on the one hand, in general theoretical terms—“to think of possibilities”—and
on the other, the particularity of events, experiences, and the everyday. There is
always the pull between the force of a consistent theoretical structure and the
specific realities of place.
In this context, I would like to bring into the discussion an essay by Mark
Wigley temptingly titled “Local Knowledge.” The essay, brought to my attention
because of its inclusion in FOA’s Phylogenesis, is a short and perceptive outlook
on the issue of globalized practice in contemporary architecture and provides
the following definition of how to reconcile an objective sense of knowledge and
place-bound conditions. Wigley writes: “The local is nothing more than a way
of defining the outside and negotiating with it. The local is not to be found in a
particular place. Rather it is a way of finding things, a way of seeing the world.
Places are never isolated, they never simply exist on a certain spot. The local can
never be pointed to. It is always embedded in a complex ever-shifting array of
networks that ultimately envelope the globe.”2 The local, as the title of Wigley’s
article indicates, is a kind of knowledge. An important task in the globalized
practices of architecture would then be to understand the relation between lo-
cal and global knowledges of architecture. Later in the essay, however, Wigley
generalizes the local architect as the agent of “the outside”: “Architecture will
always be invasive in the end. It’s a clumsy art. Architects inevitably import ideas
from afar. Think of the metaphysical discourse that underwrites architectural
theory and without which there would be not be a discipline. Generic formal
ideas are seen to be imbedded into specific material situations. The very idea of
form is the idea of the material world reaching outside itself to be touched by
an abstract order.”3 Despite his perceptive insights into the nature of the local,
Wigley assumes a universal perception of what architectural knowledge can and
has been. He places “metaphysical discourse” and the abstract notion of form at
the foundation of the theory and discipline of architecture. The foreign architect
seamlessly exchanges identity with the international architect, the possessor of
a universal encompassing knowledge. If the local is a form of knowledge, why
is architectural knowledge deemed always foreign or generic? Though the local-
foreign encounter provides Wigley with the opportunity to expose the ultimately

2. Phylogenesis: Foa’s Ark (Barcelona: Actar, 3. Phylogenesis, 109.

2004), 1096.
220 art and globalization

invasive nature of Western knowledge, he has little interest in local knowledge,

or perhaps he is not in a position to produce it. To be foreign is to be outside the
local, to be international is to be universal, to be everywhere. But is the local still
part of the universal? The regions of the unknown are unacknowledged in the
universal, for how can one acknowledge what one does not know? This is what
happens when one is outside of a concept, when a concept (such as the local) is
something to think about and write about, rather than something that is prac-
ticed. In this essay, Wigley never assumes himself to be local to a community or
a place.
It is mostly disappointing when brilliant writers who deal with the global
never assume themselves to be local. In the context of the seminar this was
particularly so with Fredric Jameson. His offhand observations lack the so-
phistication of the dialectics, the rigor of reading that he brought to such early
topics as Adorno and Sartre. The statement that a Wong Kar-wai film may be
considered a work of resistance because it was not meant for an American au-
dience is egregiously revealing. While he places much importance on the is-
sue of ethnicity and nationhood in its production and reception, the fact that
he is himself American, as Caroline Jones notes, is apparently irrelevant to his
observation. In other words, he does not believe that ethnicity conditions his
own understanding of it. He is outside of the concept. To apply Keith Moxey’s
distinction between production and reception (in the discussion of the debate
between Jameson and Canclini), Jameson is outside of both the condition of its
production and its reception. In his appraisal of Wong’s movie and the Chinese
reception of Rauschenberg, where is Jameson? Is it because in the postmodern,
global condition everything is so thinly spread out that one is outside it, looking
at it with a Marxist purview? Now that we are in the vast region of lesser-known
artists of the world, do rigor and quality no longer apply?
It is easier to criticize nationalism (or any concept) when you think you are
writing outside of it. It is quite another matter when you acknowledge that it
swarms around you, when you understand yourself to be part of its pervasive
historical fabric. One must at once acknowledge its objectified structure and
its different historicities as it unfolds within specific places and communities.
Hence, I am myself a firm advocate of knowledge. Despite the controlling na-
ture of libraries, archives, and museums, if I had a choice (and I sometimes do),
I would rather have more of them. Absence is not the enemy, but neither is it
a friend. Looking at the tragic instances in which knowledge has been erased
(the Chinese Cultural Revolution and Cambodia’s killing fields, to mention
two extreme cases), one cannot be a fan of loss. In practice, I believe it is up
to local communities to produce work that is relevant to divergent intellectual
communities. The possibility of knowledge is based on the meeting of differ-
ent communities, and it is at the level of shared knowledge (and emotions)
that I would agree with Homi Bhabha’s sense of the linkage between difference
221 assessments

and community. The point is how writing changes when one is immanent to
the concepts that one uses. The everyday impinges on the concept, and writing
inevitably becomes an experiment. In the practice of writing, concepts can be
contaminated to a point where the text may lose its logical consistency and be-
come a hybrid. As discussed in the Seminars, hybridity, to be a viable concept in
practice, cannot be another universal that battles the universal. As with Bhabha’s
differentiation of cultural diversity and cultural difference, we must recognize
not only the diversity of knowledge but, more importantly, the gaps, the regions
of ignorance that are made evident in the encounters between the local and the
foreign. Hybridity assumes knowledge but should also reveal ignorance.
what’s wrong with global art?

Partha Mitter

I am grateful to James Elkins for inviting to me to respond to a riveting series of

seminars entitled Art and Globalization. Because of the range and quality of the
discussions, they are destined to become an essential source material for future
debates on the subject. Since I did not attend the sessions in person, my com-
ments are based on the ideas refracted through the Seminar transcripts, and I
apologize for any misrepresentations of the participants’ statements.
Of the two keywords here, art and global, let me first take the concept global
(or globalism or globalization). Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann rightly points out
that in a sense globalization is as old as the time of the biblical Methuselah. We
can trace it back to the Greco-Roman period, with its extensive international
trade and cultural contacts that were inaugurated with the Persian invasion of
Greece. However, as Frederic Jameson remarks, the post-1980s globalization is
something entirely different. I would contend that it cannot be fully understood
within the framework of a Marxian analysis of the world capitalist order. Labor
and capital, which used to govern relations between nation-states and between
the First and Third Worlds, are increasingly challenged by a series of develop-
ments, the outcome of an information and communication revolution. We need
to ask ourselves: can we continue to use old categories in the age of hedge funds,
circulating finance capital and outsourcing, feverish population movements, the
Internet, and the World Wide Web? On the one hand, these developments ap-
pear to empower a vast swathe of the global population that doesn’t necessar-
ily enjoy political or economic primacy. On the other hand, surely Jameson
is correct to describe globalization as the homogenizing drive of the capitalist
system, as represented by the United States, towards global uniformity through
economic, ideological, and cultural goals—democracy, the free market, and the
Western culture industry broadly defined, embracing both “low” culture such as
blue jeans, McDonald’s, and Coca-Cola, and high culture, particularly modern-
ist art. It’s against this West-determined global village driven by international
finance, which affects even those in remote regions who cannot resist, that we
may interpret the rise of the countertendency of identity politics and cultural
resistance (with its extreme form of religious fundamentalism). Globalization
has paradoxically reinforced the nation-state, particularity, difference, fragmen-
tation, and economic disparity rather than creating a brave new world.
If we take art itself, its global implications have moved significantly beyond
what until now has rested on existing Western categories and is thus in urgent
need of radical rethinking on the part of art historians. The transnational flow
223 assessments

of finance capital, in the form of art investments of large multinational corpora-

tions, including the hedge fund, as part of the new digital economy, has had a
transformative effect on the global art market, as represented by the plethora
of biennales and international art fairs. Artworks appear to offer a more stable
investment against the background of the financial system meltdown and loom-
ing recession. This fact was foregrounded at a recent Damien Hirst auction at
Sotheby’s.1
Secondly, the art market is being transfigured by the appearance of new
players from Asia, notably China and India, who are tipping the balance in the
share of the market. Indian artists recently exceeded the million-dollar mark at
international auctions, a dominant position already enjoyed by Chinese artists.2
An art czar, Charles Saatchi, has decided that Indian artists are a good invest-
ment and plans to showcase them in his London gallery. So far so good.
But before we get carried away, let us ask: what does the greatly inflated sale
of Asian artists mean globally? I shall propose an imaginary scenario here, but
based on my recent experience, which I believe is representative: a reputable art
gallery in London representing the artist X from Ruritania in inner Asia plans
a grand retrospective of his work. Accordingly, it hires the spacious and lofty
exhibition halls of the venerable Royal Society of Oil Painters, which is now
routinely let out for such purposes. On the evening of the private viewing, a
large contingent of prominent local Ruritanians is invited to grace the occasion
along with a smattering of European Ruritania aficionados. Speeches are made,
champagne flows, and canapés freely circulate on what is generally agreed to
be a memorable evening. The sales of the artist’s work, almost exclusively to
the Ruritanian residents, are impressive. Next morning you open the national
newspapers and are shocked to find that reviewers are conspicuously silent on
the artist X while rounding up major art events in the city.
To understand this, one needs to look beyond the art market to actual art
history itself. Even though economically successful, Asian artists are, with a few
notable exceptions, bracketed within certain well-defined boundaries. Hans
Belting regrets the breakdown of previously reassuring art-historical certain-
ties, faced with the global mix of myriad art forms and practices; center and
periphery become blurred and the metropolis is seen to lose its position as a
point of reference.3 Art history appears to suffer from an inbuilt obsolescence,
its responses lagging behind the rapidly changing global situation. Let me take

1. This was September 15, 2008; it was So-
theby’s first auction of a living artist and netted
$206,000,000. [—J.E.]
2. Subodh Gupta’s Steal 2 sold for
$1,600,000 at an auction held by Christie’s New
York, September 15–16, 2008. Other records
were realized by Riyas Komu and Jyothi Basu,
Mohammed Zeeshan, a Bangladeshi artist, and
Zainul Abedin, a Pakistani artist. [—J.E.]
3. Stuart Hall, for one, celebrates the fact
that there are now major artists outside the
West. This of course is absolutely true, but how
often do they get noticed by critics who are
considered to matter, unless these artists hap-
pen to fall within the modernist canon? What we
need to think is not merely inclusion within the
canon but also dissolution of the concept of the
canon. See Hall’s keynote address, “Museums of
Modern Art and the End of History,” conference
at the Tate Gallery, May 1999; Iniva Archives,
www.iniva.org (accessed May 2009); and Hans
Belting, The End of the History of Art? (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987).
224 art and globalization

Elkins’s assessment of the Indian avant-garde painter Jamini Roy (1887–1972) as

a convenient entry point. In response to Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay, Elkins com-
ments: “Your advocacy of Indian modernist painting is problematic. I wish it were
so simple. The painters you admire, Jamini Roy among them, cannot be described
in texts that will be read in western Europe and North America in such a way
that the artists appear necessary to modernism. They are representable as local, but
not necessary.” Elkins, of course, is not alone in echoing certain constants of the
avant-garde canon that are increasingly problematic: its dependence on Hegelian
teleology and its concept of center and periphery, which automatically character-
izes the so-called periphery as suffering from “time lag” and derivativeness.
First, let me correct some of the quite understandable misconceptions re-
garding Roy, for which Elkins cannot be personally faulted since they arise from
the general lack of knowledge of artists from outside the Euro-American orbit.
In the absence of any major critical work on the artist, the impression of the
artist in the West is formed largely by stray comments and poor reproductions
of his works, giving rise to his reputation as a “primitive” artist.4 To summarize
my recent work on Roy: a remarkable dialogue between the global and the local
is powerfully articulated in his work. The artist insisted on “locality” as the site
of anticolonial resistance, which had been disavowed by pan-Indian nationalists.
His deployment of primitivism as a form of “critical modernity” has unexpected
structural affinities with the work and ideas of German primitivists, such as
Wilhelm Hausenstein, Carl Einstein, and Oskar Schlemmer, although Roy and
the Germans were complete strangers to one another and did not share aesthetic
or formal notions about art. What matters here is that they were part of a global
critique of colonial and capitalist urban modernity.
One of the important issues Elkins raises is the derivativeness of Asian artists
in comparison with European modernism. I do not doubt Elkins’s assessment of
the particular Japanese artist’s works as inferior imitations of Van Gogh, and it
may be preferable in this case to make a socioeconomic study of these works, as
conducted by John Clark. However, I am somewhat uncomfortable with taking
that as a blanket category for all non-Western artists, which stands the danger of
reinforcing the standard art-historical argument about borrowing and colonial
dependency. In contrast to the European artist’s use of Japanese prints in the
nineteenth century or of African art in the twentieth, the non-Western artist’s
appropriations are generally dismissed as derivative.
But the wider theoretical question that affects the perception of artists of
Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Australasia is the notion of “local practice,”
put succinctly by Elkins, which exposes the limitations of the modernist canon
and its inability to accommodate heterogeneity and difference. The avant-garde
discourse embraces a great deal more than a simple matter of influence, as its

4. Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism:
India’s Artists and the Avant-garde, 1922–1947
(London: Reaktion, 2007). In that work, which
is to my knowledge the first critical account of
early modernism in India, I seek to place Indian
avant-garde artists, including Roy, in their cul-
tural context. I have given here the bare bones
of my section on Jamini Roy, which discusses
the artist evolving radical primitivism as a form
of critical modernity in his art.
225 assessments

powerful teleology constructs a whole world of belongings and exclusions, the

epicenter and its outlying regions. The center-periphery issue in art history,
which has profoundly affected the reception of artists since Giorgio Vasari, now
colors the reception of artists from outside the metropolitan West. Set against
the metropolis, other modernisms are always seen to be trying to catch up with
the center. In short, the center-periphery relationship is one not only of geogra-
phy but of power and authority, affecting race, gender and sexual orientation.5
A range of strategies have been offered to counter this imbalance, the most
celebrated of which is hybridity, theorized by Homi Bhabha and Néstor García
Canclini, which challenges as much the essentialism of cultural difference as the
monolithic discourse of the avant-garde. While hybridity gives a much needed
voice to the minorities of multiple heritage marginalized by “insiders,” I think
we require a different strategy with regard to Asian, African, and Latin American
artists, where national identity has served as a counternarrative to the dominant
colonial language of art.
To reiterate, global art is always approached from the perspective of the
center, so that local practices must accommodate the center, which decides what
art ought to be. (I must acknowledge here our debt to visual studies, which seeks
to redress this situation by redefining the whole notion of what art is). Yet the
problem remains, for with so much sedimentation that has accumulated over
the centuries with regard to what art is and must be, we have come to take the
canonical prescriptions to be self-evident truth. Therefore, without some dras-
tic rethinking of the underlying assumptions of art history, this asymmetrical
relationship in so-called global art will continue to be perpetuated. What I am
proposing here is a radical decentering of the avant-garde canon, the first essen-
tial step to which has to be a far-reaching critique of the teleological categories
of modernism, a task I attempt in my forthcoming essay in the Art Bulletin.6

5. See Giancarla Periti, Emilia e Marche nel
Renascimento: L’identità visiva della “periferia”
(Azzano San Paolo: Bolis, 2005), especially the
introduction by Pierluigi De Vecchi and Giancarla
Periti, 7–11; and Enrico Castelnuovo and Carlo
Ginsberg, “Centro e periferia,” in Storia dell’arte
italiana, pt. 1 (Turin: G. Einaudi, 1979): 285–354.
On Vasari’s role in the construction of the cen-
ter, see Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, “National
Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Aesthetic Judgments
in the Historiography of Art,” in Art History, Aes-
thetics, Visual Studies, edited by Michael Holly
and Keith Moxey (Williamstown, MA: Sterling
and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2002), 73–79;
this essay gives a scholarly account of the na-
tional prejudices of art historians and attempts
to overcome them.
6. For my proposals for a revision of the
art-historical canon, see “Decentering Modern-
ism: Art History and Avant-garde Art from the
Periphery,” Art Bulletin (December 2008).
global art history and transcultural
studies

Carolyn Loeb

All of the seminar discussions and earlier assessments in this volume are stimu-
lating and provocative, but I am going to concentrate my comments on Thom-
as DaCosta Kaufmann’s contributions. The themes touched on there resonate
strongly with issues I have been grappling with in a new teaching project. Rather
than take a visual studies approach, in the arts and humanities residential col-
lege in which I teach art and architectural history, we are pursuing what we call
“transcultural studies.” It is a “larger structural model” of the sort referred to by
Michele Greet. Since the term “transcultural studies” is not well defined, many
of the questions addressed in the seminars are similar to ones with which we
have grappled as well. It is to a couple of these questions that I will address my
remarks, after some brief comments about our program.
To emphasize transculturation is to work with an idea of a global art history
very close to the one that Kaufmann describes as “an art history which would
treat all parts of the globe as interconnected.”1 I say “work with” to suggest the
somewhat improvisational nature of our project, because, from its inception, we
confronted some of the practical constraints of the discipline of art history that
many seminar participants have noted, including narrow specialization, limited
(but growing) scholarly resources, and few viable options for student readings.
These constraints exert subtle pressure to maintain the intellectual, academic,
and pedagogical status quo. Only in an environment that encourages experi-
mentation, flexibility, and openness can an exploratory endeavor such as a trans-
cultural studies program be undertaken. Dependent on preexisting work, the
methodological approach that we take is necessarily eclectic and draws on visual
studies, material culture studies, traditional disciplinary tools, and social history,
among other recent critical perspectives.
It seems to me that Michael Holly’s reference to the familiar notion that
“narratives speak us” serves as a metaphor for the pursuit of a global art history at
this moment (though she was using this phrase to ask why the global arises as an
issue just now). These seminars, the ways many of us are posing our scholarly in-
quiries, the new structures and content we are designing for courses—all of these
address questions that increasingly have become both fascinating and urgent.
The impetus for these inquiries derives from intellectual, historical, and political
imperatives that have arisen both within and outside the discipline, including
internal critiques by scholars of narrow definitions and ethical and political chal-
lenges posed by new audiences often reflecting social movements. As Kaufmann
observes, however, the results to date of these inquiries are neither unified nor

1. Section 3 of the Seminars, note 3.

227 assessments

clarified by any well-articulated theory. While they are fragmentary, it is possible

that greater coherence will emerge from continuing engagement with pressing
issues that encourage dialogue between the discipline and the wider world.
The fact that the wider society contributes to the shape of the discipline is
implicit in the kinds of questions about art history that Kaufmann and others
in his seminar address. Insights gained through transcultural studies can bring
to light connections between the circumstances surrounding the production of
art, on the one hand, and reflection on art in Western culture, on the other. For
example, recent discussions of art of the early Renaissance in Italy and in North-
ern Europe have emphasized and explored in new depth and detail geoeconomic
contexts that promoted new forms of art and new attitudes toward art. These
contexts, which are themselves interrelated, include the reconceptualization of
collections of material objects that evolved into the development of curiosity
cabinets; an intensified focus on the accumulation of material objects in general
daily life; and the expanding array of far-flung trading relationships.2 Studies
that explicate the connections between these developments and new tendencies
in works of art deepen the sense of the tensions underlying the Western defini-
tion of art, which include its profound ties to commodity relations on the one
hand, and its claims to and struggles to achieve autonomy on the other. At virtu-
ally the same moment that the latter received a decisive new formulation during
the Enlightenment, industrial capitalism transformed the former. The discipline
of art history inherited this set of contradictions. As a result, its practices are
both responsive to the needs of wealth and power—connoisseurs, collectors, na-
tions, institutions—and supportive of efforts by artists to critique and challenge
these forms of social power.
This suggests that, as art historians continue to work within these contra-
dictions, a greater self-consciousness about them is an ongoing project—one to
which these seminars and the work of many of its participants contribute.
Transcultural studies may contribute to this awareness, too. As I conceive
it, this means looking at how art (visual images and objects) embodies or mani-
fests interactions among cultures, whether these take the form of trade relations,
political alliances, immigration, colonization, conquest, or any other type of
encounter. The impact of interaction can be registered by cultural objects and
practices in varieties of ways, shaping or reshaping the production of visual ex-
pression in terms of materials, techniques, kinds and uses of objects, formal
devices, imagery, subject matter, and meanings, as well as altering institution-
al arrangements in specific historical, economic, and social contexts. Looking
beyond representations of transcultural relations to the (re)construction of
art through cultural encounters shifts the valence of traditional art-historical

2. Works that are useful in this regard
include Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New
History of the Renaissance (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1998); Rosamond E. Mack, Bazaar to
Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300–1600
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002);
Caroline Campbell and Alan Chong, eds., Bellini
and the East (London: National Gallery Com-
pany, 2005); and Stefano Carboni, ed., Venice
and the Islamic World, 828–1797 (New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2007).
228 art and globalization

periodization and its geographical hierarchy (in varying degrees depending on

the given focus). Relegation of periods of cultural isolation or independence to
a less central position problematizes conventional frameworks in relation to the
more normative—in this conceptual context—situation of cultural interaction.
Toward the end of Kaufmann’s seminar, Simon Baier directed our atten-
tion to modernism, a theme addressed by others in succeeding seminars and
assessments. I agree that many of the issues raised by the idea of a global art
history can be concentrated in considerations of modernism. With modernism,
the claim to autonomy that I referred to earlier has itself been commodified
(in blockbuster shows, coffee-table books, keychains, and auction sales). But
this is just one latter-day respect in which modernist artists placed themselves
at the core of their epoch and mined its contradictions. There is more, too, to
be learned about and from their international and, in some cases, universalistic
scope, especially in light of its deep dependence on colonial and Orientalist per-
spectives. And as several seminar participants noted, the transcultural reach of
modernism can be a useful basis for examining contemporary globalism.
As scholars continue to explore the ways that modernism created what
Iftikhar Dadi, in his assessment, calls a “networked, cosmopolitan imagina-
tion,” the concept of modernity itself becomes more complex, taking in not
only Baron Haussmann’s boulevards but streets from Kampala to Kyoto. To-
day, transcultural encounters proliferate, always within the grip of the contra-
dictions sketched earlier, but also complicating the concepts of “border” and
“margin” and the associated traditional vocabulary that refers to interminglings.
When we look at the variegated array of contemporary visual production that
encompasses, for example, modernist Sudanese and diasporic painter Ibrahim
el-Salahi, Darfurian women’s woven basketry that records recent upheavals they
have experienced,3 international biennial culture, and tourist art, it seems that
only a transcultural perspective that critically contextualizes each one can begin
to chart the complexity of art’s globalism today.

3. Baqie Badawi Muhammad, “Famine,

Women, Creative Acts, and Gender Dynamics in
Manawashi, Darfur, Western Sudan,” Jenda 2,
no. 1 (2002): 2–18.
looking for something

Suman Gupta

What follows is actually less a contribution to the rich range of ideas that were
mooted and debated in the Seminar than an attempt to shoulder in with a tan-
gentially relevant thought—one that might have a bearing on the discussion
and was elided in the course of it. I use the term “elided” advisedly. The kind of
thing I have in mind was elided, it seems to me, in somewhat the same way as
the four points Elkins raised in the last session. And this point was elided too in
the sense of being almost marked by, so to speak, slight blurs in the conversation
which suggested its imminent exposure but without its actually surfacing. I have
in mind moments in the conversation such as the following:

1. Shigemi Inaga: I was invited to submit [my paper] to Critical Inquiry, but
it was rejected with the interesting note that it was “too ethnographic.”
I wanted it to be theoretical, but it was regarded as ethnographic—
Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay: It did not appear to be universal in scope,
that’s what the judgment meant.1
2. Shelly Errington: . . . instead of talking about globalization as an event
or a stream of events that either did or did not happen, or when “it”
began, or whether “it” is continuous or ruptured, as if it were a thing
that could be pointed to in the world like a table or a chair, Joyce is ask-
ing what it means to a person or a collection of associated people in a
particular place and time that people are connected in certain material
ways instead of others, or that images are flowing around us constantly,
or whatever? That’s a different way to ask the question than asking what
the phases of capitalism are and when they started.2

Here are two separate passages, both in the context of trying to come up with
phrases or terms which are akin to or closer to what is being designated as
“hybridity”:

3. James Elkins: All the choices of words are likely to come up short,
because they are symptoms of a conceptual structure. That is why I
thought it might be best to begin with abstract terms.
4. James Elkins: I think the question Why write a global art history? is
misleading, because it implies people set out to do such a thing—Is Art
History Global? showed, I think, that almost no one does. What every-
one tries to do is write in a way that is sensitive to local meanings, but

1. Section 2 of the Seminars. 2. Section 3 of the Seminars.

230 art and globalization

what results is a massive, worldwide literature-in-the-making, in which

practices are described in such a way that each is legible to the others:
they comprise a slowly accumulating, global art history.

The first and third quotations seem to me to gesture toward a certain kind of
rhetorical circularity. The exchange between Inaga and Mukhopadhyay (and the
Critical Inquiry assessor) attempts unsuccessfully to find a counterpoint between
three terms: “ethnographic,” “theoretical,” and “universal.” If no clarification fol-
lows from this attempt, it is probably because all the terms are at a similar level
of obfuscating abstraction, and any attempt to clarify one with reference to the
others is likely to work at cross purposes. In a similar way, Elkins’s observation
on the ineffectiveness of trying to clarify “hybridity” with reference to like terms
also folds in rather mystifyingly on itself. Why Elkins feels that beginning with
“abstract terms” might resolve the impasse—rather than exacerbating it—is un-
clear. Arguably, it is precisely the abstraction involved in “hybridity” and the
other terms proposed that causes the impasse to begin with, and precisely be-
cause abstract terms are generally “symptoms of a conceptual structure.” Both
these incidental, almost trivial, moments in the conversation seem to me to re-
sistantly note a quality of slipperiness and circularity in the use of terms in, in
the register of, the seminar as a whole. The various strands of the seminar revolve
around the identification of abstract terms—in binary oppositions like
“global”/“local,” “global”/“national,” “universal”/“particular,” “capitalist”/“socialist,”
“neoliberal”/“Marxist,” “center”/“margin,” “authentic”/“hybrid,” “postcolonial”/
“imperial,” “Western”/“Eastern,” and so on, or in mediating terms like “identity,”
“location,” “market,” of course “art” itself, and so on—followed by a kind of
autoperpetuating discussion delving into the connotation of the chosen abstrac-
tions. To a large extent, in other words, it appears to me that the lexicon and
syntax of the critical discourse provided the impetus of the discussion. To pose
these abstractions (equally abstract at both poles of binary opposites) is also to
reify their presumptive meaningfulness, and the discussion is largely an interro-
gation of the reifications that have already been enacted: so that to enunciate
abstractions like, say, “globalization” and “nationalism” always begs the question
What do you mean? and that always leads to a discussion of presumptions in
proposing the abstraction itself and the vagaries therein. The unfolding of the
transcribed seminar text, in a way, seems to recall Baudrillard’s reading of
Foucault: “Foucault’s discourse is a mirror of the powers it describes”—where no
“truth index” gives it strength, “where seduction feeds analytical force and where
language itself gives birth to the operations of new powers.”3 Something similar,
I feel, happens here: the seminar displays and seduces by the exercise of the
power of critical discourse through its self-perpetuating performance—and ends
by confirming the power of critical discourse itself. Ultimately this has the effect
of consolidating the power of an institutional register, however that institutional

3. Baudrillard, Forget Foucault (New York:

Semiotext(e), 1987), 10.
231 assessments

centering is designated—whether within the precincts of the Stone Theory In-

stitute or more broadly within the porous boundaries of the institutional disci-
pline of art history.
The second and fourth quotations, I feel, are moments where the auto-
perpetuating tenor of the conversation could have been interrogated and wasn’t.
Errington seems in the second to resist the uncritical acceptance of an abstrac-
tion, “globalization,” as something that is already, so to speak, out there and
meaningful as such. Instead she proposes (or feels Brodsky is proposing) trying
to infer its nuances from something more specific: “what it means to a person
or a collection of associated people in a particular time and place.” Perhaps “spe-
cific” is not quite the right word—perhaps it is the concreteness or familiarity of
the everyday that she has in mind. But there is an idea of something there—some-
thing that is not an abstraction in itself, but with regard to which an abstraction
like “globalization” (or any abstraction really) may become immanent. From
a somewhat different direction, in the fourth quotation Elkins’s perception of
“global art history”—the abstraction most pressingly at stake in the seminar—as
emerging somewhere between what art historians do (be intentionally sensitive
to “local meanings”) and what results (a spontaneous “worldwide literature-in-
the-making” that is “global art history,” spontaneous in the sense of not being
the product of a specific agency). The direction marked in this observation is not
so much (as it ostensibly seems) from the “local” nuance to the “global” scale:
though conceptually the global contains the local, equally conceptually both
are mutually defined abstractions of equal rarity. The direction Elkins marks
makes sense because he connects that containment of local within global in a
process from “doing” to “resulting” art history. The effect is of rendering the idea
of “global art history” as an agency-free, acontextual pure abstraction, which is
put into perspective against something that is more than an abstraction or more
grounded in praxis and materiality: doing with regard to the local. It is implied
that the latter actuates the former, and the latter is more basic.
These hints of a something in art history, in art theory and criticism, in
thinking about art—which is not after the fact of abstractions but lies beneath
them and brings them together—interests me. There is no easy way of expressing
this something more precisely than in the quotations from Errington or Elkins
above, but perhaps it can be homed in on more emphatically. It needs more
emphasis to put the seminar discussions and their lack of conclusions into per-
spective. This something is not as simple as citing empirical evidence or referring
to a particular producer, product, or environment, though those are implicated.
One way of coming to grips with it might be to try to trim away the generalities
or containments of abstractions so that both the application of abstractions and
the something they abstract from and upon can be brought to view. But that is
itself a debilitatingly abstract exercise. Nevertheless, it might make some sense
to think of a process like “the particular time T when a specific person/group P
of such-and-such background/qualifications/experiences encountered art object
232 art and globalization

A by artist X of such-and-such background/qualifications/experiences in space

S which has such-and-such dispositions/ends-orientations/features,” and so on.
Such an absurdly regressive process of delineating a bottom line that is arguably
not abstract in itself is obviously inconclusive too, but the very effort at positing
such could provide locus standi for abstractions: a notion of what abstractions
are abstractions from. Besides, it is not such an absolute bottom line that needs
to be discerned, any more than an absolute abstraction that has to be engaged;
even a somewhat less rigorous and pragmatic marking of a bottom line—such
as when “her gaze encountered this art object in that space on this date”—that
feeds into and derives from abstractions could be useful for seminar discussions,
the conceptualization of art history, the task of the intellectual vocation or the
academic profession. Another way of thinking about the something—that is, not
in terms of a regressive charting of specificity—might be in terms of frames. I
have in mind the kind of juxtaposing of a conceptual apprehension of frames
with the materiality of frames of art that Derrida performs:

Parerga have a thickness, a surface which separates them not only (as
Kant would have it) from the integral inside, from the body proper of
the ergon, but also from the outside, from the wall on which the paint-
ing is hung, from the space in which statue or column is erected, then,
step by step, from the whole field of historical, economic, political in-
scription in which the drive to signature is produced . . . No “theory,”
no “practice,” no “theoretical practice” can intervene effectively in this
field if it does not weigh up and bear on the frame, which is the decisive
structure of what is at stake, the invisible limit to (between) the inte-
riority of meaning (put under shelter by the whole hermeneuticist, se-
mioticist, phenomenologicalist, and formalist tradition) and (to) all the
empiricism of the extrinsic which, incapable of either seeing or reading,
miss the question completely.4

Derrida’s conceptual-material frame of art is a shifting space, a negotiable sig-

nifier itself, and all systems of abstraction—whether of “theory” or “practice,”
whether “hermeneuticist, semioticist, phenomenologicalist, and formalist”—are
arraigned around its prefiguration. The frame has to be grasped first; perhaps the
frame is the something.
It seems to me that unless such a something—with regard to which abstrac-
tion occurs, which becomes subsumed in abstraction—is grasped and fore-
grounded somehow, much of the discussion in the Seminar appears irrelevant
as a discussion of art and seems no more than a performance of an institutional
discourse and its power, allure, self-regard, self-confirmation.

4. Jacques Derrida, Truth in Painting,

translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 63.
233 assessments

At any rate, almost all the prodigious number of strands of the seminar
discussion appeared productive to me because they could be—were inevitably—
implicated in and inflected by an arbitrary something to which I had anchored
my reading. I participated and disputed in the Seminar at third hand, as a reader,
accordingly. This is how that came about.
In April 2005 I was in the old town of Plovdiv in Bulgaria as a tourist, and
came across—as a tourist must there—the permanent exhibition and museum
of the painter Zlatyu Boyadzhiev (1903–1976). I hadn’t heard of him before this
visit. The exhibition was heartily recommended by the Bulgarian colleague who
was with me, and in my guidebook. The exhibition appears on the central thor-
oughfare of the old town, which is largely Bulgarian Revival of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries and was carefully restored in the 1970s and 1980s. Boy-
adzhiev’s paintings, of which seventy-six are displayed in the permanent exhibi-
tion, were recommended for two ostensible reasons: they represent vividly a
certain local environment (the Plovdiv region) and its inhabitants, and more
generally a Bulgarian national ethos; and they are evidence of an extraordinary
artistic effort. The latter is because, I was told, about halfway through his career
(in 1951), the painter suffered a stroke that left his right hand, his painting hand,
paralyzed, and he thereafter taught himself to paint with his left hand; most of his
more highly regarded paintings were executed with his left hand, and his career
and paintings are consequently considered as belonging to two separate phases.
Boyadzhiev’s paintings seemed to resonate with the old-town tourist experience
and accentuate my view of Plovdiv itself in various ways. In the following couple
of years, I viewed them in Plovdiv several times, and other Boyadzhiev paintings
in other collections around Bulgaria, including Sofia, Blagoevgrad, Smolyan,
and Pleven. A little exploration brought home further aspects of these paintings
to me: for instance, that though they are firmly placed in Plovdiv (a city that is
recognized as a center of art with a distinctive artistic tradition in Bulgaria) and
the Bulgarian national canon, they have received indifferent critical attention
even within Bulgaria (predominantly along the lines of the locational and the
biographical), negligible attention beyond, and are relatively modestly priced
in the art market. And relevant here is the fact that my cursory exploration and
repeated visits to the Boyadzhiev exhibition were undertaken because, from the
first visit, I perceived in the paintings certain qualities that did not subscribe to
the locational and biographical (the disabled but driven artist), lenses through
which they were recommended and made available. Briefly, I felt I could dis-
cern in them a self-reflexive preoccupation with the form and performance of
painting itself that superseded their often stereotyped or archetypal themes and
motifs—I felt that these are, in fact, not so much paintings that simply represent
something but paintings about painting itself. This is not the place to justify
this perception; I note this as the factor that underlines my encounter with Boy-
adzhiev’s work.
234 art and globalization

The point of this preamble is that my encounters with Boyadzhiev’s paint-

ings aroused a curiosity about the receptive fields through which they have
traveled and to which they are offered now. It was in terms of this encounter
and subsequent curiosity that my reading of the Seminar transcript, which for-
tuitously appeared as I was contemplating the matter, was structured. And it
occurred to me that my reading of the transcript was fruitful because I inadvert-
ently anchored it to my present something, this curiosity about the receptive
fields for Boyadzhiev’s paintings. Almost every strand of the Seminar discussions
seemed implicated in possible further contemplation of Boyadzhiev’s receptive
fields, and the implications from Boyadzhiev’s paintings seemed to render the
different strands of the discussion relevant and coherent to my reading.
The slippage between my perception of the paintings and the recommended
locational and biographical frames—frames, that is, in the Derridean sense—en-
courages interrogation of both those frames and my own perceptual associations
and tourist sensibility (my framing). The slippage is in the fact that the given
frames and my framing pull in contrary directions: the former tend to provin-
cialize, or at best contain in a national sphere, and personalize, while the latter
tends to dislocate from both. It is evident that the former has been the basis on
which Boyadzhiev’s paintings are available at all; but, speculatively, if the latter
perception had been more widely shared and cultivated, that might have enabled
those paintings to travel more widely (outside the regional and national). The
placement of Boyadzhiev’s paintings in the circuit of art criticism and the art
market has, arguably, been constrained by an overdetermination of the regional
or the national, and the biographical. This is actually a considerably more com-
plex argument than that bald statement suggests, and implicates all the main
topics covered in the Seminar. To begin with, my tourist encounter with Boy-
adzhiev’s paintings is undoubtedly engineered by a heritage industry, in which
both state and corporate agents play their roles, that focuses on images and sites
to confirm a national and regional narrative and satisfy consumer desires and
lifestyles at different levels. Equally, my tourist encounter is also mediated by
my extrinsic background and range of interests and experiences (including the
academic), and involves a constant set of translations and reassessments, none of
which are necessarily contained by the heritage industry’s proffered frames. The
negotiations between global, national, and local are conducted, in the first place,
through my tourist gaze. In this context, it occurs to me that this is not simply
a matter of how things are within the arena of the encounter, but of how they
have come to be so that this encounter is possible. The locational and biographi-
cal frames are available because they have evolved through a process, just as I
bring a history—personal, experiential, institutional—with my gaze. That Boy-
adzhiev’s paintings are framed by the old town of Plovdiv effectively directs at-
tention to that locale. The old town as it appears now was, as I observed, largely
reconstructed in the 1970s and 1980s through the efforts of Atanas Krustev, who
was appointed an inspector in Plovdiv Municipality’s Department of Science,
235 assessments

Art, and Culture in 1954 and took a personal interest in having Boyadzhiev’s
work centered in the reconstruction. At the time this wasn’t a reconstruction
that was likely to have been designed with an international heritage industry
in mind (though the results were peculiarly amenable for this industry), but it
was certainly designed to concretize a regional and national historical narrative
and Plovdiv’s claim as a cultural and particularly artistic center. To some ex-
tent, the reconstruction could be regarded as a branding exercise that subsumed
Boyadzhiev’s art. The history of this reconstruction therefore calls for further
attention. The historical narrative at the level of nation itself had diverse, and
often contrary, pulls that were focused or neglected (both equally telling) in the
reconstruction: a claim to authenticity (thus highlighting the Thracian, Roman,
medieval, and Revival/Liberation periods) that is simultaneously also a claim
to diversity and hybridity; and together with that a postcolonial sensibility that
tends to underplay both the five hundred years of Ottoman rule and the domi-
nant influences, such as Russian. Obviously the frame of the reconstruction
itself, and Boyadzhiev’s place within it, is superseded by the considerably more
complex frame of national history and historicizing. Insofar as this actuates the
receptive fields relevant to Boyadzhiev, it is a matter of charting several phases
of ideologically determined culture and art policy. Of particular importance are
the different phases of communist culture policy in Bulgaria from 1944 to 1989,
which were far from homogeneous and which contained much of Boyadzhiev’s
most productive period as an artist. Then there’s the postsocialist transitional
phase of Bulgaria’s adaptation as a liberal capitalist democratic state, and reactive
rejection of communist heritage, particularly from 1990 to 2007. This included
both setting up a corporate capitalist infrastructure and efforts toward accession
into the European Union. The run-up to and accession into the EU in 2007 en-
tailed a kind of self-performance and construction of cultural heritage that was
meant to consolidate a transnational status. In brief, the receptive fields through
which Boyadzhiev’s paintings traveled and arrived to the present involved com-
prehensive changes both in the construction of nationality and in the construc-
tion of transnational or international positioning. The locational and biographi-
cal frames that are on offer now were negotiated through these shifts, and very
possibly the slippage of my framing has to do with how those frames were put
in place—or how, perhaps, something akin to my framing may have been sup-
pressed or neglected. Alongside those, implicated both in the self-constructions
of the nation and in the ideological shifts, are the extrinsic political, economic,
and cultural categories that have prevailed at different times: whether in locating
Bulgaria as on the eastern fringe of Europe, as partner in the Axis, as a Stalinist
state, as a Soviet satellite, as an underdeveloped postsocialist country, as a Balkan
country, as a newly opened property market, as a newly accessible tourist desti-
nation, as an aspirant to EU membership, as a source of large-scale emigration,
as a boundary of Fortress Europe, and so on. Each of these designations is within
overlapping grids of global geopolitics. And in a variety of ways all these play
236 art and globalization

into the manner in which Bulgarian culture and identity—and consequently

Boyadzhiev’s paintings—are located or dislocated, are framed and reframed, are
attended to or neglected.
It seems to me fairly self-evident how reading the Seminar transcript—the
discussion of globalization, nationality, hybridity, capitalism, postcolonialism,
translation, and so on in the context of art history—may be inflected by and
implicated in a preoccupation with the framings and receptive fields of Boy-
adzhiev’s paintings. And reading the Seminar discussions worked for me in that
fashion. Boyadzhiev’s paintings may seem a counterintuitive anchor for a discus-
sion that is as wide-ranging and globe-embracing as this one, but it is as relevant
a something as any other I could think of. The question is whether these Seminar
discussions are productive without such a something to anchor the strands to,
and whether the need for such a something shouldn’t be registered within the
discourse of such discussions. What does it read like without that? That question
takes me back to the first half of this response.
nomadic territories and times

Saskia Sassen

Reading the texts and the discussions of the Seminar, I was struck by their po-
tential to make legible critical aspects of the current moment. But I was also
struck by the extent to which we remain captives of a period, of a particular
modernity. There are rumblings in these Seminar discussions that signal there is
much happening beneath the surface of that modernity. Yet the discussions were
excessively anchored in a particular type of narrative when it comes to subjects
such as globalization, one I have been working on for a long time.
And yet I think it is artists who can detect, see, in ways that those of us
shaped or confined by prose cannot. Here then some thoughts as a way of disen-
tangling some issues about globalization, the national, and the character of the
transformation. The hope is that this advances the discussions launched in the
Seminar around these subjects. I want to pull out a couple of aspects that are
bubbling in the discussions but that somehow remain slippery: I want to grab
this slippery intimation of something that is part of the transformation we are
living, but that remains opaque.
The deep transformation afoot today is well beyond the usual language of
weakening national states and powerful global regulators, which is a putative
combat of titans, where what the national loses and the global wins. In my read-
ing, at its deepest this transformation is the unshackling of foundational catego-
ries of social existence (time, subjectivity, territory, authority, rights) from their
national encasing. We lack the language to capture the thousands of little chang-
es and unsettlements that are worming themselves into the established cages
for these foundational elements. These are the cages produced by the project of
building the nation-state and the work of rendering all building blocks of social
existence as national, albeit never fully achieved.
Today, territory and time, subjectivity and identity, are beginning to seep
out of these national cages. This easily gets experienced as disorder and crisis,
because it contrasts with the standardizing, bureaucratizing, and nationalizing
of time, territory, identity that is part of the nation-state-building project. An
interesting instance of grappling with these experiences of crisis is is the 2009
Transmediale, dedicated to the Deep North. As Steven Kovats, the TM’s new
director, puts it, Deep North is “not a fixed location, but a paradigm transform-
ing loss into a complex state of being and cultural development—an indicator
of fusing location with global introspection.”1

1. Deep North, Transmediale ’09, Festival for

Art and Digital Culture, Berlin, January 27–Febru-
ary 1, 2009.
238 art and globalization

Although it never completely succeeded, the nation-state-building project

constituted the organizational formats, the notions of justice and ethics, and the
subjectivities of belonging and identity that have dominated the last century.
A synthetic way of saying this is that when the national state is the dominant
format, the overarching dynamic is centripetal: the center grasps most of what
there is to be had. And what happened outside the borders of territorial states—
whether the impoverished terrains of former empires or the earth’s poles—was
written out of history.
Today’s catastrophic conditions—the melting of the glaciers, the radical-
ness of today’s poverty, the violence of extreme economic inequality, the geno-
cidal character of more and more wars—are often seen as part of today’s major
change. But it seems to me they are not. They developed over centuries but were
“exported” to that supposed no-man’s-land that absorbed the costs of the mak-
ing of nation-states and capitalism. They are floating signifiers, speech acts that
narrate the current condition in a far more encompassing manner than standard
narratives about nation-states and globalization. While these conditions have
existed for a long time, today they are crossing new thresholds and, crucially,
they become legible as the cages of the national begin to fall apart and reveal
the landscapes of devastation on which they were built. “Our over-cantilevered
bridge cannot cope with the warming waters below.”2
We are seeing a proliferation of partial, often highly specialized, assemblages
of bits of territory, authority, and rights once firmly ensconced in national insti-
tutional frames, assemblages that begin to escape the cages of the national. These
assemblages cut across the binary of “national versus global,” and in this process
they take us beyond this binary, which has become the usual way of attempting
to understand what is new today. These emergent assemblages inhabit both na-
tional and global institutional and territorial settings and amount to a far deeper
transformation than the global-versus-national type of analysis captures. They
can be localized, and in that localness have the (powerful) effect of denationaliz-
ing bits of national territory. Or they can span the globe in the form of translocal
geographies connecting multiple, often thick, subnational spaces—institutional,
territorial, subjective. One aspect that matters here is that these often thick,
subnational settings are building blocks for new global geographies. They do not
run through the more familiar global and supranational institutions, which take
out that thickness and generalize across differences. These assemblages resonate
with Nicolas Bourriaud’s notion of an altermodernity that “arises out of plan-
etary negotiations, discussions between agents from different cultures.”3
Elsewhere I have developed the notion of denationalization as a category
for analysis that aims at capturing a specific set of components in today’s ma-
jor global transformations, for which the typical terms in use—globalization,
postnationalism, and transnationalism—are inadequate. These three terms all

2. Hilary Koob-Sassen, Serpentine Manifesto, 3. See the catalogue of the Tate Britain 2009
London, October 2008, www.artreview.com/ Triennale, London.
profiles/blog/show?id=1474022%3ABlogPost%
3A534986 (accessed May 2009).
239 assessments

point to locations for change that lie outside the nation-state. The effort behind
developing a fourth category—denationalization—arises out of an as yet small
but growing body of research showing that critical components of today’s major
transformations actually take place inside the nation-state. The processes that
constitute the transformation in this case have the effect of denationalizing what
has historically been constructed as national. These processes are partial, often
highly specialized and obscure. Further, they frequently continue to be coded,
represented, and experienced in the vocabulary of the national, and hence can
remain unrecognized and undetected. Thus, this new category for analysis opens
up a vast research and theorization agenda connected to global trends but fo-
cused on the nation-state. (And the no-man’s land of devastations is actually
also a product of nation-state building, but in the form of the shadowy zone for
exporting toxicities.)
Globalization has brought with it an incipient unbundling of the exclusive
authority over territory, people, and identity we have long associated directly
and indirectly with the national state. One way of conceptualizing this unbun-
dling is to posit that it entails a dynamic of denationalizing what had been
constructed as the “national” over the last century and more. This construction
of the national was in many, though not all, parts of the world a political, eco-
nomic, legal, and culturally thick process. Thus, current dynamics of globaliza-
tion need to be understood in the context of this thickly constructed national.
What I am arguing is that today’s transformation does not simply refer to
that which transcends the national, as is commonly asserted. There is a far more
complex and ambiguous negotiation that happens largely inside multiple in-
stances of the national. Such a conceptualization relocates the analytic task from
the macrolevel of interdependences and cross-border flows to what are mostly
microsites that may well remain coded as the national. It is an analytic inversion
of the usual strategy used to address or study or represent transnationalism and
also globalization.
There are sites where these dynamics of denationalization take on thick and
consequential forms. Among these sites are, from the perspective of my own re-
search experience, global cities. The global city is a border zone where the old
spatialities and temporalities of the national and the new ones of the global digital
age get engaged in complex, multisite, and multilevel ways. Out of their juxta-
position comes the possibility of a whole series of new economic and cultural
projects. Conceivably there are other sites, including microsites, where the juxta-
positions of different spatialities and temporalities are likely to be thick, charged.
If this lens is used to look at some current, often minor and barely visible,
developments, it opens up some interesting vistas.4 For instance, this way of nar-
rating the current period allows us to reposition immobility, at a time when the
focus is on mobility as an indicator of globality. If globalities are constituted in-
side the national, then the immobile can be global actors, if they care to—their

4. See “Women on the Move,” Frieze 105

(March 2007).
240 art and globalization

bodies do not cross the borders of national states, but that does not preclude
their being part of global subjectivities and politics. And while the immobile
are likely to be among the disadvantaged, the condition is less absolute and
less oppressive than the emphasis on mobility suggests. Their powerlessness can
become complex and thereby contain the possibility of politics, of making the
political. Localized struggles by actors who are not globally mobile are nonethe-
less critical for the organizational infrastructure of a globally networked politics:
it is precisely the combination of localized practices and global networks that
makes possible a new type of power for actors who would be seen as powerless
in terms of older, more conventional variables. While geographically immobile,
these localized actors and their practices are also inflected by their participation
and constitutive role in global civil society. Even if contained within an admin-
istrative unit of a national state, they are not simply local.
The proliferation of these novel assemblages of bits of territory, authority,
rights, identities, once ensconced in the national, does not represent the end of
national states, but it does begin to disassemble bits and pieces of the national.
Nor does it represent simply the expansion of the global. It produces a kind of
“third space” for a growing range of operations, from economic to cultural to
political. If you see through the eye of the national state, these assemblages look
inchoate, disorderly, arbitrary, a no-man’s-land. But they are actually the bits of
a new reality that is coming into being.
dead parrot society

Charles Green

The welcome significance of the Chicago Seminars is twofold. First, it is

disciplinary: the Seminars are part of the inevitable, epochal, and rapidly
emerging reform of a North Atlantic–centered canon of art history that remains
entrenched despite repeated, incantatory acknowledgments of its inadequacy.
Many of us insist instead on a global narrative of major contributions to art
made by artists around the world. The narrative that results will redress the
disciplinary imbalances that are becoming obvious to anyone with any degree
of attentiveness to facts. But this calls for a set of criteria and a quality of simple
empirical observation that is able to ignore the canonical lists of names in books
such as Art Since 1900 that seem so self-evident. The Chicago Seminars and
responses would make a great corrective start to an art history Wikipedia.
This aim remains relatively incomprehensible and opaque to most powerful
scholars in North America and western Europe, and to many younger scholars
as well. I am a little more shocked than I should be at this, for, as an Australian-
based scholar who spends a considerable amount of time in Asia and the United
States, I admire and have learnt from many New Yorkers. Chris Berry’s and
Rasheed Araeen’s frustration rings loud, true, and clear across continents.
If the North Atlantic image of itself through past art can no longer be
sustained by the Atlas of contemporary art, then a future, post-Obama North
Atlantic will have to define itself in relation to others in a very different way,
as will North Atlantic–based art historians. The question of deciding what it
is necessary to art history is, and always was, circular. The anxiety of textual
indeterminacy implied by the absence of “necessity” has haunted the exchanges,
and may be extrapolated onto art history’s predicament when it eventually
confronts the modifications that will be required to the art history of North
America and Europe. To demonstrate a degree of inclusiveness, let alone
attentiveness, is still a long, long way off.
The alternative to the North Atlantic’s global art history can be understood
by thoroughly reimaging the North Atlantic as provincial, and then comparing
that provincialism to “smaller” centers. In my own relatively small but artistically
hyperactive society there are two art practices: the national and regional (an
art world that values fairly conservative and backward-looking, exclusively local
reputations such as painters Charles Blackman and Arthur Boyd as timely, and
that is incapable of recognizing timeliness and untimeliness except in the most
fuzzy ways); and younger artists, for whom the issue of nation versus globalization
is irrelevant compared with access. This is irrelevant, as has been convincingly
242 art and globalization

argued, to the rest: to indigenous artists, for instance, who have other definitions
of nation, and to artists outside Melbourne and Sydney, for whom Australian
art is Melbourne-Sydney art (both are by far Australia’s biggest cities, and they
tend to myopia regarding other, smaller centers such as Perth, let alone tiny
desert indigenous settlements such as Papunya). The same double economy is
mirrored across the planet in differing proportions, as Jim Elkins points out, but
this includes New York’s twin nature itself, where the naturalization of imperial
ideology is most convincing to the inhabitants themselves. Smaller cultures
like Australia have—as several participants pointed out—been driven by the
need to construct a national narrative of art. It is doubtful whether a global
art alternative would have been much better (especially since so many of these
national narratives, including those of Australia, India, and the United States,
were thoroughly structured by the Cold War). A fascinating and vast recent
exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, Picture Paradise: Asia-Pacific
Photography, 1840s–1940s (July 11–September 28, 2008), juxtaposed immensely
ambitious photographs across the whole Pacific Rim, placing contemporaneous
works from Java to Yokohama to San Francisco. Another way of imagining
history outside of the national provincial is to write this Pacific Rim history
of interaction, exchange, and innovation in which enormous photographic
panoramas of a late nineteenth-century Sydney rival and illuminate Muybridge’s
equally enormous, virtuoso San Francisco views.
Understanding the genuine but forgotten patterns of causation and influence,
as well as the synchronicities and counterintuitive primacies of innovation,
requires a lot more encyclopedic knowledge than art historians are used to.
This is one of Reiko Tomii’s key points about North Atlantic art historians’
repeated anxiety about timeliness, which occludes the chronological primacy
of innovations outside the North Atlantic and by immigrant artists who arrived
and worked in North Atlantic centers. It is possible to start to conceptualize
these shifts more easily if you do not live in the United States or Europe. Imagine
that many places have seen analogous modernities, and many of the artists are
of equivalent value. The canon depends on where you live, and depends on the
ability to imagine that you are not at the center of the world and that there are
many potential places of greatness. For example, one of the greatest painters
of the twentieth century was a New Zealander, Colin McCahon. One could
potentially argue that his importance is comparable to, perhaps greater than, for
example, that of Jasper Johns. Or else, more interesting, that Colin McCahon
occupies a position of transition similar in character to Philip Guston, though
more radical. All the resources to study his work are out there already: there
are great Web sites that catalogue his paintings; the large Stedjelik retrospective
a few years back should have burned his name into the discourse, but not as
a national or peripheral exemplar. For all its chaotic failings, Documenta 12
attempted such revisions. The ability to conceptualize a different history that
243 assessments

does not relegate by “untimely” comparison also depends on one’s ability to

widen the field of cultural production to include other fields of images than
the privileged medium of oil painting. This is not even to argue for a cultural
studies approach, nor to blur the high–low divide. If we insist that oil painting
is the crucial site of modernism, then obviously Paris is a key site and a necessary
center, but if architecture is brought into play, then Brazilian art suddenly
comes into focus, or if illustrated books, then Indian miniature painters loom as
large as Raphael. It is possible to write histories that fully acknowledge a more
complex and multiple direction of knowledge production that is not at all radial
in nature.
We still have to face other core questions. If art history’s terms of value and
the reasons for valuing painting have been formulated across the North Atlantic,
then attempts to think of other centers as equal—as Asianist John Clark does,
for example—might seem to risk cutting off the reasons for valuing painting
as painting. Do such attempts risk tending to change the conversation from
the value and quality of the painting to the socioeconomic contexts that make
different art unique in different places? As Elkins acknowledges, even when other
seminar participants do not, this is to display vast ignorance of the presence of
non–North Atlantic artists within west European and East Coast centers, and
the reverse, the continual movement of forgotten but genuinely major artists
outwards to other centers, such as German émigré painter Eugen von Guerard
to Gold Rush Melbourne in the mid-nineteenth century. And this further begs
the question of the place of artists of North Atlantic racial and cultural heritage
living in the South, close to Asia, in Australia, Chile, Argentina, New Zealand,
and South Africa. In reality, if one bothers to look, the problem melts away. Tani
Barlow and Mark Jarzombek are right: the so-called impasse of art historians
is a false impasse, one born of incuriousness. And in any case, no matter what
identity theory’s early 1990s lingo held, a large proportion of artists have never
been bound, nor felt they wished to be bound, as exemplars of racial and cultural
self-definition. John Cage is as good a cosmopolitan example as McCahon or Xu
Bing. The discipline should face up to the sense of cultural omnipotence that
afflicts everyone, everywhere, at great metropolitan centers.
The seminar’s second significance is more slow-burning, though later
responses (particularly that of T. J. Demos) and Jim Elkins’s summations, spell
it out clearly: neither the Seminar participants nor art historians in general
deal with the explosion of contemporary art with the specificity or knowledge
of on-the-ground facts that is now required, retreating instead into a level of
theoretical abstraction that may, in fact, be inapplicable. Several discussions
lean into a soixante-huitard correct-mindedness that, attractive though it might
be, has little connection with art or artists, assuming that resistance to the
commodity form is a determinant of importance. Art history has little if any
effect in the ecosystem of contemporary art (as it has flourished up to right
244 art and globalization

now, as we move into the financial meltdown’s tornado path; from this point all
bets are off). Contemporary art is doing swimmingly, museums are doing fine
with contemporary art, curators have substantially displaced art historians from
the activity of in-depth research, shuffling art historians into marginal positions
even within art criticism (where, despite the conflicts of interest, curators even
there dominate). Art historians are, in effect, well-preserved grandmother figures
wheeled out for display and ritual Sunday obeisances, permitted to demand a
sentimental moralism from artists that is both otherworldly and ignored, though
historians themselves have enough sinecures from foundations and endowments
to perpetuate the discipline’s historic access to palazzo (or chateau) long-term
stays on a sustainable but not expansionary scale. In the light of this, we might
ask—as do several participants—not what is or should be art history, but how
likely it is that art historians will ever genuinely wish to move beyond an increas-
ingly ill-fitting, North Atlantic perspective.
geoaesthetic hierarchies:
geography, geopolitics, global art,
and coloniality

Joaquín Barriendos

The Seminar addressed a welter of interesting issues and confronted a series of

pertinent questions related to the way in which globality has modified traditional
understandings of art production, art writing, and transcultural aesthetics
worldwide. In spite of its more often than not digressive structure, the Seminar
elaborated on what I consider one of the most controversial aspects of the world
art studies: the inclusion of non-Western “geographies” into the Western canon
of art. There can be no doubt that the material assembled by James Elkins is
useful for expanding and diversifying research on the transnational study of
global art. However, having read the many pages of the manuscript and having
contrasted the proposals posited by the authors of the assessments, it seems to
me that two important issues were denied during the discussions, or at least only
timidly mentioned: the colonial matrix of the modern geography of art on the
one hand, and the “coloniality” of the current global art-system on the other.
Because I agree with Rasheed Araeen that there is no common ground
for criticizing the way in which art and globalization were interwoven during
the seminar, I do not pretend to offer here an all-embracing comment on the
gathered texts. Rather, I feel moved to introduce a different point of departure
for the analysis of the geopolitics of global art: the interplays between the
modern geopolitical imagination, coloniality, and Western aesthetic discourses
when they come to operate as a geographic hierarchicized system. In my view,
the geopolitical dimension of global art and of world art studies deserves an
extensive and more radical critique. As I will try to argue in this assessment,
there are several reasons to believe that a westernizing process of some of the
canonical aesthetic and geopolitical categories hides behind the claims to rewrite
the mutual interdependencies and blur the geopolitical debts between Western
and non-Western regions through a sort of new kind of progressive global art
history. However, before deepening our explanation of the decolonial dilemmas
the concept of global art is facing today, I would like first to briefly summarize
the way in which a series of geographical issues and geopolitical matters were
referred to during the Seminar.

a global critique of the art’s geographies of power

Despite the fact that neither geography nor geopolitics was explicitly proposed by
the conveners as topics for the analysis of art and globalization, the vast majority
of the speakers alluded to them in more ways than one. For instance, Zhivka
246 art and globalization

Valiavicharska provides a view on the tactical uses of critical geography. In her

introduction she mentions the close relation geography keeps with transnational
capitalism, on the one hand, and with some global phenomena such as the art
market or the exhibition systems, on the other. In Valiavicharska’s view, the
analysis of these global issues requires an interdisciplinary understanding of the
“geographies of power.” Harry Harootunian perceives a close relation between
an imperial cognitive impulse of the social sciences and Western cultural and
aesthetic strategies of translation. Similarly, the seventh Seminar, “Neoliberalism,”
describes the usefulness of critical geography for the ethnographic analysis of
development and the study of spatialized power relations of modernity.
Another example of explicit references to geographical matters appears in
the third Seminar, sharply called “The Prehistory of Globalization,” in which
Shelly Errington and Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann quote Immanuel Wallerstein
in order to emphasize the long historical and geographical structure of current
globalization. In describing the geopolitical situation of the Istanbul Biennial,
Susan Buck-Morss provides a critical view on the symbolic rise of the West, using
a premodern and precapitalist historical example, “the geographical area of the
Silk Road.” We may also point out the way in which Andrzej Szczerski alludes
to the concept “geopolitics of knowledge” in order to question the geographical
division between the global level and the local. At the end of the ninth Seminar,
“Universality,” James Elkins points out the relevance of the “cultural geography
of art writing.”
In the same way, several authors of the assessments also allude to
geographical or geopolitical issues. We find a clear example of this in Carolyn
Loeb’s contribution: instead of taking “chronological surveys” or “thematic
approaches” for teaching art history, Loeb prefers a “geographical emphasis” on
specific cultural areas as the point of departure for a cross-cultural understanding
of the art world. In contrast, by examining the Orientalist and Eurocentric
background of the concept “Islamic Art,” Iftikhar Dadi criticizes the westernized
identification of certain art practices with a sole geographic and symbolic area:
the Middle East.
As we can see, the geography and geopolitics of art were extensively
discussed during the Seminar. Generally speaking, both concepts were perceived
as useful tools for questioning the center/periphery schema; moreover, the
vast majority of the participants considered them as renewed disciplines for
contesting the capitalist production of westernized global space, on the one
hand, and postcolonial global imaginaries, on the other. However, eliminating
the Eurocentric split between our Western aesthetics and the other’s belated and
displaced modernity is not enough. In my opinion, the historical geography of
the Western canon of art needs to be contested by taking into consideration the
whole colonial dimension of modernity as well as the current coloniality of the
global art system.
247 assessments

In order to elaborate on these issues, I would now like to briefly describe the
current geopolitical revisionism of art museums; that is to say, their impulse to
adapting their collections, expanding their acquisition policies, and realigning
their discourses so as to engage with art production worldwide. By introducing
the concept of emerging geoaesthetic regions, which I have used elsewhere with
the intention of criticizing the rise of what is called new internationalism in the
visual arts, I will categorize these museographic impulses as a sort of postcolonial
westernizing attitude.1 As I will try to show in the following paragraphs, such
museographic revisionism seems committed to the design of a new geopolitical
universal language: global art as a postcolonial lingua franca offered up by the
West to the world.

“emerging geoaesthetic regions” and the critique of the geopo-

litical revisionism of western museums
Under the influence of the postcolonial trend, some museums have been
claiming to rewrite the geopolitical debts between Western and non-Western
regions. The aim of their museographic imaginaries is to dissolve the hierarchical
regime of what Immanuel Wallerstein described as the modern world-system, via
an all-encompassing program of exhibition. From the point of view of the cultural
interplay dictated by the global knowledge economy, these museums subscribe to
the inclusion of what I call the emerging geoaesthetic regions into the historical
geography of the Western canon of art.2 In a nutshell, these museums argue in
favor of reaccommodating those cultural areas situated at the margins of the
hierarchical architecture of the modern geopolitical imagination into the new map
of the global-led inclusivity. In spite of promoting cultural diversity and claiming
to acknowledge multiple modernities, this sort of museographic revisionism
appears to fail due to its Eurocentric geo-epistemological point of departure, a

1. The history of the new internationalism is,
regardless of its recent emergence, too complex
to attempt to grasp here. In a manner that was,
in itself, to a certain extent inaugural, it was the
“Expanding Internationalism” meeting that gave
new internationalism its global exposure as a
new geopolitical paradigm of contemporary art.
Held in 1990 in the context of the Forty-fourth
Venice Biennale, this meeting saw the con-
frontation of two contradictory readings of the
international and the global: one progressive
and affirmative, believing in the translation of
the postcolonial in the internationalist represen-
tational politics of contemporary art; the other a
skeptical reading, doubting the generosities of
the new internationalism as a paradigm for the
decolonization of geoaesthetic thinking. Without
a doubt, the internationalist character of the
Venice Biennale functioned as the legitimizing
framework for the more affirmative readings and
promoted the idea that the international system
of contemporary art was entering a less hierar-
chical phase, one more encompassing of global
geography. From that moment it can be said
that new internationalism entered a consolida-
tion processes as a new global-led museograph-
ic imaginary. See my “Global Art and Politics of
Mobility: Transcultural Shifts in the International
Contemporary Art-System,” in Art and Visibility
in Migratory Culture: Enacting Conflict and
Resistance, Aesthetically, edited by Mieke Bal
and Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro (forthcom-
ing); Khaled D. Ramadan, Peripheral Insider:
Perspectives on Contemporary Internationalism
in Visual Culture (Copenhagen: Museum Tuscu-
lanum Press, 2007); and Jean Fisher, ed., Global
Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the
Visual Arts (London: Kala Press, 1994).
2. See my “Geopolitics of Global Art: The
Reinvention of Latin America as a Geoaesthetic
Region,” in The Global Art World: Audiences,
Markets, and Museums, edited by Hans Belting
and Andrea Buddensieg (Amsterdam: Hatje
Cantz, 2009), 98–115.
248 art and globalization

universalistic understanding of what global art and world art history should be
after postcolonialism, and, finally, the belief that cultural geography will directly
rectify the biased accounts produced by modern and colonial Western museums.
Once we have accepted this failure, then the concept of emerging geoaesthetic
regions becomes useful for the following three goals.3 First, to establish a
direct connection between the recent reinforcement of regional imaginaries
within global-knowledge capitalism (what may be called new regionalism), the
transnational corporatization of the emerging and exotic economies (emerging
peripheral cultural markets), and the appearance of the new internationalism in
the contemporary art system during the early 1990s; second, to emphasize the
mutual debts between the historical geography of contemporary art drawn by
the geopolitical imaginaries after the Second World War and the spreading of
diverse westernizing economic theories, such as developmentalism (the denial
of the coeval), the Prebisch-cepal school (the systemic underdevelopment
of the Third World), dependency theories (what may be called revisionist
dependentistas) or problems of uneven cultural economic growth (unequal
immaterial exchange); and finally, to focus on the influence area studies has
exerted on the asymmetric geopolitical configurations and new hierarchized
aesthetic designs of the current international contemporary art-system, and
on the rewesternization of some “revisionist” fields of expertise, such as world
art studies, transnational postcolonial studies, transcultural and intercultural
aesthetics, comparative art history, and cross-cultural art studies.4

the rewesternization of global art

As Tony Bennett has noted, one of the characteristic traits of the modern and
colonial museum is its self-perception as the sole institution authorized for,

3. For more on these three themes, see of Transculturality in Contemporary Aesthetics,

my Geoestètica i transculturalitat: Polítiques
de representació, globalització de la diversitat
cultural i internacionalització de l’art contempo-
rani [Geoaesthetics and Transculturality: Global
Cultural Diversity, Politics of Representation, and
the New Internationalism in Contemporary Art]
(Girona: Fundació Espais d’Art Contemporani,
2006); Is Art History Global? edited by James
Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2007); Eric Venbrux
and Pamela C. Rosi, “Conceptualizing World Art
Studies: An Introduction,” International Journal
of Anthropology 18, no. 4 (2003): 191–200; John
Peffer, “The Burden of Global Art,” Rethinking
Marxism 15, no. 3 (2003): 334–38; Peter Weibel
and Andrea Buddensieg, eds., Contemporary
Art and the Museum: A Global Perspective (Am-
sterdam: Hatje Cantz, 2007); Clare Harris, “The
Buddha Goes Global: Some Thoughts Towards
a Transnational Art History,” Art History 29, no.
4 (2006): 689–720; Intercultural Aesthetics: A
Worldview Perspective, edited by Antoon van
den Braembussche, Heinz Kimmerle, and Nicole
Note (Amsterdam: Springer, 2009); and Frontiers
edited by Grazia Marchiano and Raffaele Milani
(Turin: Trauben, 2001).
4. On the connections between criti-
cal regionalism, area studies, and cultural
economy see Graham Huggan, The Postcolo-
nial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London:
Routledge, 2001); Regions, Globalization, and
the Knowledge-Based Economy, edited by John
H. Dunning (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000); Immanuel Wallerstein, Open the Social
Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commis-
sion on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996);
Wallerstein, “Contemporary Capitalism Dilem-
mas: The Social Sciences and the Geopolitics
of the Twenty-First Century,”Canadian Journal
of Sociology 23 (1998): 2–3; Vicente L. Rafael,
“Regionalism, Area Studies, and the Accidents of
Agency (Bringing Regionalism Back to History),”
American Historical Review 104, no. 4 (1999):
1208–20; and Harry Harootunian, “Postcoloni-
ality’s Unconscious/Area Studies’ Desire,” Postco-
lonial Studies 2, no. 2 (1999): 127–47.
249 assessments

devoted to, and equipped for the production of narratives and representations
concerning the civilizing hierarchies and the historical or geopolitical value of
culture (understood here as Western culture).5 It can therefore be said that the
modern colonial museum consolidated itself historically through a procedure
of discrimination of what is and what isn’t culture, of what is and what isn’t
civilization, of what is and what isn’t art, of what is and what isn’t universal.
Likewise, but guided by a stronger desire for global legitimacy, art museums
claim in turn to posses the epistemological tools to define of what is and isn’t
contemporary art, and the geopolitical arguments to establish what the temporal
and geographical limits of Western modernity are and what modern art is.
As can be deduced, contemporary art museums’ self-perception as the
sole repositories of the global production of recent art leads into a number
of questions that go beyond issues merely related to exhibitions, archives,
collections, or curatorial discourses. The concept of global art is not an aesthetic,
historiographic, or chronological category, but a geopolitical, or better yet, a
geoaesthetic one, which implies the paradox of refounding westernizing thinking
initiated by modernity and coloniality. Consequently, global art isn’t a kind of
artistic production that can be acquired, collected, and exhibited in art museums,
but rather a kind of symbolic capital or geoaesthetic asset that museums employ to
produce or reproduce discourses and imaginaries related to Western modernity.
Thus, the apparent corrective gesture supported by the global-led museographic
imaginaries, seen from the standpoint of what is called decolonial theory, reveals
itself as a new geoaesthetic expression of Western hegemonic pattern.6
Therefore, behind the geopolitical revisionism of art museums two
profoundly westernizing pretences are concealed: first, that a specific cultural
region has a right to redirect the historical evolution of modernity through the
strategic universalistic management of the concept of global art; and second,
that Western institutions can rightfully command the new geopolitical designs
of the international contemporary art system, given the fact that it is supposedly
in the West that the genealogies and the museographic critical traditions are
founded.
The moment in which contemporary art museums legitimate their new
global imaginaries from the West, they take as a starting point the Western
geo-epistemological crisis that James Clifford refers to as “the postcolonial crisis

5. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum:
History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge,
1995); Bennett, Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolu-
tion, Museums, Colonialism (London: Routledge,
2004).
6. On decolonial theory see Coloniality at
Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial De-
bate, edited by Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel,
and Carlos A. Jáuregui (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2008); El giro decolonial: Reflexiones
para una diversidad epistémica más allá del
capitalismo global, edited by Santiago Castro-
Gómez and Ramón Grosfoguel (Bogotá: Instituto
Pensar-Siglo del Hombre Editores-IESCO, 2007);
and Ramón Grosfoguel, “The Epistemic Decolo-
nial Turn,” Cultural Studies 21 (2007): 211–23.
The records of the following symposia are also
pertinent: “From the Left Turn to the Decolonial
Option: Conceptualising Current Latin America,”
Copenhagen, Denmark, International Develop-
ment Studies and Intercultural Studies, Roskilde
University, May 20–23, 2008, convened by Lars
Jensen; “Decolonial Turn/Western Universalisms:
Debates on Border Thinking,” Barcelona, March
25–31, 2008, CIDOB-Universidad Autónoma de
Barcelona, convened by Ramón Grosfoguel,
Joaquín Barriendos, Víctor Hernández, and
Liliana Vargas.
250 art and globalization

of ethnographic authority.”7 Even in the best cases, influenced by postcolonial

theories, the locus of enunciation does little else but refound the Western historical
geography of modernity and coloniality. Expressed in the concepts of decolonial
theory, the blind spot of geopolitical revisionism in contemporary art museums
is the fact that the epistemic site from which they articulate their geoaesthetic
discourses is still a westernizing locus of enunciation. We may conclude that
the inclusion of emerging geoaesthetic regions into the historical geography
of the Western art canon is still very far from being capable of breaking the
hegemonic matrix of Western modernity and coloniality; on the contrary, such
an inclusion seems to lead to nothing other than the reinforcement of a kind
of expansionist geographic knowledge derived from the West.8 What persists in
these new museographic global narratives, then, is the coloniality of the power
of representation of other modernities, other cultures, and other geoaesthetic
regions.

7. James Clifford, The Predicament of Cul-
ture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature,
and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1988).
8. Barriendos, “The Decolonization of Geo-
graphical Thinking: Global Art, Transculturality,
and Politics of Mobility,” in Art Critics in the Age
of Global Mobility (Barcelona: ACCA-AICA, 2007),
1–11, available at www.accacritics.org/downloads/
sympo_07_10.pdf (accessed May 2009); com-
pare this with Sanjay Seth, “Historiography and
Non-Western Pasts,” Postcolonial Studies 11, no.
2 (2008): 139–44.
afterword

James Elkins

This is such a difficult topic. We designed the inaugural Stone Summer Theory
Institute as a convergence of people who do not always read one another’s work:
political and social theorists, art historians, curators, artists, postcolonial theo-
rists, and art critics. As we had hoped, we got a week of unpredictable conversa-
tions. As my co-organizer Zhivka Valiavicharska says in her closing comments
(Section 9 in the Seminars), the conversations “produced serious uncertainty.”
Yet the Assessments point to complexities even beyond the ones we encountered.
I imagine the thirty-five participants in the Seminars will be surprised to see how
negative some of the Assessments are: for some people, we produced no uncer-
tainty at all. But for most, the Seminars provided at least a sounding for the most
pressing issues around global art production.
Several of the Assessments develop particular concerns of the Seminars.
Carolyn Loeb explores a theme that is related to Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s
interests, and so does Karl Eric Leitzel. Ján Bakoš, who works in Bratislava, says
that central European historians are unconcerned with globalization in the sense
it is discussed in this book; he reports instead on a truly remarkable attempt
in central European art history to revive a former age of globalism under the
fifteenth-century Jagiellonian dynasty, as a way of countering the usual narra-
tives of east central European art history.1 I imagine that idea is off the map of
most of our participants, except Tom Kaufmann. Other Assessments are not
negative, exactly, but they decline to engage in theoretical debates. Several focus
on case studies, which we didn’t explore in the Seminars, and there was a sense
among some contributors that without case studies, talk about globalism will
not have purchase.2 T. J. Demos begins with a useful summary of the Seminar’s
principal points, but mainly he finds the conversations lacking in references
to contemporary art. Esther Gabara offers a discussion of an artwork’s scale as
an allegory for the book’s preoccupations. She says her text is given in lieu of
theorizing, although it strikes me that the artwork she mentions is a theory that
declines to identify itself as such. Suman Gupta wrote a two-part Assessment:

1. “East central European” is Bakos̆’s
formula. See his intervention in Is Art His-
tory Global? and also Minulost’v Prítomnosti:
Súcasné umenie a umeleckohistorcké myty/The
Past in the Present: Contemporary Art and Art
History’s Myths, edited by Bakos̆ (Bratislava:
Nadácia–Centrum Súcasného Umenia, 2003).
2. As preparation for the Seminars, the
participants read ten dossiers on individual
artists, some of which are mentioned in the
notes; those dossiers, prepared by graduate
students, contained everything that had been
published about the artists that had a bearing
on globalization. We had originally planned to
include the dossiers in this book, but most were
a hundred pages long, and one was over three
hundred pages. Most significantly, even though
some dossiers were presented in the Seminars,
our conversation seldom returned to them. I
take that as a sign of the pleasure in theorizing,
which went largely unremarked.
252 art and globalization

first he doubts that all the abstract thinking in the Seminars is useful;3 and then
he describes a case study, the strange and wonderful Bulgarian painter Zlatyu
Boyadzhiev.4 Demos, Gabara, Gupta, and several others imply, or claim, that
headway can’t be made without case studies, so it is helpful to have some detailed
examples in the Assessments.5
Aside from those reservations about the level of abstraction, the majority of
Assessments are more or less strongly critical. A number, like Rasheed Araeen’s,
John Clark’s, Tani Barlow’s, Iftikhar Dadi’s, and Anthony King’s, are consistently
critical and even polemical. Araeen’s and Clark’s Assessments are, I would say,
not only irritated but sad, as if our conversations in the Seminars were so deeply
misguided that they could not usefully be repaired.6
I thought it might be helpful to assemble an list of ideas raised in the Semi-
nars. Afterward, I will develop the question that I find most pressing: how to
best write about the art of the last hundred years.7

the seminars 8
1. Nationalism

Section 1 of the Seminars came mostly from a session led by Fredric Jameson.
Several assessors thought that Jameson’s comments on the nation and nation-

3. In particular, he doubts the categories,
dichotomies, and oppositions that structure the
conversations in the Assessments, because they
reproduce the modalities of power that they
evoke. “Abstraction,” in my reading, is more a
rhetorical covering term for such structures than
a conceptualization of them. It would be good,
ideally, to have an account of the full range of
categories and other structures, and their rela-
tion to what is proposed as abstraction.
4. In preparing this Afterword, I had hoped
to add a footnote to images of Boyadzhiev’s
paintings, but there are almost none. I find
it delightful that a painter as interesting as
Boyadzhiev has almost no Web presence, so
I can only recommend adding Plovdiv to your
travel itinerary. (I was introduced to Plovdiv
and Boyadzhiev by Zhivka Valiavicharska.) And I
thank Gupta for sharing his unpublished MS on
Boyadzhiev, which includes a very welcome and
unusual reception history of a “marginal” artist.
5. Gupta objects to the Seminars’ level of
abstraction, and mentions unproductive dualities
(some of which were certainly in play); he notes
the self-affirming nature of the discussion (a
point made more directly by John Clark); and he
criticizes the lack of specific examples (as several
Assessments do). But aside from those objec-
tions it isn’t clear to me that conceptual analysis,
even done at a consistent level of abstraction, is
unproductive. (I am also puzzled because Gupta
concludes by noting that the Seminars resonated
with his current research.) My sense of things
is more or less the opposite of Gupta’s: I find
that an absence of abstract, analytic discus-
sions about global art permits unexamined
assumptions, received ideas, and inconsistently
deployed concepts to remain intact.
6. It could be argued that some of the As-
sessments achieve their polemical perspectives
by offering homogenized readings of points that
were actually articulated in the Seminars; but
such an argument would have to posit an ideal
level of reading or discourse. I prefer to take the
Assessments as they are: each speaks in its own
register, for its own purposes. The divergence in
readings, and in reading itself, is a significant
property of the current state of discourse on art
and globalization. As in the Art Seminar series, we
hope these Assessments provide a sense of the
full range of critical participation in the subject.
7. This is my own interest, and it was not the
preeminent concern of a majority of participants
in the Seminars. Zhivka Valiavicharska read a
draft of this Afterword extremely closely, compar-
ing it with all the Assessments and Seminars, and
she sent me extensive comments. As a result,
many of the descriptions I offer are due to her
careful readings, and some turns of phrase are,
in fact, hers. That is not to say she agrees with
either the framing or the content of this After-
word, and in particular the project I outline in the
second half of the essay is entirely my own.
8. In this list, shorter entries are not meant
to imply that the themes of those Seminars
are less important; but if the material is well
253 afterword

state were brilliant; others found them old-fashioned or unhelpful. Nina Mönt-
mann’s Assessment focuses on the distinction between the nation and the state,
a division largely bypassed in our discussions. Saskia Sassen takes many of these
concepts further, by developing her concept of denationalization in contrast to
existing concepts of globalization, postnationalism, or transnationalism.9 She is
interested in particular in the subnational pockets, “localities,” and fixed popula-
tions produced by the mobility and transnationalization, and how they actively
participate in global constellations.
Most contributors do not develop specific concepts to do with nationalism,
but instead focus on whatever might be an alternate or opposite to the increas-
ingly uniform globalized economy, whether that global economy is conceived
as empire (as in Hardt and Negri10), as transnationalism (as in Arjun Appadurai
and others11), or as remnants or revenants of nationalism. For most writers, in-
cluding Sassen, the subnational is an optimal concept, and the challenge is to
elaborate it so that it can fit the problematics of contemporary art. I will return
to this later.
Hungmin Pai, Blake Gopnik, Suman Gupta, and Caroline Jones all criticize
Jameson for thinking that he can stand outside the conditions of production and
reception of Wong Kar-wai’s film,12 and several others fault Jameson for imagin-
ing that the film is as bound by its temporality and its place as he imagines: an
idea that is only possible for someone who speaks from the global to the local. It
is interesting to note that Gopnik, the principal art critic for the Washington Post,
is the only one of the assessors to say that the game of contemporary art—he
thinks of it as a game, like chess—is Western. I agree, but it’s not a position that
is common in academic discussions.

2. Translation

Translation is a trope, a traditional subject when it comes to globalization. Trans-

lation studies came up again in the following year’s seminars, and were criticized
for being an unhelpful accompaniment to more pertinent discussions.13 It would
be possible to develop a rhetorical analysis of the ways translation is brought into

developed in the Seminars, I only mention it
briefly here.
9. See for example Sassen, Cities in a World
Economy (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press,
2006).
10. An interesting assessment of the English-
language reception of Negri’s works through
2008 is in the January 2009 Bookforum: Scott
McLemee, “Empire Burlesque,” online at www.
bookforum.com/inprint/015_04/2973. See also
Gopal Balakrishnan, ed., Debating Empire (Lon-
don: Verso, 2003).
11. Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural
Dimensions of Globalization (Delhi: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1997); also Elliot R. Barkan, ed.,
Immigration, Incorporation and Transnational-
ism (Somerset, NJ: Transaction, 2003).
12. It is pertinent that the film literature
assumes Wong Kar-wai’s assimilation into global
concerns. See, for example, Paolo Magagnin,
“Lecture, relecture, réécriture: La littérarité des
films de Wong Kar-wai,” Actes de la Journée
Doctorale “Autour du cinéma, réflexions et
études de cas,” Université de Provence, Aix-
en-Provence (France), June 12, 2008, available
in the online journal Lignes de Fuite (2008),
www.lignes-de-fuite.net/article.php3?id_
article=108&var_recherche=magagnin (accessed
December 2008). My thanks to Paolo Magagnin
for the full reference.
13. What Is an Image? coedited with Maja
Naef, vol. 2 of the Stone Theory Seminars
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, forthcoming).
254 art and globalization

conversations on art. Initially translation is said to be difficult and imperfectable,

or, more provocatively, it is said to be impossible. Sometimes, too, it is said that
translation’s impossibility is built into language. Occasionally it is noted that
mistranslations can be enabling. Those and other observations circulate, ending
up as hedges to claims about the meaning of art that otherwise may appear too
direct or universalizing. Translation, as a trope in art conversations, may func-
tion more as an acknowledgment of contingency and uncertainty than as an
explanatory model.
We were lucky in this book to have the seminar on translation run by Shi-
gemi Inaga, whose theory of translation is one of the most epistemologically
radical. In effect his interventions and examples were aimed to deflect any op-
timism that conversations like the ones in this book, which are about practices
that bridge different languages, can ever make sense. That is a theory—really,
a practice—that calls for a strong answer, but we answered it mainly with our
own guarded and unfounded optimism that visual meanings can be understood
across cultures. In the opening of Section 9 of the Seminars, Zhivka Valiavich-
arska took this discussion forward by mentioning the possibilities that transla-
tion opens—its possibilities for communication, even if that communication is
always imperfect and open to revision.

3. The Prehistory of Globalization

We had very little agreement on this, but I am glad it was discussed at length,
and taken up by several people in the Assessments. It is important that there is
no agreement over whether contemporary globalization has a pertinent history:
that indecision indicates how much work needs to be done on relevant intel-
lectual and economic histories, and how little of that sort of work is done in the
art world. Jameson’s stand and Kaufmann’s counterstand have exemplary clarity,
which should be helpful as conversations on the subject go forward. It is also
here, in a discussion of globalization’s history, that most of us—aside from Harry
Harootunian—missed an opportunity to go in the direction Anthony King sug-
gests: not toward art as “an occupationally specialized practice . . . produced or
performed by designated individual artists” but as a matter of urban—that is,
lived and inevitably material—contexts throughout the world.

4. Hybridity

Néstor García Canclini’s informative Assessment revisits the concept of hybrid-

ity, bringing in recent research not mentioned in the Seminars. García Canclini
is open about his own work and the need to consider different meanings of
hybridity as just “a chapter of the multiple forms of intercultural studies.” He
seconds Darby English’s prescient abstraction of the Seminar conversation (I will
not paraphrase it: it is at the end of Section 4). Whatever hybridity will continue
255 afterword

to mean after its canonical formulations by García Canclini and Homi Bhabha,
it will probably be helpful to consider it under several registers.
My own interest in that conversation was to see whether hybridity functions
as the principal word for the interest so many of us share in whatever is mixed,
impure, in process, variably present, and otherwise detached from an unmediated
sense of identity.14 My sense of the Seminars and the Assessments is that hybrid-
ity does in fact often stand for the properties that interest us in art, and that it is
therefore more important than ever to be careful about what it means—as García
Canclini is. Partha Mitter’s Assessment also points to the fundamental nature of
the concept, and calls for new concepts to fit different Asian, African, and Latin
American practices. Mitter’s idea is in harmony with García Canclini’s reserva-
tions about how widely hybridity can be applied: both their texts are an invita-
tion to new work on historically and geographically specific concepts that could
be alternates to hybridity. It would be wonderful to have such concepts, which
would enrich the current discussion and also maintain its drive to specificity.

5. Temporality

For some people in the Seminars—and I am one of them—temporality is one

of the most interesting ways to rethink certain problems in art history’s repre-
sentation of modern and postmodern art. The difficulty is knowing what senses
of temporality are apposite. It was generally understood that certain senses of
time can be associated with the global art market: Hegelian meliorist time, for
example—what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls developmental time, the time of the
“not yet.”15 The difficulty is in defining what should count as alternative forms of
temporality. Chakrabarty’s answer, the horizon of the “now,” was not taken up in
the Seminar, but its influence could be felt, perhaps most strongly in Seminar 6.
For some people, the conceptualization of temporality in the art world
involves concepts of the everyday. Hyungmin Pai makes this connection, and
quotes Zhivka Valiavicharska’s question: “How can we think of possibilities to
write art history through events, through alternative experiences of time, and
through the ambiguities of the everyday?” (More on the everyday below, because
it is associated with concepts of the local.) There are also “alternative experiences
of time.” The Seminar participants debated the idea that a study of temporalities
might reopen discussions about marginal and “canonical” art that have either
reached stalemates or been shuttled aside in favor of a euphoric pan-national art
market. Before the Seminars, I was unsure of the utility of temporality as a way
to reconceive modernist problems of the sort I will describe in the second half
of this essay. I thought that the theorization of temporalities was too abstract to

14. As Hans Belting puts it, “We therefore
call anything in non-Western contemporary art
that cannot be classified by Western notions
‘hybrid.’” Belting, “Art in the TV Age: On Global
Art and Local Art History,” in Transmission Im-
age: Visual Translation and Cultural Agency,
edited by Birgit Mersmann and Alexandra
Schneider (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars, 2009), 169–83, quotation at 176. Belt-
ing calls hybridity a “magic formula” (179).
15. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe:
Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000),
especially the Introduction.
256 art and globalization

be able to guide research on, say, Indonesian modernist painting or Estonian

expressionism.16 But the discussion was tremendously suggestive, and now it
seems to me temporalities are a very promising way around the roadblocks of
universalizing modernist descriptions. (More on this later, also.)
The principal alternative temporality in this book is a mixture of several
sources, including de Certeau, together with art-world appropriations of his
work, Harry Harootunian’s senses of urban temporalities, Benedict Anderson’s
development of differential temporalities, phenomenological accounts of lived
experience, and echoes of Chakrabarty’s analysis. Perhaps an understanding that
comes out of these discourses effectively is the temporality we would want to put
against Hegelian and other totalizing temporalities.17

6. Postcolonial Narratives

The original title of Susan Buck-Morss’s seminar was “What Comes After Post-
colonial Theory?” Inevitably, the conversation went in other directions, and the
parts transcribed here do not directly address that question.
(The year following our Seminar, this theme was also taken up by the Third
Guangzhou Triennial.18 Postcolonial theory is often put to one side when the
political context is not itself postcolonial; that point is made in this book, for
example, by Néstor García Canclini. An analogous argument is made by Gao
Shiming in relation to the Guanghzhou Triennial.19 Sarat Maharaj has enumer-

16. Here I also want to acknowledge Jim Su-
pangkat’s very articulate “‘Seni’ [Art] Manifesto,”
which addresses marginalization and temporality
in Indonesian modernism (personal communica-
tion, July 2009); and Lee Weng Choy’s medita-
tion on temporality, modernism, and Singapore,
“Authenticity, Reflexivity and Spectacle: or, the
Rise of New Asia Is not the End of the World,”
in “Inhabiting the Intersection: New Issues in
Contemporary Asian Visual Art,” edited by Joan
Kee, special issue, Positions 12, no. 3 (2004):
643–66. (I thank Nora Taylor for drawing my
attention to Lee Weng Choy’s texts.)
17. The Seminar conversations tended not
to include speculation on “the contemporary” or
“contemporaneity.” In winter 2009, October an-
nounced a questionnaire on the subject, which
will serve to collect various senses of that sub-
ject in and around art history. There are excep-
tions, including Okwui Enwezor, Donald Kuspit,
and Terry Smith. See Smith, “Contemporary Art
and Contemporaneity,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 4
(2006): 681–707 (also on Documenta Magazines
online journal, magazines.documenta.de), an
argument for three senses of contemporaneity,
related to one another less as dialectics than as
antinomies.
18. See “‘Farewell to Post-colonialism’:
Querying the Guangzhou Triennial 2008,” edited
by Sarat Maharaj, Printed Project 11 (2009),
published by Visual Arts Ireland. The Third
Guangzhou Triennial was held September 6 to
November 16, 2008, and was curated by Gao
Shiming, Sarat Maharaj, and Chang Tsong-zung.
Their opening objection was that postcolonial
theory has become “increasingly institutional-
ized as an ideological concept” (from their state-
ment). Maharaj’s essay in Printed Project makes
a number of claims about postcolonial theory as
an object of other people’s interest, by way of
placing it in the recent past. But the character-
izations of contemporary discourse that he then
goes on to sketch are not answers to postcolo-
nial theory’s special interests: he means them to
function as provocations or invitations. It seems
to me that Maharaj’s approach is too hopeful,
too impressionistic, and too sanguine about the
ongoing unresolved interests of the majority
of people working in and around postcolonial
theory. It is not difficult to sketch the future, but
it is difficult to enable that future by critiquing
the present.
19. Gao Shiming’s essays, such as one
presented at the Global Art Museums Platform
III conference at the Goethe-Institut Hong Kong,
May 21, 2009, raise the objection that postco-
lonial studies is, prima facie, inapplicable to
political situations such as China. Gao goes on
to argue that “the concepts of identity, hybridity,
and diversity have gradually evolved into high-
sounding political statements” without critical
purchase. The general position in this book is
that such concepts have developed multiple
uses and that what is needed is slow dissection
257 afterword

ated other reasons to be skeptical of postcolonial theory, including its institu-

tionalization in academic discourse.20 But it is an open question whether postco-
lonial theory’s shortcomings have been effectively addressed; postcolonial theory
appears throughout the texts associated with the Guangzhou Triennial.)
Buck-Morss’s project on Hegel and Haiti, and her amazingly energetic de-
scription of it in her seminar, were examples of what cultural scholarship could
look like. We talked around a number of questions that would be fundamental to
any future practice: the quality of attention to the local, the nature of interdisci-
plinarity, affect in historical writing, and the place of images. A problem, for some
people present in the Seminar, was that Buck-Morss’s writing is unique: it is not
available as a model. In the Assessments, it is García Canclini who says the most
about what might follow postcolonial theory. He is careful and exact about the
inappropriateness of postcolonial theory in parts of Latin America. “Understand-
ably,” he writes, “postcolonial thinking is more useful when analyzing countries
that attained their independence fifty years ago, while for Latin Americans the
main question is how to reorient modernity.” As in the case of hybridity, García
Canclini’s intervention leaves an open door for regionally specific alternatives to
postcolonial theory. The final assessment, by Joaqín Barriendos, considers deco-
lonial theory and “the decolonial turn” in the light of what Barriendos calls “geo-
aesthetic thinking.” These are initiatives that aim to rethink postcolonial theory
for Latin American and other contexts by emphasizing regional differences, espe-
cially as those are expressed in the “imaginary” of museums.21
(These branching terminologies also suggest that it might be promising
to begin from a discourse analysis of postcolonial theory and its descendants.
Patrick Flores suggests as much with a tripartite division of the literature into
“chronicles of emergence,”22 “modalities of transfer,”23 and “theories of art.”24 Per-
haps in future the diverging lines of postcolonial discourse will become clearer.)

of their individual uses, rather than the formula-
tion of new contexts or an overall critique of the
theory that supports the concepts. If postcolo-
nial imagination seems to be “just . . . intro-
spective” or “another form of dominant power
discourse,” that may be less from lack of new
material or what the organizers of the Triennial
call “new modes of thinking and fresh analytical
tools for today’s world” than it is from lack of
careful analytic studies of the particular uses
of individual concepts. I thank Gao Shiming for
sharing the Triennial position paper and his own
unpublished papers, “The Forthcoming History:
On the Deconstruction and Reconstruction of
the ‘Local,’” which is forthcoming in the GAM
series; and “Observations and Presentiments:
‘After Postcolonialism.’” The previous two quota-
tions are from these two papers, respectively.
20. In addition to noting that postcolonial
theory’s “blanket application [is] questionable,”
Maharaj says postcolonial theory’s “academic-
cultural institutionalization [has] dulled its
investigative tackle”; that “the postcolonial
kit” of concepts such as “center/periphery, N/S
divisions, migrant/citizen, colonizer/colonized,
authentic/derivative, authority subordination,
self/other” is “bogged down in new versions of
the original deadlock”; and that it is “more a
reactive than [an] affirmative stance.” Maharaj,
“Counter Creed: Quizzing the Guangzhou Trien-
nial 2008 According to James Joyce’s ‘Catecheti-
cal Interrogation,’” in “‘Farewell to Post-colonial-
ism,’” 5–11, quotations at 5.
21. In addition to the sources cited by Bar-
riendos, see Enrique Dussel, “World-System and
‘Transmodernity,’” Nepantla 3, no. 2 (2002):
221–44; and Barriendos, “Global Art and the
Politics of Mobility: Transcultural Shifts in the
International Contemporary Art System,” in Art
and Visibility in Migratory Culture: Enacting
Conflict and Resistance, Aesthetically, edited
by Mieke Bal and Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro
(forthcoming).
22. Flores defines this as “art history within
an interdisciplinary frame,” and names John
Clark; Nora Taylor, “Why Have There Been No
Great Vietnamese Artists?” Michigan Quar-
terly Review 44, no. 1 (2005): 149–65; Ahmad
258 art and globalization

7. Neoliberalism

This Seminar was led by Zhivka Valiavicharska, who has presciently focused her
own scholarship on the way depoliticized contemporary cultural production par-
ticipates in neoliberal development in Bulgaria and other Southeast European
countries. the limitations of neoliberal discourse. She finds that the relatively
sudden prohibition of Marxist discourse following the decline of Soviet influ-
ence—it was expelled from academia and intellectual discourse, and suppressed
in progressive politics—enabled an influx of neoliberal discourses, which these
countries adopted on the road to joining the European Union. In the Seminars,
discussion turned to the ways that the contemporary art world can be understood
as an integral part of neoliberal processes, and the way neoliberalism serves as
a precondition for the art world’s sense of nationalism, democracy, and other
foundational concepts. Here we were touched on the material dimensions of
globally functioning institutions, for example how they may be participating in
newly emerging inequalities and geographies of power—as in Valiavicharska’s and
Milevska’s comments. We also raised questions about how globally positioned
contemporary art practices bring into being new kinds of subjects through new
mechanisms of power. If there was a limitation to our very interesting exchanges
on neoliberalism, it was the point T.  J. Demos productively developed in his
critique—that we certainly did not give satisfying and rigorous analyses of how
actual contemporary institutions, biennials, and art practices take part in these
processes. And while exploring questions of subjectivity and power, we did not
leave any time to ask how these various institutionalizations, while being integral
to neoliberal development, also delineate radically conditioned terrains of agency.

8. Four Failures of the Seminars

This was from the five-hour closing public roundtable, at which I tried to ar-
range a discussion of things we had not managed to analyze. I won’t enlarge on
the first three points.25 The fourth was the fact that most of the week had been

Mashadi, “Moments of Regionality: Negotiating Abbreviated Account of Installation Art in South-

Southeast Asia,” in Crossings: Philippine Works
from the Singapore Art Museum (Singapore: Sin-
gapore Art Museum and Ayala Museum, 2004);
and T. K. Sabapathy, “Trimurti: Thoughts on
Contexts,” in Trimurti and Ten Years After (Sin-
gapore: Singapore Art Museum, 1998). I thank
Flores for sharing a copy of his “Field Notes on
an Art World: Interest and Impasse,” forthcom-
ing in Global Art Museums 3.
23. These are “specific ways in which
techniques of making art are received and
transformed,” and include Apinan Poshyananda,
“‘Con Art’ Seen from the Edge: The Meaning of
Conceptual Art in South and Southeast Asia”,
in Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin,
1950s–1980s (New York: Queens Museum of Art,
1999); and Julie Ewington, “Five Elements: An
East Asia,” Art and Asia Pacific 2, no. 1 (1995):
109–15.
24. These are texts “that offer an alterna-
tive to ‘aesthetics’ and ‘art’”; for Flores they
include Stanley J. O’Connor’s pathbreaking essay
“Art Critics, Connoisseurs, and Collectors in the
Southeast Asian Rain Forest: A Study in Cross-
Cultural Art Theory,” Journal of Southeast Asian
Studies 14, no. 2 (1983): 400–408; and Jim Su-
pangkat, “The Emergence of Indonesian Modern
Art,” in The Birth of Modern Art in Southeast
Asia: Artists and Movements (Fukuoka: Fukuoka
Art Museum, 1997).
25. From the introduction to Section 8: (1)
the slightly suspicious ease we experienced in
talking about contemporary art, as opposed to
the difficulty of talking about history and our
259 afterword

devoted to finding oppositional concepts and practices, instead of understand-

ing the current shape of the market.26 C. J. W.-L. Wee notes that in the Semi-
nars, “the biennialization of the world appears primarily in a negative light, and
does not entirely take into account the positive opportunities for representation
that accompany it.” I was surprised, throughout the event, at the lack of interest
in modernist and contemporary art that does not do appreciable work of politi-
cal resistance. This is a constant in the Assessments also, from Nina Möntmann’s
concern about an “institutional avant-garde” that can intervene in the logic of
the national representation, to Rasheed Araeen’s complaint that we had not done
enough to avoid complicity with the usual self-regarding self-description of the
art market. Yet most work in biennales, the majority of work in art fairs, and the
overwhelming majority of work in commercial galleries throughout the world
is not about resisting capitalism or nationalism. It seems to me that if we are to
understand globalized contemporary art, we need to take this seriously. In the
Seminars, I proposed—following an idea of Benjamin Buchloh’s—that uncriti-
cal celebratory art is the obverse of politicized, avant-garde art, so that they are
two sides of the same phenomenon. In that case—although Buchloh does not
draw this conclusion—our work is incomplete because it gravitates to just one
side of the dialectic of resistance and complicity.27 It could even be argued that
biennale and art fair culture are primarily composed of uncritical work, so that
from a sociological point of view it makes sense to take that art seriously.28
This theme also occurs in Caroline Jones’s lead-off Assessment (first in the
book because it was first received). Jones opens with a distinction between the
words “globalism” and “globalization.” She proposes the former as a good name

place in it; (2) contemporary art practices that
are excluded by the international art market;
(3) whether or not there are emergent histories
of art that are structurally different from the
one developed in North America and Western
Europe.
26. An important source, omitted in the
discussion, is Hal Foster’s discussion in Art
Theory, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul
Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 1037. Foster
makes a similar distinction between complicit
and resistant postmodern art. A recent text that
also sees contemporary art as “a critical answer
to globalism” is Hans Belting’s “Art in the TV
Age,” 172.
27. Speaking of the world art market since
the 1990s, and in reference to my mention of
Central Asian painters, Iftikhar Dadi writes: “In
Central Asia . . . painters appear to have be-
come more isolated. But one wonders why that
medium should continue to be valorized today;
especially by artists possessing Soviet-era
training that shaped their artistic consciousness
accordingly (by bestowing upon Central Asian
peoples a secularized, bureaucratized moder-
nity, while denying them mobility). If artists
working in older modes have suffered isolation,
important work in newer media that reimagines
Central Asia as a region and a crossroad is also
emerging.” This, I think, mistakes the cause of
painting’s decline. It implies painting has been
marginalized by cultural and political conditions.
But painting has also been marginalized by the
very international art market that privileges new
media, and therefore by arguments like Dadi’s.
The different values placed on painting and new
media are not intrinsic to those media, but to
the discourse that supports or critiques them.
All the more reason to consider both old and
new media: some work in new media takes an
optimistic, internationalist look at Central Asia,
and some painting reflects a more isolated
culture, but that does not mean that a critic
interested in political realities should care which
is valorized.
28. Caroline Jones misunderstands my idea
of “statistical” work: I don’t mean we should
adopt the methods of social scientists; I
mean we should consider our obligation to be
interested in work that is uncritical and unchal-
lenging. She also misconstrues my interest in
Kazakh artists: I don’t want to rediscover them
for art history—I want to point to their differ-
ence without marking it as some new peripheral
radicalism.
260 art and globalization

for the condition in which an artist can react to the state of the world, “mining
. . . widely shared references, against which he or she might pose the strange-
ness, wonder, resistance or irritation of local residues.” The latter “suggests the
artwork’s helplessness, its inability to avoid translations, transactions, transpor-
tation and transformation by pervasive processes of globalization.” “Globalism”
in this sense harbors emancipatory potentials, and “globalization” a sad fact of
the current art market.29 She is right that the conversation veered between those
alternatives, although I think that was recognized in the Seminars. Most of her
Assessment is to do with Hélio Oiticica as an example of an artist who negoti-
ated between the two. Her conclusion is that “unless the art historian can use
the objects under study to explore modes of subjectivity we are experiencing
under globalization, then they are of no use to our study of the global.” Art
objects that can’t be used to study subjectivities under globalization “will lay the
groundwork for Kazakh studies, or the basis of sociologies of kitsch, but they
will not have bearing on our histories from the present.” For me, this raises the
question of who “we” are. Jones is interested in whatever impinges on “our study
of the global” and “our histories from the present.” But when I encounter an
older Central Asian artist who is making Sufi paintings on suf (Arabic wool), I
consider him very much part of “our histories from the present” if not “our study
of the global.” His work speaks in exactly the way I wish history to speak: not
mirroring my own concerns, and not presenting itself as an instance of a pressing
and therefore familiar current interest. The suf painting is not a space of resis-
tance—and in fact it is not concerned with either resistance or celebration. Nor
is it kitsch (or more accurately, camp), except outside its contexts of production
and reception.30 And it is not, in any simple art-world sense, either belated or
avant-garde. It is, in short, a genuine problem—a historical problem, a problem
for history.
I love Mark Jarzombek’s formulation: “Nothing has been better for the
global expansion of art history than the globalized claim for a local resistance to
globalization.” That is wonderfully put, and it’s so true: resistance has become
a trope in art writing. The converse is that local acquiescence to globalization
has become wholly invisible. And I especially like T. J. Demos’s objections. He
says that questions about contemporary art rarely come up in the Seminars, and

29. It is helpful to add two more terms here:
“world art” and “global art.” Hans Belting’s
essay “Contemporary Art as Global Art” uses
“global art” to denote a new kind of institution-
al art that has developed from the worldwide
practice of art; he opposes it to “world art,”
which involves a universalizing claim and is a
traditional subject of the discipline of art history.
Because Belting is not primarily concerned with
critical or resistant practices, his “global art”
includes both Jones’s “globalism” and “global-
ization.” For Belting, “world art” entails ideas of
heritage and nationalism, as in UNESCO World
Art Heritage sites and internationally visible
national museums such as the British Museum.
Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art,” in
The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets, and
Museums, edited by Hans Belting and Andrea
Buddensieg (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009),
38–73.
30. The normative judgments and presump-
tions about history and geography that are
involved in the judgment of a work as kitsch
are powerless when it comes to understanding
what the work communicates in its context.
“Camp” instead of “kitsch,” because the latter
is a historical category of mass-produced art
together with its projected values, and the for-
mer is a judgment—as Susan Sontag famously
elaborated—rendered against kitsch and other
practices, which sees them as ironic and there-
fore entertaining.
261 afterword

when they do they are “met, for the most part, with untenable generalizations:
artists are merely the instruments of capital, we are told; biennials and the art
market are simply the affirmative expressions of neoliberalism.” Chris Berry is
also concerned about the lack of attention to resistant practices. But Demos’s
and Berry’s point is that biennale culture does permit local practices, those that
are “indigenized,” in Arjun Appadurai’s expression. I wouldn’t ask whether art-
ists who are represented by commercial galleries are “merely sell-outs, devoid of
any resistant agency,” because most commercial galleries don’t look for “resistant
agency.” Demos is right that our conversations minimized those possibilities in
a wash of pessimism—but it’s also the case that resistant work is a tiny fraction
of the art market. Beyond the few successful interventions, and the many less
successful attempts at opposition, is the uncharted ocean of “ordinary” art: unre-
sisting, belated, complicit, celebratory, oblivious, confused, undecided.

9. Universality

This was also from the closing roundtable. Universality was a concept chosen
by Valiavicharska. After a great deal of thought—all week she and I had been
wondering how to structure the closing roundtable—she decided that universal-
ity had emerged in our discussions as a crucial concept for understanding the
globalization of art. Here again it was especially interesting to have Susan Buck-
Morss on the panel, because she was working on a radical sense of universality,
one that could articulate some of the hopes of art-world discourse. It was a fitting
last topic, because the exact nature of “universal” communication in art, and the
difference between that “universal” and the “particular” that art continues to call
upon, are deftly avoided in contemporary writing. Several people who wrote As-
sessments responded to Valiavicharska’s exposition. Ming Tiampo, for example,
refers to Valiavicharska’s citing Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s skepticism about universal-
ity; Tiampo prefers a historically specific response to transnational phenomena.
Yet this tension between the two universalities—the imperial one and its radical
reformulations—persists relentlessly throughout the Assessments as well.

four options
Those are the leading themes of the Seminars. The Assessments raise and develop
other themes. Here I will focus on an issue that is developed in a number of As-
sessments, and is, I think, the most pressing and also furthest from resolution:
what kinds of accounts of modern and contemporary art are being constructed
now, how those accounts might be related to one another and to past accounts,
and what the most interesting options currently are. I will mainly be drawing
on contributions to this book, but the literature is growing quickly, and several
new sources are also crucial, including an exchange with Partha Mitter in the Art
262 art and globalization

Bulletin31 and new essays by Hans Belting, Iftihkar Dadi, John Clark, Suman Gup-
ta, David Carrier, Whitney Davis, Hiroko Ikegami, and Dipesh Chakrabarty.32
What I have in mind is a very provisional “state of the art” essay on the op-
timal strategies for writing about the art of the last hundred years.
Before I begin, I want to acknowledge a tremendously useful distinction
made by Itfikhar Dadi, between the first phase of international modernism and a
second phase that has obtained in the world art market roughly since the 1990s.
In my reading of Dadi’s distinction, the first phase includes high modernism
and its many forms around the world, but the second phase is not exactly a sym-
metrical complement: it includes not so much postmodernism and poststruc-
turalism as much as the the economic and institutional structures that enable
contemporary international art. This is helpful because the first phase presents
very different problems. Some otherwise intractable differences among scholars
evaporate when it comes to the more recently globalized world, as Caroline Jones
describes it. The first phase is articulated quite differently: painting is exemplary,
resistance is not a central concern, and there is a much deeper uncertainty about
how the art should be interpreted in current scholarship. What I have said so far
in summarizing the Seminars pertains mostly to the second phase; what I want
to explore now is mainly a concern when it comes to the first phase.
I will organize this exposition into four options for current scholarship on
modernism in the visual arts. Three options came up at the end of Section 5 in
the Seminars: writing that sees itself as contributing to a cumulative account of
world art under the name “art history”; writing that concentrates on economic,

31. The exchange with Partha Mitter is one
of the Art Bulletin’s “Interventions.” It begins
with Mitter’s essay “Decentering Modern-
ism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the
Periphery,” and includes responses by Alistair
Wright, Rebecca Brown, Saloni Mathur, and Ajay
Sinha. See Art Bulletin 90, no. 4 (2008): 531–48
(Mitter’s essay), 549–54 (Wright’s response),
555–57 (Brown’s response), 558–60 (Mathur’s
response), 561–67 (Sinha’s response), and
568–74 (Mitter’s reply). I will cite these as Art
Bulletin “Intervention.”
32. Iftikhar Dadi reviews Mitter’s Triumph
of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-
Garde, 1922–1947 in Art Bulletin 90, no. 4
(2008): 652–54. As of August 2009, Hans Belting
has published three essays from his ongo-
ing international project on Global Art and the
Museum (www.globalartmuseum.de/site/home).
One, “Contemporary Art and the Museum in the
Global Age,” is cited in Section 4 of the Semi-
nars; the second is Belting, “Art in the TV Age:
On Global Art and Local Art History,” in Trans-
mission Image: Visual Translation and Cultural
Agency, edited by Birgit Mersmann and Alexan-
dra Schneider (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars,
2009), 169–82; and the third is “Contemporary
Art as Global Art,” in Belting and Buddensieg,
Global Art World, 38–73. An unpublished paper
by Chakrabarty, “Belatedness as Possibility,”
was given at a symposium organized by Chris-
topher Pinney at Northwestern University, May
21, 2008; I thank Dipesh Chakrabarty for sharing
the MS. Clark is at work on a MS provisionally
titled “Modernities Compared: Chinese and Thai
Art in the 1980s and 1990s”; I thank him for
sharing the table of contents. Gupta graciously
shared chapters from an unpublished MS, co-
written with Milena Katsarska, on the Bulgar-
ian painter Zlatyu Boyadzhiev. See also David
Carrier, A World Art History and Its Objects
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 2008). I also thank Whitney Davis for
sharing two drafts of chapters on the subjects
of world art history and perspective; and Hiroko
Ikegami for sharing material from her The
Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the
Global Rise of American Art (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, forthcoming), which promises to be
an interesting contribution to the conversation
about world art concentrating on a moment in
the dissemination of North American modern-
ism from a postrevisionist perspective. As I
write this (February 2009), I have just found out
about a PhD dissertation, “The Globalization of
Contemporary Art,” by Lotte Philipsen (Aarhus
University, 2009), which takes as its point of de-
parture the Institute of New International Visual
Arts conference Global Visions (1994).
263 afterword

political, and identity issues, and often strays from the concerns of art history
in favor of postcolonial theory and other strategies; and writing that presents
itself as outside of academic concerns, often by experimenting with new kinds of
narrative.33 It fits the Assessments better if I interpolate a further option, which
I will put just between the second and third: writing that avoids global themes,
concentrates on particular contexts and places, and treats individual artworks,
their makers, and their publics. Such writing is engaged in an ongoing project
of acknowledging and reading multiple histories of modernism, in ways that
art-historical writing (the first strand) and postcolonial theory (the third strand)
may not.
The four options are a productive and flexible way of thinking about the
current directions of scholarship on modernism. They correspond to four de-
grees of skepticism about the appropriateness of art history for the project of un-
derstanding the last hundred years of art production around the world. Begin-
ning with art history, the options move through postcolonial theory and related
efforts, to writing that declines theories in favor of specific historical examples
(the third option), and finally to writing that attempts to speak from outside
academia altogether. In addition—and at the risk of making this analysis a bit
too elaborate—the four options articulate three dialectics: a dialectic that binds
and differentiates art history and postcolonial studies (the first and second op-
tions); one that ties and also distinguishes global concerns with local ones (the
first and second in relation to the third); and one that relates academic historical
accounts and any and all other historical accounts (the first three in relation to
the fourth). Here are the four options, along with some of the questions that
were raised in the Assessments.34

1. Write about modern art in such a way that the scholarship builds a cumulative
account of world art under the name “art history.”

There is a substantial academic industry devoted to building, critiquing, and

elaborating the existing Euramerican sense of modernism and postmodernism
so that it can account for practices around the world: perhaps that needs to be
said, because there are no representatives of that perspective in this book. It is a
sign of the current distress of art history in the face of global issues that there is
little similarity among attempts to expand and rethink art history. Some are at-
tempts to encompass art made outside Europe and North America.35 Others are

33. Like most other things in this book,
that schema draws on other material that isn’t
included in this book, but is presupposed in the
discussion. In addition to sources cited in the
Seminar, there is a review of Steven Mansbach,
Modern Art in Eastern Europe, in Art Bulletin
82, no. 4 (2000): 781–85, and “Response [to
Anthony Alofsin’s letter regarding the review of
Mansbach’s Modern Art in Eastern Europe],” Art
Bulletin 84 (2002): 539.
34. J. W.-L. Wee says the three-part schema
“repeats an old argument that the creation of
modern culture came about without any cultural
or other interaction with the economic periphery
or the colonial-era frontier.” I don’t feel this is
my argument: my purpose here is to make all
the possibilities, including the received idea of
an independent European modernism, as clear
as possible.
35. Examples include Carrier’s World Art
History and Its Objects and John Onians’s Atlas
of World Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
264 art and globalization

attempts to revise art-historical understanding without looking beyond Europe

and North America. In Art Since 1900, the few references to non-Western art,
colonial art, or anything outside a few countries in Europe and a few states in
eastern North America demonstrate that the project of continuing a geographi-
cally limited art history still has critical purchase.36 The same has to be said of the
many PhD theses written in Europe and North America that rework our under-
standing of the canonical figures and issues of modernism and postmodernism.
The contributors to this book are all more or less committed to writing about art
and issues outside those canonical walls. As Iftikhar Dadi says, “canon formation
is linked to global power imbalances, capitalist accumulation, and institutions
in complex ways that require analysis rather than tacit acceptance of its a priori
status.” In this book and in an article in the Art Bulletin, Mitter proposes “a
radical decentering of the avant-garde canon,” and in that he speaks for a large
number of scholars. But I don’t share even Mitter’s very guarded optimism that
such a decentering can be accomplished mainly by the accumulation of studies
of the “margins,” unless the new scholarship also does its work of decentering by
addressing the coherence of the old work. Mark Jarzombek, for example, makes
the excellent point that non-European modernist architecture can be not only
“a fundamental challenge to the European nation-state model” but one that is
legible within art history. But it is not easy to move a conceptual apparatus as
heavy as art history. I think of it as steering a bulk ore carrier, so heavy and slow-
moving that it can hardly be stopped.
Of the many issues here, belatedness has emerged as the exemplar, the synec-
doche. Any account of modern art that tries to keep itself connected to existing
narratives in art history will need to acknowledge the belatedness of many mod-
ernist practices in relation to western Europe and North America. Belatedness
is a prickly concept: it forecloses sympathy and prohibits dialogue by offering a
value judgment as a description. It trails a string of problematic concepts with
normative implications, including the avant-garde, influence, originality, and
precedence. All these, and especially belatedness, have been the subject of con-
certed critiques. Yet I am not fully convinced by the strategies that have been
suggested to adjust or abandon belatedness or its enchained concepts. The most
direct approach, taken by Charles Green, Chris Berry, and others, is not to cri-
tique the concept, but to enumerate examples where the West was belated. After
a while, it can seem as if Europe learned as much from other parts of the world
as vice-versa, and that can suggest several things: the provincializing of Europe
(as in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s work), the weakness of distinctions between Europe
and other parts of the world (this is most fully developed in Martin Powers’s
scholarship), or the existence of multiple centers of innovation and belatedness

2004) and his Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle
and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2007), and, in a different
vein, David Summers’s Real Spaces; my review
of that book, reprinted in Is Art History Global?
is meant to ask about the nature of “art history”
when it is expanded in that fashion.
36. Art Since 1900 is also the starting point
of Partha Mitter’s “Intervention,” which is
perhaps the most extended recent attempt to
expand art history in this fashion. See Mitter,
“Decentering Modernism,” especially 531.
265 afterword

(I will consider this later). A less straightforward approach is to reconsider the

concept of belatedness itself. A number of scholars, including Partha Mitter,
have contributed to redefinitions of belatedness and the avant-garde.37 Such
conceptual critiques have led to several proposals: to acknowledge the fact that
belatedness and the avant-garde are different in different places;38 to abandon
influence in favor of concepts like affinity or resonance;39 to see belatedness as a
positive possibility on account of the way that newness is always partly disguised
by displacement and repetition;40 to “frankly” note the ideological interests that
drive talk about belatedness;41 and to make belatedness into a virtue by stressing
the self-reflexivity and sophistication of belatedness outside the West.42 That is
five possibilities in my count, and they are often mingled and combined with a
sixth—simply ignoring the issue, writing around it or overwriting it with new
material.
An example of the first possibility—stressing how belatedness, and the
avant-garde, appear differently in different places—occurs in C. J. W.-L. Wee’s
Assessment. His crucial and final example is Ahmad Mashadi’s contribution to
the Singapore Biennale in 2006, which proposes that new Asian figuration and
conceptual art should not be seen as belated because they arose for different
reasons than they did in the West. “Thus,” Wee concludes, “by implication, the
region has no need to be in sync with Western narratives of such art forms.” This

37. Mitter’s contribution is the concept of
the “Picasso manqué syndrome,” which he
develops by comparison between Picasso’s
borrowing of African motifs and Gaganendranath
Tagore’s borrowing of cubist motifs. The former
did not “compromise” Picasso’s “integrity,”
but the latter was seen to result in the loss of
Gaganendranath’s “self as an Indian” (Mitter,
“Decentering Modernism,” 537). Mitter does not
elaborate a theoretical platform for avoiding the
syndrome, but his statement of it is clear and
helpful—although I would rather it had been
called the “Gaganendranath-Picasso syndrome,”
to keep cultural parity. A useful source for the
reconsideration of the modernist avant-garde
is Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, Stammbäume der
Kunst: Zur Genealogie der Avantgarde (Berlin:
Akademie Verlag, 2005).
38. This is perhaps best argued in Clark,
Modern Asian Art, 217–32. For a critique, see
my “Writing About Modernist Painting Outside
Western Europe and North America,” in Com-
pression vs. Expansion: Containing the World’s
Art, edited by John Onians (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2006), 188–214.
39. This is Mitter’s proposal. For a critique
of the proposal, see Dadi, review of Mitter, The
Triumph of Modernism, 654.
40. This is an inadequate condensation
of Chakrabarty’s reading of Deleuze’s Differ-
ence and Repetition in the unpublished paper
“Belatedness as Possibility.” Chakrabarty takes
repetition in the Deleuzian sense of behav-
ing “in a certain manner, but in relation to
something unique or singular that has no
equal or equivalent,” so that newness is at
first not experienced, because it “enters the
world in disguise . . . in disguise and through
displacement.” Chakrabarty, “Belatedness,”
unpaginated, unpublished MS, section II. The
first quotation is from Deleuze, Difference and
Repetition, translated by Paul Patton (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), 1, as cited by
Chakrabarty. This approach, which is akin to
questions that have long been debated in aes-
thetics about the nature of originality, could be
useful in discussing modernist art; in my read-
ing, it would refocus inquiries on the structure
of repetition, disguise, and apparent newness.
For some sources in aesthetics on the reciprocal
relation of originality and repetition, see my
“From Copy to Forgery and Back Again,” British
Journal of Aesthetics 33, no. 2 (1993): 113–20,
and David Fenner, ed., Ethics and the Arts: An
Anthology (New York: Garland, 1995).
41. “Frankness” is enjoined in Reiko Tomii’s
Assessment.
42. This is the strategy deployed by Ajay
Sinha’s “Intervention” in the Art Bulletin. Sinha
argues that Indian modernists felt a “historical
‘blush’” at such moments, and he divides his
theory into three examples, “virtualism, femi-
nization, and mimesis” (Sinha, “Intervention,”
567). Sinha’s position is promising, but it runs
the risk of valuing complexity, self-reflexivity,
and irony, qualities that were the possession of
the European avant-garde.
266 art and globalization

is the commonest form of the argument against belatedness, and it insists rea-
sonably enough that forms and practices can be reinvented in new contexts. One
could add that forms and practices are also interesting to the degree that they are
visible as reinventions. But this does not resolve the initial problematic of be-
latedness. Contemporary figuration and conceptual art in Singapore can be de-
scribed in such a way that they are of interest to people who follow conversations
on non-Western forms of twentieth-century figuration or conceptual art, so that
the practices in Singapore do not appear as only belated. Singaporean figuration
and conceptual art can also be described so they are comprehensible to scholars
who are concerned about Western precedents, so that the practices in Singapore
appear in some way dependent on Western modernism and postmodernism,
and not as putatively original creations. Contemporary Singaporean figuration
could be framed as a development in the ongoing, worldwide explorations of
the figure; or else it could be acknowledged, as it would be by a historian of an
earlier generation, that while contemporary Singaporean figuration has its own
interest, it is also belated. Either one of these two can be accomplished by itself,
but there is not yet a way of joining the two discourses to make a new, more
complex whole. That further problem, the problem of synthesis or rapproche-
ment, is only occluded by saying, as Wee and Mashadi do, that Singaporean
figuration is something different, because that is true, differently, from both
perspectives. Because there is truth in both ways of describing contemporary
figuration in Singapore, it may seem that this is only a pseudoproblem, and a
thoughtful text or exhibition might embrace both as a dialectic condition of cur-
rent practices. But that would lead, I think, to a genuine dilemma, because the
the two positions are not in a dialectic relation: there are political investments in
both positions, and one perspective partly excludes the other. If I call a figura-
tive painting done in Singapore in 2005 “belated,” I foreclose some talk about
how the work is part of a different socioeconomic and temporal condition. I am
as helpless on this point as I think anyone is. Concepts like belatedness are not
disarmed by the observation that they differ in various places, or that they are
culturally produced, or that they depend on politics, imperialism, nationalism,
or identity. That makes concepts like belatedness less magical, but it does not
make contact with the force they have in their original contexts, both in North
America and western Europe and also in various centers, including Singapore,
where artists work in ways they know are indebted to previous Western models.
Belatedness, the avant-garde, influence, derivativeness, originality, and pre-
cedence are in turn enmeshed in problems of periods, styles, manners, practices,
schools, and groups. These latter are the primary organizational tools employed
by art history. A problem for work that wishes to be read as art history is the
occurrence of periods and styles outside their normative origins. What is Para-
guayan expressionism? Czech cubism? Peruvian surrealism? Even though such
expressions are reductive, in some form they are unavoidable in art historical
description. There is an awful formula, “the Iliad of X,” that is used for innumer-
267 afterword

able national poems: the Shanameh is the Iliad of Persia; the Manas is the Iliad of
Kyrgyzstan; the Lusiad is the Iliad of Portugal; the Three Kingdoms is the Iliad of
China; and so on without end. These formulas are persistent because they cap-
ture the irreducibly comparative character of modernist historical understand-
ing. Several people who wrote assessments for this book are concerned with ways
to avoid such comparisons; Carolyn Loeb, for example, suggests “transcultural”
studies. The difficulty with all such projects, as important as they are, is that the
structure of understanding on one side—the Euramerican side—depends on
versions of such formulas. It is that structure itself that we need to study: the
way the integrity and sense of European modernism relies on the development
of comparisons at all levels of historical understanding.43
Several people who wrote Assessments are working on these problems, and
avoiding words like “influence” in favor of concepts like affinity or resonance.
(This is the second of the options I mentioned above.) Speaking of Global Con-
ceptualism, the exhibition she helped curate, Reiko Tomii remarks that viewers
found “resonances” between conceptual art in different regions of the world
even though connections were not actively pursued in the exhibition. She de-
fines “resonance” as “similarity with little or no evidence of actual connection,
influence, or knowledge.” There can be many kinds, resulting in layered “maps”
of analogous phenomena, “extended chain[s] of similarities and dissimilarities,”
and “hidden degrees of similarity.” I think that with work, the concept of reso-
nance might gain in interpretive power, but I am already convinced by her stress
on individual concepts, such as shinkō geijutsu (new art), and especially avant-
garde (zen’ei), which in its original Anglicized French version “is effective only
as a way of aligning Japanese practices to similar practices outside Japan.” I pre-
fer the analysis of terms to the construction of a theory of resonances, because
concepts can be more exact. As Tomii says, partly following Terry Smith, “the
perception of international contemporaneity at a given locale at a given time and
the actual state of international contemporaneity are not always the same”—and
the way to get at that, I think, is through individual concepts and not through
fine-tuning of multiple “layers” of resonances, similarities, and analogies. There
may not be a clear alternative to the old-fashioned art-historical reliance on
cause and effect (that is, on influence).44

43. My own effort is the book-length study
Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art His-
tory (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press,
2010).
44. Reading this section, Zhivka Valiavi-
charska added a long marginal comment. In
part she was urging that “the question is also
that effects are not necessarily passive results
of what is causing them, and the ‘effect’ itself
can radically subvert or unpredictably alter the
agency that produced it, in our case the phe-
nomena that have the power to influence . . .
That way [the] ‘derivative’ can have a radically
different social, political, or cultural function.”
It is true, as Valiavicharska went on to point
out, that accounts by Derrida, Judith Butler, and
others have problematized the sort of dead-end,
one-way theory of influence that is ingrained in
older art history. This entire subject needs to be
explored in, and as, art history. In this context
I will only add the observation that logically
speaking, resonances, affinities, analogies, and
other kinds of relations can function more to
defer questions of causality as to offer alternate
models. Causal models are hidden inside mod-
els of affinities like the load-bearing structures
hidden inside architectural edifices. No matter
how complex the model of causality becomes,
it will have to come to terms with logical causa-
tion. An interesting text here is Karl Aschen-
brenner’s study of the concept of coherence,
which is remarkably difficult to define because
268 art and globalization

Yet “resonance” and “affinity” are not the only possibilities. Tomii also calls
for a deconstruction of originality and derivativeness to find “differences within
similarities.” Ming Tiampo writes about the concepts of influence and original-
ity, in an attempt to rethink them from the bottom up. Like Tomii, Tiampo,
Dadi, and many others, I think fundamental conceptual analysis is indispens-
able, but I wonder if it will ever be enough. These concepts have deep roots, and
the culture in which they grew has impacted around them like clay. We can work
hard at understanding how the concepts have operated, and we can acknowledge
their continuing grip, but it is as if they are fused to the soil.45 If concepts like
influence are radically reduced by critique, I think we will be little left of what
matters.
My best try so far is to redefine terms such as “figuration,” “conceptual art,”
“cubism,” and so on, for each next new context—that is what I am experiment-
ing with in a work in progress. In the same vein, Iftihkar Dadi mentions the
need to reconsider terms such as “Islamic art.” That way, at least, frail bridges
remain in place linking concepts and practices in different places. “Cubism,”
for example, does not sound the same in a text on France as it does in a text on
Chile, Colombia, or China, and it can help to set out the different meanings, so
that “cubism” appears as two different words, or three or four different words,
in different contexts.46 Singaporean figuration would be “belated” in one sense
when it is introduced to an art history seminar on the histories of modernism,
but it would be “belated” in another sense when the artists themselves talk about
their relation to the art-historical past. (Some artists treat words like “belated”
or “original” the way people sometimes treat serious words like “cancer”: they
are said as quickly as possible, as if in passing, or else insouciantly, as if they
were simple and easy.) Instead of changing the subject and talking about socio-
economic contexts, it is possible to continue using even dangerous words like
“belated,” provided it is understood that their meanings can vary so widely that
they are effectively different concepts camouflaged as a single word. The same
applies to period and style terms such as “cubism.” It seems to me a way forward
here is to take the generative concepts, the building blocks of art-historical writ-
ing on modernism, and reveal their multiple meanings.

its operation as an aesthetic term depends on
the occlusion of its relation to causality. Claim-
ing a work of art is “coherent,” like claiming a
cultural relation depends on “resonance,” is a
way of conjuring but postponing inquiry into
causal relations. Aschenbrenner, The Concept of
Coherence in Art (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985).
45. Rebecca Brown puts this concisely in her
Art Bulletin “Intervention,” responding to Partha
Mitter. “We require,” she writes, “a major shift in
our understanding of modernism and post-
modernism.” She feels Mitter “does not make
this move,” but he “tempts us to discard the
modern altogether as an organizing principle.”
She doesn’t advocate that, however, because
it would go against the importance modern-
ism had for the artists. I agree, but I also note
Brown implies that it would be possible to shift
or discard the concepts of modernism (Brown,
Art Bulletin “Intervention,” 556). The metaphor
of the conceptually rooted discipline is also
used by Saloni Mathur: “To tug at these deeply
rooted ideas is to realize the extent to which
they remain firmly attached to the epistemologi-
cal bedrock of the discipline itself ” (Mathur, Art
Bulletin “Intervention,” 558).
46. See the end of Section 3 of the Semi-
nars. This method is pursued in my experimen-
tal article “Writing About Modernist Painting
Outside Western Europe and North America,” in
Compression vs. Expansion, Onians, 188–214.
269 afterword

The crucial point in regard to current revisions of art history is that the test
of an adequate reconceptualization of a term like “belatedness” will be whether
it can sustain a conversation that combines the anxiety the word continues to
provoke in some quarters with the many decathected versions in current schol-
arship. It is not enough to explore “differences within similarities,” or to write
about repetition and disguise, or affinities instead of influence. It is necessary
to “move away from blunt instruments such as originality, influence, and deri-
vation that remain embroiled in discourses of domination,” as Ming Tiampo
writes, but it is also necessary to include them, to let them speak. There is an
opportunity here, because despite suggestive work by Judith Butler and others,
none of our current solutions are enough. Without a synthesis, an account call-
ing itself art historical will only tell part of the story, and be compelled to omit
the rest.

2. Stop asking about a work’s value or its visual quality (the old questions of
Euro-American modernist art history) and consider identity issues, subjectivi-
ties, social settings, market forces, economic frameworks, national and political
constructions of meaning.

This change of focus creates an interpretive dilemma, which Charles Green

expresses most eloquently. “If art history’s terms of value and the reasons for
valuing painting have been formulated across the North Atlantic,” he writes,
“then attempts to think of other centers as equal—as Asianist John Clark does,
for example—might seem to risk cutting off the reasons for valuing painting
as painting. Do such attempts risk tending to change the conversation from
the value and quality of the painting to the socioeconomic contexts that make
different art unique in different places?” As Green notes, the interest in not fram-
ing modernist art in terms of its value or quality springs from the awareness of
the historical and political conditions under which the art was given attributes
such as value and quality. This is an interesting opening for new scholarship,
but also a problem, because the two approaches are not understood as compat-
ible, and only one—the new one—includes an account that explains the other.
(This is not to say that the two approaches should be reconciled, or their deep
disagreements resolved; but the unequal interpretive power of the two makes it
especially challenging to see how they might coexist in a single text.) This issue
is also succinctly put in Ming Tiampo’s Assessment. She notes the assumption
“that modernism was a closed system, located in the West and relentlessly dis-
seminated to its territories with no reciprocal exchange; and that once ‘trans-
planted,’ modernism was replicated around the world, resulting in no contribu-
tions that were necessary to modernism.” Her suggestion is to shift the question
into politics: “As Edward Said suggested in Culture and Imperialism, modernism
needs to be reevaluated as a transnational movement that is inextricably linked
to its history of colonialism, imperialism, and war and the outcomes of travel,
270 art and globalization

commerce, media, immigration, and imagination.” In this way the new interests
are presented as ways to understand the old interests: the two perspectives are
unequal in their interpretive power.
The shift from aesthetic interests, such as value and quality, to socioeco-
nomic ones is the sea change in art-historical scholarship in the last thirty years,
and it is still far from being resolved. In this book, as in many others, the change
plays out as a divergence of opinion between those for whom judgments of
aesthetic quality are primary and those who want to understand art as a social
and economic phenomenon. Broadly speaking, the interest in quality, visual
and formal properties, aesthetic content, value, and judgment is pursued within
art history; and the interest in politics, nationality, and economic context is
identified—again speaking broadly and informally—with postcolonial theory
and cultural studies. The common rhetorical form this difference takes is that
scholars who speak from outside art history are outspoken and those who write
as art historians are circumspect, and I think the reason is partly the perceived
unequal explanatory power of the two positions.
This, at least, is how I would put the situation as a heuristic formula. There
are a thousand shades of gray and a million compromises. Thus, T. J. Demos, for
example, takes Susan Buck-Morss to task for a “totalizing tendency” that “reduc-
es all culture to economic reason,” even though Demos’s interest is not aesthetics
but the complexity of the market and the concept of the imagination.47 But in
the gray of ordinary compromise it is possible to discern the blurred outlines of
a deep and fundamental disagreement about the nature of art. In this book the
greater interpretive power of socioeconomic analysis is not questioned, but its
relation to aesthetic understanding is unresolved. Three questions in particular
stand out. I arrange them in order of the strength of the claims that are made on
behalf of political interpretations.
A. Make use of social and cultural contexts to problematize the simple identifi-
cation of the visual qualities of unfamiliar art. Iftikhar Dadi cites the enormous
compendium Modernism, edited by Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska,
and especially an essay by Andreas Huyssen called “Modernism at Large.” The
argument, as Dadi presents it, is that modernism needs to be understood by
“careful and patient work, including an awareness of social and political his-
tory, languages and literatures, and other cultural conceptions.”48 As Dadi notes,
much of that work has been done in the pages of Third Text. Before Third Text,
it had seemed possible to quickly assess whether a particular Kazakh, Indian,

47. In the Art Bulletin “Intervention,” Saloni
Mathur says that what made Gaganendranath
Tagore’s modernism distinctly “Indian” was “the
revolutionary currents of Indian nationalism, the
radical forms of cultural resistance operating in
Bengal in the 1920s,” and other factors, all of
them political and social rather than aes-
thetic (Mathur, Art Bulletin “Intervention,” 559).
Although none of the respondents to Mitter’s
“Intervention” quite say it, Mitter’s position is
taken to be more traditional, formal, and per-
haps even aesthetic. See, for example, Iftikhar
Dadi’s review of Mitter’s Triumph of Modern-
ism; and among the “Interventions,” especially
Wright, 554.
48. Dadi’s position is interesting and com-
plex, and he also advocates “careful studies
of the intellectual and aesthetic concerns of
modernist and globalist artists at large.” For the
purposes of this summary, I am concentrating
on what I see as his principal interest, which is
not aesthetic but social.
271 afterword

or Japanese painter was worthy of consideration in the context of canonical

modernism, or whether the work lacked value or quality. Without extensive
research into the particular conditions of each place, Dadi points out, writing
about South Asian modernists will just be a new form of trophy hunting, with
the Eurocentric historian bringing back astonishing and exotic new examples of
avant-garde art.
I agree with these reservations. When I travel, I do not hope to augment the
modernist canon, and in fact I systematically avoid “discovering” “new” artists.49
I say this because I have been misidentified as a covert agent for the moribund
traditions of Western art history.50 And yet it is a common temptation for schol-
ars to “discover” “new” artists, and describe them using terms familiar from
North Atlantic modernism.51 This is explicit in Steven Mansbach’s book Modern
Art in Eastern Europe, which describes many eastern European artists in terms of
their similarities to western European artists.52 Yet it is nearly impossible not to
do so, and the reason is not simply that it is natural to understand new things
in terms of familiar things; it is because the logic of modernism requires inces-
sant aesthetic judgment, and we—all of us—are not yet free of modernism.
Even scholars trained in postcolonial studies can find themselves “discovering”
“new” artists. In this book, several Assessments propose political and economic
analyses of artists, including criticism of previous work that had made simple
identifications of the art and aesthetic values, but without saying why those
artists are worth considering aside from their political and socioeconomic con-
texts. The absence of that justification is a sign that aesthetic and socioeconomic
understandings are immiscible: within a politically oriented critique, an artist
can still be understood as having intrinsic value, but that value is presupposed
and not directly addressed. The unarticulated assumption that an artwork has
intrinsic value, and is therefore worth writing about, is a limit to the postcolo-
nial studies project of problematizing the modernist scholars’ identification of

49. See Stories of Art (New York: Routledge,
2002); “Is There a Canon in Art History?” in
Partisan Canons, edited by Anna Brzyski (Dur-
ham: Duke University Press, 2007); and “Writing
About Modernist Painting.”
50. Most recently, Parul Mukherji has argued
this in a reaction to a reading of an Indian text.
Her essay will appear as part of a volume edited
by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann; the paper was
originally given at the 2008 CIHA conference
in Melbourne. Mukherji refers in her paper to
an abbreviated version of an account of the
Visn.udharmottara Purān.a in my Stories of Art.
My interest in the original analysis of that text,
in On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
as I hope is clear, is not to shore up a Western
understanding of art history: it is rather to help
erode that sense. Ironically—unfortunately—
Mukherji and I have compatible aims, even
though her essay doesn’t make it sound that
way. See Parul Dave Mukherji, ed. and trans.,
The Citrasūtra of Visn.udharmottara Purān.a,
Kalāmūlaśāstra series 32 (New Delhi: Indira Gan-
dhi National Centre for the Arts, 2001), and the
review by Doris Meth Srinivasan, “The Citrasūtra
of Visn.udharmottara Purān.a,” Journal of the
American Oriental Society (July 1, 2004).
51. “North Atlantic” is also a term used
by Charles Green; I like it because it acknowl-
edges that the principal centers of scholarship
on modernism and postmodernism are still
centered on Western Europe and the Eastern
seaboard of North America. When it comes to
art practices, markets, and institutions, other
terms are also useful, such as “Euro-american”
or “Euramerican” (preferred by John Clark), or
“Eurocentric” and “Anglocentric.”When it comes
to art practices, as distinct from the centers of
theorization and scholarship, a diverse vocabu-
lary of “centers” is helpful. Each “provincializes”
differently.
52. Review of Mansbach, Modern Art in East-
ern Europe, and Mansbach, “Response”; and
a reprise in “Writing About Modernist Painting
Outside Western Europe and North America.”
272 art and globalization

visual qualities, because the initial choice of the artwork is beyond the text’s ho-
rizon of conceptualization. A corollary is that the project of problematizing the
identification of aesthetic qualities in art appears as a project because modernist
logic remains so pervasive. In this case it is the internal conceptual structure of
modernism that leads scholars to see their task as the dismantling of modernist
concepts. This is a complex argument, but it is a complex problem: postcolonial
theory and visual and cultural studies that interpret art as a socioeconomic and
political phenomenon conceive themselves as engaged in a critique of judgments
of value and quality that emanate from particular cultural institutions in Europe
and North America, and that critique takes the form of the assertion of the
conceptual dependence of valuation on politics, rather than an examination of
the possibility and history of valuation, and that is because valuation is involved
in the initial location of objects of study, outside the text: and that, in turn, is a
result of the ongoing dependence of writing about modern art on the conceptual
machinery of high modernism, no matter how distant that machinery may ap-
pear to be.
B. Replace older assertions of value and aesthetics with the critical tools of post-
colonial studies, cultural studies, and critical theory. It is one thing to employ
socioeconomic and political tools to problematize previous assertions about the
visual qualities of art, but it is another to assume that such tools will remove
or vitiate older assertions. Some contributors to this book imply that work on
political histories will come to replace the older, art-historical concerns that I
am identifying with aesthetics. It seems reasonable that as the new scholarship
grows, the old art-historical valuations will fade away along with the institu-
tions and ideologies that supported them. For several respondents, the best way
forward is to just change the subject from aesthetics to politics. The argument is
not explicit in this book, but it is implied whenever a writer remains silent about
value, quality, and other aesthetic judgments.
I am not convinced: I think that modernist investment in judgment, to-
gether with the art-historical and critical narratives that give it voice, is tougher
than postcolonial theory.53 I do not think that even the massive accumulation
of scholarship on art outside of North Altantic modernism has had an effect on
either the global value of North Atlantic modernism or the ongoing power of
its master tropes. Despite Rasheed Araeen’s very serious criticism, I do not think
that Third Text has come to terms with the power of the aesthetically driven nar-
ratives of modernism in the way that is necessary if they are to be fundamentally
changed and not just rewritten as episodes in the history of nationalism, or
slowly forgotten as fading remnants of European hegemony. The new subjects
(economics, politics, postcolonial histories, languages and social contexts, mate-
rial culture, identity construction) will not remove the old subjects (including

53. Master Narratives and Their Discontents, attempt to see how the existing narratives are
Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism structured, so that new accounts can get a grip
in the Visual Arts 1 (Cork: University College on them and build an effective critique.
Cork Press; New York: Routledge, 2005), is an
273 afterword

not just value, quality, and other aesthetic judgments, but also “master narra-
tives,” concepts of the avant-garde, originality, immediacy, formalist criticism,
notions of the significance of cubism or surrealism—the entire narrative and
scholarly tradition of Western modernist and postmodernist art history).54
The reason is an old chestnut: value matters in modernism, and judg-
ment of quality is not separable from modernist self-descriptions. Postcolonial
theory, area studies, and critical theory have rewritten judgments of quality
and originality as ideologically and historically specific notions, whose per-
suasive force depends on specific political and institutional interests; but aes-
thetic quality cannot be made into a socioeconomically determined property
of modern art without loss of a historical grip on the self-understanding of the
modernist artists.55
Dadi writes that “in the absence of powerful but outdated institutional and
academic codes to rebel against, the avant-garde simply cannot exist.” This is
a good observation, but it may miss something that can be crucial to the ways
artists outside Europe understood what they were doing: the fact that in the
absence of the institutions that propelled European modernism, it was and still
is possible to desire to have an avant-garde. You can still mimic what you take
to be avant-garde styles and ideas, and you can still measure the quality of your
art against them. In my experience, most modernist painters working today do
not measure their work directly against North Atlantic models, but that is not
because they are convinced that their socioeconomic condition makes them dif-
ferent in kind, it is because a direct comparison is debilitating. Modernist artists
in places like Chile, Paraguay, and Argentina—or Cambodia, Thailand, and the
Philippines—have long understood their projects as emulations of European
modernism, and that makes it not only permissible but necessary to think of

54. Tani Barlow criticizes Third Text and
mentions Positions, Traces, and Inter-Asia
Cultural Studies as promising venues for Asian
studies. It may be that in a decade Third Text
or journals such as the ones Barlow prefers to
it will be the principal texts in seminars on art
history and criticism. But if that is so, it will be
partly because people prefer writing that ap-
pears independent of older discourses. That is a
working premise in journals such as Third Text
that set out fresh problems and unfamiliar con-
texts rather than revisiting older ones. On the
one hand, it is vital that projects like Third Text
continue to bring new material into writing on
art. But on the other, it is often easier to work
with new ideas than it is to continue engaging
the same stubborn bankrupt ideas of older art
history. This is my principal complaint about
visual studies: it is too easy, because there is
often too little sense that the past of disciplines
bears down on the present. This is developed
in Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (New
York: Routledge, 2003), 63–124. In relation to
this book, see also Kasfir Sidnay, “Thinking
About Artworlds in a Global Flow: Some Major
Disparities in Dealing with Visual Culture,”
International Journal of Anthropology 18, no. 4
(2003): 211–18. I thank Joaquín Barriendos for
drawing this to my attention.
55. Reading this passage, Zhivka Valia-
vicharska suggested I could add that “these
concepts were the epistemological foundations
of this kind of knowledge and they produced
a modernist subjectivity (what you call self-
understanding); an epistemological analysis of
modernism and this modernist subjectivity is
yet to happen. We need to write genealogies of
when, how, and by what necessity notions of
‘originality,’ ‘immediacy,’ ‘value’ appeared, . . .
and how artists become agents of this knowl-
edge.” I agree, but I also would add that such
genealogies would not necessarily improve our
sense of the artists’ self-understanding, both
because that self-understanding was not always,
or often, self-critical, sufficiently articulate, or
capacious enough to accommodate narratives
about its deployment of concepts such as
‘agency’ or ‘originality’; and because aesthetic
judgments are experienced as immediate and
outside concepts. This is an obdurate problem
because of the opacity of judgment, not just
because of the lack of analysis.
274 art and globalization

aesthetic questions including quality and value. Dadi is sensitive to this, and he
writes that it is important to engage in “a writing of artistic practice that respects
the formalist properties of the art.” But how, I wonder, can formalist properties
be represented in a discourse that sees formalism and its attendant aesthetic
properties as products of specifically European and North American practices?
There is an enormous, largely submerged problem here. Reconfiguring con-
cepts such as value or the avant-garde as particular effects of specific Eurameri-
can socioeconomic configurations only delays and deflects the possibility of bet-
ter understanding their effect on our own choices and interests—on the reasons
why we choose to write about certain art practices. As Ian Hacking has argued,
naming something as a social construction is not the same as critiquing that
thing.56 I agree wholeheartedly with Partha Mitter that despite the new schol-
arship in postcolonial and area studies, “the problem remains,” because of the
“sedimentation that has accumulated over the centuries with regard to what art
is and must be.” The privilege of the center will continue, he says, unless there is
“some drastic rethinking of the underlying assumptions of art history.”
C. Use socioeconomic analysis to describe any art. An inbuilt assumption of
postcolonial studies and other recent work is that a sensitivity to economic and
political contexts is apposite to any art practice. Because all art is politically
implicated, a political act, scholarship that attends to socioeconomic conditions
will in theory be able to describe any unfamiliar art practice. I wonder about this
assumption, not because some practices may cease to appear as interesting art,
but because socioeconomic interest can be high where the art practices appear
to be uninteresting, and vice versa. This is clearest to me in John Clark’s work
on the Tokyo Academy of Art at the beginning of the twentieth century, which
which I mentioned in the Seminars.57 I was arguing that Clark avoids the deriva-
tive nature of the paintings in order to write about the socioeconomic condi-
tions in the Tokyo Academy at the time. But it is not clear how the politics or
economics of the Tokyo Academy bear on the qualities of the artwork: indeed,
it is meant not to be clear because Clark intends to change the subject, to avoid
the unfruitful and restricted discourses of belatedness and quality. Yet the reason
why that disconnection is itself unproblematic is not addressed within the text.

3. Avoid global themes or concentrate on particular contexts and localities, treat-

ing artworks and their makers and publics as individual instances; acknowledge
and develop multiple histories of modernism.

The emphasis on the particular, the unique, and the unreproducible is an ex-
emplary purpose of historical writing, and it would be hard to maintain that
compelling historical accounts could be written without such an emphasis. I list
this option separately because it has become a trope in the historiography of art

56. Hacking, The Social Construction of 57. See Section 5 of the Seminars. Clark,
What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Modern Asian Art (Honolulu: University of
1999). Hawai‘i Press, 1998), especially 217–25.
275 afterword

history and postcolonial studies, and also because it has been put in such a way
that it bypasses specifically disciplinary concerns. At its core, it revives an old
historiographic debate about the importance of individual events and objects as
opposed to universal ones.58 In that debate, the question is whether scholarship
that attends only to particular people and objects can be historical writing, and
conversely what happens when scholarship becomes so interested in large-scale
ideas that it ceases to see structure in history. In this book there are several calls
for a return to specificity. Speaking of the Seminars, Hyungmin Pai asks: “Is
this a search for a global theory in a globalized world? . . . One must emphasize
that there are centers and peripheries; divergent communities defined through
language, ideology, nationhood, financial interests, wealth, and connectedness
to a global world . . . The point is how writing changes when one is immanent
to the concepts that one uses.” Other Assessments exemplify Pai’s point. Caro-
line Jones gives a persuasive account of Hélio Oiticica’s sense of the local and
global; Suman Gupta offers a glimpse of his work on Zlatyu Boyadzhiev; Esther
Gabara reads all the Seminars through the example of Cildo Meireles; Rasheed
Araeen mentions Third Text work on nonwhite artists in postwar England and
the United States; and Iftikhar Dadi reports that he is working on a book on
Pakistani artists.
I think it is helpful to distinguish a pragmatic and a critical form of the
valorization of the local and particular. As a pragmatic approach, it is a way of
suspending conversation about large issues such as influence or experiences of
the avant-garde. It is a tonic to the repressive effect of those concepts, and also a
tacit response to what is understood as their lack of consequences for day-to-day
writing. As a critical strategy, looking at local contexts is a way of revealing the
fundamental disunity of the European center. Alistair Wright, for example, sug-
gests that thinking about Rabindranath Tagore can also reveal the “hybrid and
contingent nature of Picasso’s own work.”59 Both the pragmatic and the critical
purpose raise several issues.
A. The question of how to best understand what is meant by the “local.” I men-
tioned that Seminar 1, led by Fredric Jameson, attracted most attention not for
its theorization of the global or the national but for those concepts’ putative
opposites. Saskia Sassen’s Assessment is exemplary in this regard. Among the
terms that are used to name what the global or the national occlude, the “local”
is a common choice. Hyungmin Pai writes about Jameson’s seminar that “it
is mostly disappointing when brilliant writers who deal with the global never
assume themselves to be local.” For Pai, the local is a practice, not a conceptu-
alization. It is therefore not available to universalizing theories. He makes an
analogous point about the affiliated concept of the “everyday” when he asks:

58. A useful comparison is Erwin Panofsky’s
debate with the anthropologist Franz Boas.
See Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in
Western Art (New York: Icon, 1972); “atomism,”
the logical extreme of a focus on the local and
particular, is discussed in my Stories of Art,
chap. 1.
59. Wright, Art Bulletin “Intervention,” 554.
This is another instance of the work that the
hybrid does in current scholarship; here it signi-
fies a foundational dissimilarity to self that is
taken as a critique of the self-image of Western
modernism.
276 art and globalization

“Isn’t the everyday, even in its varied uses, defined as something that is practiced
rather than thought?” For Pai, the everyday and the local are immersive: they
may own us rather than the other way around. “The everyday impinges on the
concept,” he writes. These two kinds of experience, the local and the everyday,
appear in a number of Assessments.60 They are understood in various ways, but
their uses share a stress on nonconceptual, phenomenological, lived experience,
and in that respect the conversations in this book echo conversations elsewhere
in art theory and contemporary art criticism.61 A common thread in these oth-
erwise divergent usages is an interest in inhabiting a represented experience that
is phenomenological rather than conceptual.
Yet it could be said that Arjun Appadurai, one of the authors of the cur-
rently circulating idea of the local, warned against the identification of the local
with “phenomenological” experience.62 In this book, the local moves between
a phenomenological experience that can only be conjured or excerpted and
never assimilated, and a compressed microcosm of the global, which remakes
global conditions while participating in their conceptualization.63 As Pai says,
paraphrasing Mark Wigley, the local “is a form of knowledge” that reconciles
“knowledge” with “place-bound conditions.” A truly phenomenological sense of
the local, however, could only be hinted at through “thick description,” and not
analyzed using the tools developed in this book.64 A purely phenomenological lo-
cal would be inimical to accounts of historical structure, but the evocation of an
unthought, practiced, and lived experience is an integral part of the presentation
of the local in this book. This opens a question for future writing: what threads
lead from the practiced, unthought, experienced, unconceptualized sense of the
local—which I think is primarily a phenomenological conceptualization—to

60. The everyday is a common concept in
contemporary art criticism, although it is not
often articulated beyond Michel de Certeau’s for-
mulation. The canonical source is Michel de Cer-
teau, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by
Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984). For uses of the everyday in current
art criticism—sources that could be used to do
more work on temporality—see Anna Dezeuze,
“Assemblage, Bricolage, and the Practice of Ev-
eryday Life,” Art Journal 67, no. 1 (2008): 31–37;
Dezeuze, “Everyday Life, ‘Relational Aesthetics,’
and the ‘Transformation of the Commonplace,’”
Journal of Visual Art Practice 5, no. 3 (2006):
143; and Meir Wigoder, “Some Thoughts About
Street Photography and the Everyday,” History
of Photography 25, no. 4 (2001): 368–78. See
also Sarat Maharaj on “everyday space,” in his
“Counter Creed: Quizzing the Guangzhou Trien-
nial 2008 According to James Joyce’s ‘Catechetical
Interrogation,’” in “Farewell to Post-colonialism,”
5–11, especially 7.
61. Pai’s intervention, for example, resembles
the nonconceptual, phenomenological account
of “land” and “landscape” that is developed by
the geographer Denis Cosgrove as an example
of what Marxist and other ideological analyses
of landscape omit. See Landscape Theory,
coedited with Rachael DeLue, The Art Seminar
6 (New York: Routledge, 2008), 93. This theme
is developed in my “Über das Buch Landscape
Theory,” in Points of View: Landschaft verste-
hen: Geographie und Ästhetik, Energie und
Technik, edited by Richard Schindler (Freiburg:
Modo Verlag Freiburg, 2008), 45–54.
62. Appadurai, “The Production of Locality,”
in his Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions
of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 1996), 178–200, especially 182.
63. For another critique of the use of “local,”
see Lee Weng Choy, “Just What Is It That Makes
the Term ‘Global-Local’ So Widely Cited, Yet So
Annoying?” in Over Here: International Perspec-
tives on Art and Culture, edited by Gerardo
Mosquera and Jean Fisher (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2004). I thank Nora Taylor for drawing
this to my attention.
64. Pai’s invocation of the local has reso-
nance with Partha Mitter’s evocation of Clifford
Geertz’s “thick description” in “Decentering
Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from
the Periphery,” Art Bulletin 90, no. 4 (2008):
568–74, especially 569.
277 afterword

the wider concerns of scholarship, up to and including the global? Or to put

it more formally: how can phenomenological experience be represented in ac-
counts that are engaged with concepts that devolve from the universal?
B. How does modernism-at-large serve as a counterbalance to the local or indi-
vidual? When some version of the local, particular, or individual is valorized and
the global is suspended or rejected, it becomes necessary to develop an alterna-
tive term that can function to counterbalance the global. One of the candidates
here is “modernism-at-large.” Tani Barlow makes an especially strong stand in
favor of the individual, distinguishing it from modernism-at-large: “So let me
make my first point as unmistakable and clear as possible,” she writes. “Tanizaki,
Oiticia, Doxiados, Lu Xun, Na Haesuk, and so on are not integers on a larger
platform or project about globalism or global art. They are critical and inven-
tive actors in the historical events of modernism-at-large.” Here modernism-
at-large is the critical counterbalance to the individual, but it could be argued
that modernism-at-large is not as clearly disjunct from either larger platforms or
individual “actors” as it would need to be to serve the distinction Barlow makes.
Andreas Huyssen, who coined the expression, defines “modernism-at-large” as
“the hybrid cultural forms that emerge from the negotiation of the modern with
the indigenous”; for him the expression is more about mediation than differ-
ence.65 Arjun Appadurai’s concept of “modernity-at-large” is similar, although it
does oppose itself more distinctly to modernity’s “universalism.”66 Modernism-
at-large and modernity-at-large, along with other concepts that point to mod-
ernism’s entanglement in nationalism, global media, capital, migration, and co-
lonial experience (to paraphrase a list of Dilip Gaonkar’s), are parts of a general
conversation on the impure, hybrid, self-dissimilar, and continuously political
sense of modernism.67
The issue raised by Barlow’s Assessment is different: it is to do with what
concepts might be evoked by scholars who wish to distinguish their interests
from any that have a potentially global reach. One reason the debates in this
book have so much energy is because of the unremitting difficulty of replacing
a discourse relating a universalizing modernism or postmodernism with the in-
dividual or local, with a discourse relating the individual or local to something
else. Holding too tightly to the particularity of local contexts or individual artists
and artworks can mean releasing the companion term of the dialectic into an
open-ended or ill-defined conceptual field. In Barlow’s Assessment, that prob-
lem is avoided by adducing modernism-at-large, which she also links to Dadi’s
use of the expression, to neoliberalism, and to the collapse of the central position
of the United States in the world economy. There are many possibilities for this
kind of move, and they can be developed by exploring exactly what roles are

65. It is also another concept that depends
on an agreed-upon sense of hybridity. Huyssen,
“Modernism at Large,” in Modernism, edited by
Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska (Amster-
dam: John Benjamins, 2007), 53–66.
66. Appadurai, Modernity at Large. Huyssen
acknowledges Appadurai’s concept only in pass-
ing (“Modernism at Large,” 57).
67. Gaonkar, “On Alternative Modernities,”
Public Culture 11, no. 1 (1999): 1–18; Gaonkar’s
formulation is also quoted in Huyssen, “Modern-
ism at Large,” 57.
278 art and globalization

played by the three groups of concepts: the large terms that are suspended (in
Barlow’s text, “globalism or global art”), the small-scale terms that are valorized
(the “actor,” the “integer”), and the new alternatives to the large-scale terms
(“modernism-at-large”).
C. How do multiple modernisms serve as counterbalances to the local or individ-
ual? One possible outcome of attending to many local contexts is the sense that
modernism was a multiple endeavor, and that the European version need not
be privileged over the others. Charles Green’s brilliant Assessment takes stock of
mutual influences, resonances, and other kinds of connections, and opts for a
model that accommodates many modernisms. “Imagine,” he writes, “that many
places have seen analogous modernities, and many of the artists are of equiva-
lent value. The canon depends on where you live, and depends on the ability
to imagine that you are not at the center of the world and that there are many
potential places of greatness.” If painting is the art we’re interested in, Green
says, then Paris will indeed have to be the center, but there are other centers for
other media. That is one way to conceive multiple modernities or modernisms.
Another is to notice the presence of non-Europeans in European contexts, and
to see how “Europe” itself was always divided. Like others in this book, I am
exploring whatever possibilities present themselves, but I am not certain that
histories of the multiple centers of modernism can ever, in the end, be more
than adjustments and correctives to the self-described unity, universality, and
independence of North Atlantic modernism. The problem here is strictly sym-
metric to problem of replacing older assertions of value with the critical tools of
postcolonial studies: in replacing older ideas, we risk losing a sense of the way
the modernist artists understood themselves. In the case of value, there is the
fact that modernists in many countries aspired to the avant-garde, to value and
quality and originality. In the case of multiple modernisms, there’s the fact that
modernists in many countries sought to emulate European or North American
modernism. Those desires can be dissected and their ideology can be revealed,
but then they disappear as desires, and something of the sense of the particular
historical situation gets lost.68 On the other hand, modernisms were multiple
in many ways, and Green is absolutely right to keep reminding us of the fact.
Even if no one at present is trying to write an answer to Art Since 1900, and even
if “new” centers of modernism and modernist artists are likely to be swallowed
into the slightly bulging canon of modernism that is still growing in North
Atlantic scholarship, there are few things as sensible as continuing to point out
what has been overlooked, and why.
D. And finally, how do we recognize the local? So far I have just been arguing
that as we explore ideas of the local, individual, or particular, we keep a watch
on the ecology of terms in which they thrive. It is also possible to ask how we
come to recognize what counts as interesting local or particular practices to be-

68. Again this is a question of modernism, more recent art. “John Cage,” he says, “is as
Dadi’s “first phase.” It’s true that “the problem good a cosmopolitan example as [Colin] Mc-
melts away,” as Green says, when it comes to Cahon or Xu Bing.”
279 afterword

gin with. I wonder if what counts as persuasive immanence to local practices isn’t
limited to work that makes contact with “our” interest in global capital and the
possibility of resistance, as Caroline Jones puts it. Critical or resistant practices
are the main examples of the local throughout this book. What about the very
modest, direct, and crystal-clear Assessment by Karl Eric Leitzel, director of
Landscape Artists International? He also has things to say about his practice, but
they scarcely touch on anything we discuss in this book. He only mentions the
local and the global, the intuitive and the theoretical, because he was generously
trying to reply to my request. There may be more to this than our concern with
critical art: it may also be that our interest in critical art is shaped and even lim-
ited by our sense of persuasive immanence or local practice—or, more troubling,
that that our sense of local practice is limited by our sense of critical art. What
about artists who speak like Leitzel? Perhaps they reveal another limit to “our”
apparently capacious interests in current writing on art.

4. Create a compelling narrative that might be detached from existing academic

concerns.

So far I have outlined two dialectics: one that binds and differentiates art history
and postcolonial studies; and one that binds and also distinguishes global con-
cerns and local ones. This fourth and last strategy I want to introduce reimagines
both of those dialectics by focusing on writing, trying to find a working method
that can be independent of some customs of academic writing. The Seminars and
Assessments suggest several possibilities. In this case, they are all hypothetical.
A. Use interpretive methods other than Western ones, such as concepts and theo-
ries outside semiotics, deconstruction, structuralism, or psychoanalysis. Many con-
tributors are also invested in the kinds of writing that scholars produce when
they present the new art, and the ongoing dependence of that writing on models
developed in North America and western Europe. What is new in such writing
is the art, the artists, and their cultural contexts. The writing can also appear
new because it is so full of unfamiliar points of reference—“new” geographies,
languages, politics, and temporalities. As a thought experiment, let me propose
a more radical possibility, one that is consistent with these interests: deploy inter-
pretive methods that are not used in North America or western Europe—meth-
ods that are more temporally or culturally consonant with the work that is being
studied.
Again it is Tani Barlow who puts the argument most strongly. She quotes
my idea that a young scholar who tries to explain Renaissance altarpieces in
terms of Peruvian huacas might not get a job at a major university. I should have
said “in an art history department, as a specialist in the Italian Renaissance.”69 It
is definitely the case that such a person could get a job in a major university, and

69. So I agree that there is “precious little across disciplines, which is widely encouraged;
danger to even the most rarefied aspirants to it was about using interpretive methods taken
even the best universities, if they write across from disparate cultures.
disciplines.” But my point wasn’t about writing
280 art and globalization

that writing that deploys unexpected interpretations is often privileged in the

humanities. Visual studies, anthropology, and philosophy are filled with such
experiments, and they can be compelling. At the same time, academia continues
to impose limits on such experimentation. Elsewhere I have noted that Gayatri
Spivak reads Derrida for the interpretive methods she deploys, and not, for ex-
ample, Bengali texts. (She reads and works with Bengali texts for many other
purposes, but she takes deconstruction as her interpretive tool.) Vinay Lal and
others have proposed a radical rejection of Western interpretive sources and con-
cepts in favor of Indian sources, but that suggestion has not been taken up by
any scholars I know.70 It remains the case that a text on a Renaissance altarpiece,
elucidated by reference to Peruvian concepts, would not be acceptable in spe-
cialist journals or conferences. There is a great deal more that can be done along
these lines.
B. Write a text that risks, or invites, being read as “poetry” rather than as ex-
pository prose. The word “poetry” came up several times in the Seminars, as a
name for any sort of writing that would not be immediately recognizable as
a contribution to an existing body of disciplinary knowledge. A “poetic” text
on an Indonesian modernist, for example, might not appear as art history or
postcolonial studies, even though it might still appear as a text of interest for art
history or postcolonial studies. “Why demonize poetry?” Barlow asks. “For me
the poem is a precisely a problem in universality.” Poetry, she notes, asks about
the “universal in the appreciation of this thing called art.” So why be skeptical of
“poetry”? Why can’t it be a solution to the problems raised in the Seminars? It
can, and perhaps it will. Yet very few people write outside academic conventions
in this sense. There is actual poetry on visual art, John Ashbery’s for example;
and there is creative writing on visual art, such as John Berger’s or Thomas Bern-
hard’s. But the list of people who write genuinely unclassifiable prose on visual
art is very small; for me, it includes Joanna Frueh and the inimitable Jean-Louis
Schefer. Real “poetry”—meaning nonacademic writing, unclassifiable as exposi-
tory or fiction—is exceptionally rare. The vast majority of us, including the
most disaffected among the contributors to this book, write normative exposi-
tory narratives with footnotes, captions, section headings, and bibliographies.
Sometimes we also write the nonacademic “poetry” that is conventional in com-
mercial gallery publications, but for the contributors to this book, that is an
unusual sidelight on our principal work.71 If we want to hold up an ideal of
inventive writing such as Carl Einstein, Walter Benjamin, or Aby Warburg, we

70. For Lal and Spivak, see my Visual
Studies, 115–16. The closest is perhaps Parul
Mukherji’s analysis of the Citrasūtra of
Visn.udharmottara Purān.a, cited above, but
her essay in the ambitious anthology Towards a
New Art History cites Norman Bryson and Grisel-
da Pollock, and the introductory essay, “Towards
a New Art History,” co-written with Deeptha
Achar and Shivaji Panikkar, ends with a “select
bibliography” of exclusively European and North
American scholars—no Indian sources are con-
sidered as interpretive models. The anthology
is an excellent conceptualization in many ways,
and I mean only to point to the existence of an
even more radical possibility. Towards a New Art
History: Studies in Indian Art, edited by Deeptha
Achar, Parul Dave Mukherji, and Shivaji Panikkar
(New Delhi: D.K. Printworld, 2003), especially
47–68 and 122–30.
71. This is discussed in The State of Art Criti-
cism, coedited with Michael Newman, The Art
Seminar 4 (New York: Routledge, 2007).
281 afterword

need also to acknowledge that we ourselves are not following in those footsteps.
This is, I think, another opportunity for radical experimentation. Both this and
the idea of using non-Western interpretive methods would acknowledge the im-
plication we all have in our writing: as long as scholars in art history, critical
theory, and postcolonial studies continue to write normative academic papers,
with abstracts, introductions, and carefully signposted arguments, supported by
archival research, trailed by footnotes, presented at conferences, revised for ed-
ited volumes, and published by university presses, we will confine the “newness”
of our scholarly practice art to the art we describe. A more radical engagement
with the “new” can involve, and risk, more than just the pouring of new art into
vessels that are now not only quite old but deeply stained by the very Eurameri-
can interests that we often wish to question.72
C. What does it mean to be outside Western academic writing, but still inside
academic writing? This last question concerns what happens when an author
wants to be distinct from a specifically Euramerican context, but still participate
in an international—globalized—academic discourse; in other words, when a
scholar does now want to be seen to be writing “poetry.”
John Clark’s despondent Assessment concludes with this line: “In short, this
was another case of discussion in Euramerica that will end up being for Eura-
merica, and its very inconclusiveness points to an aporia that will become more
apparent with time.” It is true that the only non-Euramericans “admitted” to
the book (as editor, I have to say that many more were invited) are from Japan,
China, India, and Singapore, places where scholars “know how to discuss in
these modes” and can read English (the transcript was not offered in transla-
tion, but Assessments could be in any language). But is Clark as “distant,” as far
outside this immense self-lubricating mechanism of Euramerican art scholarship
as he proposes? For some, his work would be even further “inside” than most,
because his writing can be exceptionally difficult to read: it depends on extensive
knowledge of political, poststructural, and postcolonial theory, all of which have
been elaborated in Euramerican academia.73 One of the principal unresolved
issues in the book Is Art History Global? was the question of the existence of non-
Euramerican (or, as I would rather say, North Atlantic) practices of art history. It
is a sensitive question, because it leads not only toward the limits of our aware-
ness of our implication in academia, but also toward the limits of our acceptance

72. As I see it, this position is commensu-
rate with calls for a radical and transformative
encounter between critics and artists, which
can be found, for example, in Irit Rogoff’s work.
In other words, it already happens in some art
criticism; the scholarly disciplines represented
in this book lag behind. A good comparative
source here is Gavin Butt, ed., After Criti-
cism: New Responses to Art and Performance
(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), discussed for
example in The State of Art Criticism.
73. David Carrier’s recent book on world art
history can be used to raise the same ques-
tion. Carrier ends the book with three fictional
examples of art historians who work in Beijing,
Mumbai, and Baghdad and write about Western
modernism and postmodernism. The fiction is
meant to sketch a condition of the near future,
in which art history is written everywhere, about
everyone. However, it also posits a future in
which a particular kind of Western academic
writing has won the day. (One of Carrier’s fic-
tional authors has supposedly published in the
Burlington Magazine.) Carrier, World Art History,
147–52.
282 art and globalization

of whatever might count as different, as “poetry.” In the next few decades, as

questions about world art history and world critical studies become increasingly
common and central, it will be necessary to develop good accounts of what,
exactly, will count as being outside Euramerican scholarship other than writing
about non-Western subjects.74 “Poetry,” I think, is as good a cipher as any for
that supposed “outside,” but the structure of the “inside” is still very much in
question.

conclusion
My purpose in setting out these four options is not to produce a taxonomy, but
just to temporarily tease apart practices that are actually mixed. The options
blend, diverge, and converge continuously, in all the writers represented in this
book. Although Suman Gupta’s Assessment is mainly about the inefficacy of
our abstract arguments, his current project on Boyadzhiev is a mixture of close
readings (they are, broadly speaking, art historical), meditations on the eco-
nomic and political histories that have kept Boyadzhiev out of the mainstream
(those passages are consonant with postcolonial studies and related initiatives),
and enthusiastic appreciations of the work (which can be read as criticism or
even “poetry”). Gupta mixes modes as practical matter; in theological terms, his
project is kathenotheistic, because it turns to whatever will help throw light on
the mysterious object of his attention. Most scholars have mixed practices. (A
few don’t: Benjamin Buchloh’s political readings, for example, are relentlessly
consistent.) The reason I treated these four options as if they exist separately in
the literature is that sometimes it is helpful to look at just one strand or another
in a practice that is, like all real-world practices, entangled. My concern is that
when an interpretive strategy harbors an endemic problem that is pertinent to
the artwork and to the projected audience for the text, then mixing that strategy
with others may hide the problem rather than healing it. But that observation
does not imply that purer practices are more effective. In practice, writing is
mixed, and it thrives on that mixture. None of the purer themes I have consid-
ered would be as nourishing.
My own interest in this book has been to make it a little more difficult to
add to the current glut of writing on contemporary international art. In the art
world, you can say almost anything you like about expression, meaning, ethnic-
ity, nationality, nationalism, translation, hybridity, universality, postcolonialism,
locality, place, everyday experience, temporality, identity, or neoliberalism, pro-
vided it is sufficiently multivalent, ambiguous, ambivalent, open-ended, allu-
sive, impressionistic, coy, or otherwise free from critical accountability. As C. J.
W.-L. Wee so nicely puts it, art world writing has “a vocabulary that indicates
‘critique’” but “a tone that suggests ‘celebration.’” I hope this book demonstrates

74. I thank Whitney Davis for sharing a Art History Global? and in World Art Studies,
chapter of his work in progress on global art edited by Wilfried van Damme and Kitty Zijlmans
history, which is partly an “ethnography” of the (Leiden: Valiz, 2008).
different initiatives. Many are mentioned in Is
283 afterword

that there are rigorous discourses available to help make sense of what is happen-
ing in contemporary art production. At the same time, I have no illusions that
this book will make a difference—I can’t imagine many exhibition catalogues,
brochures, reviews, or monographs taking these arguments on board. There is
tremendous euphoria in the market, and despite little dips and crises it is doing
just fine without serious discussion of meaning. As long as artworks are used as
signs of prestige, culture, mobility, and patriotism, then art writing can remain
vague, polyphonic, evocatively allusive, provocatively opaque, teasingly mean-
ingful, and intellectually evasive.
Happily there is great pleasure in the hard work of rethinking contemporary
art. It is often said that the complexity of art theory is artificial, and that it dam-
ages our love of art. I think more often the opposite is true: after a while, the
unfocused joys of unanalyzed art can get a little old. The thorny, contentious,
and often brilliant critiques in this book are not aimed at art but at the ways it
is understood, and they have the effect of making the art even more rewarding.
I learned a tremendous amount from the contributors of this book, and now I
think we are only at the beginning of a truly reflective and ambitious account of
art and globalization.
 notes on the contributors

ján bakoš is Emeritus Professor of Art History at Comenius University, Bratislava, and a mem-
ber of the Presidium of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. His books include Dejiny a
koncepcie (History and Conceptions of Medieval Art in Slovakia; 1984); Umelec v klietke
(Artist in the Cage; 1999); Štyri trasy metodológie dejín umenia (Four Routes of Art History
Methodology, 2000); Periféria a symbolický skok (Periphery and Symbolic Jumps, 2000);
and Intelektuál a Pamiatka (Intellectual and Historical Monuments, 2004). He has also
edited Artwork Through the Market (2004).

joaquín barriendos is a visiting professor in the Department of Art History at the Uni-
versity of Barcelona. Since 2007 he has coordinated the platform Global Visual Cul-
tures (http://www.culturasvisualesglobales.net). He is currently a Fellow in the program
in Museum Studies at New York University. His publications include “Geopolitics of
Global Art: The Reinvention of Latin America as a Geoaesthetic Region” (2009); and
Geoestética y Transculturalidad: Políticas de representación, globalización de la diversidad
cultural e internacionalización del arte contemporáneo (2007).

chris berry is the Professor of Film and Television Studies in the Department of Media and
Communication at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research is focused on Chi-
nese cinemas and other Chinese screen-based media. His books include Postsocialist Cin-
ema in Post-Mao China: The Cultural Revolution After the Cultural Revolution (2004); TV
China, coedited with Ying Zhu (2008); and Chinese Films in Focus II (2008).

charlotte bydler is a lecturer at the Department of Art History at Södertörn University. Her
publications include The Global Art World Inc.: On the Globalization of Contemporary Art
(2004); “Global Contemporary?” (2010); and The Global, the Cosmopolitan, and Other
Internet Art Worlds (forthcoming).

néstor garcía canclini is Distinguished Professor at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana

in Mexico City and Emeritus Researcher of the National System of Researchers. His
awards include a Guggenheim scholarship, the Premio Casa de las Américas, and the
Book Award of Latin American Studies Association for Hybrid Cultures for the best
book on Latin America in 1992. His most notable publications are Consumers and Citi-
zens (2001); Hybrid Cultures (1995); Diferentes, desiguales y desconectados: Mapas de la
interculturalidad (2006); and The Imagined Globalization (forthcoming).

john clark is Professor of Asian Art History at the University of Sydney, and was founding
director of the Australian Centre for Asian Art and Archaeology. Among his books are
Modern Asian Art (1998); Eye of the Beholder, coedited with Maurizio Peleggi and T. K.
Sabapathy (2006); Modernities of Chinese Art (2009); and Modernities Compared: Chinese
286 notes on the contributors

and Thai Art in the 1980s and 1990s (forthcoming). From 2004–2006 he worked on the
new Biennales in Asia under an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, for which
a book draft, “Biennales and Contemporary Asian Art: Histories of the Asian ‘New,’” is
now in submission.

iftikhar dadi is Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art, Cornell University.
His research interests include modern and contemporary art, with emphasis on South
and West Asia. Recent essays include “Shirin Neshat’s Photographs as Postcolonial Al-
legories” (2008) and “Ghostly Sufis and Ornamental Shadows: Spectral Visualities in
Karachi’s Public Sphere” (2009). He recently published Modernism and the Art of Muslim
South Asia (2010).

t. j. demos is a critic and reader in the Department of Art History, University College London.
He is the author of The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (2007). His essays on modern and con-
temporary art have appeared in international journals such as Artforum, Grey Room, Oc-
tober, and Texte zur Kunst, and in numerous exhibition catalogues; recently he contrib-
uted “The Politics of Sustainability: Contemporary Art and Ecology” to the Barbican’s
Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet, 1969–2009. Currently a Fellow
at the Flemish Academic Centre for Science and the Arts in Brussels, Demos is working
on a new book, provisionally titled “Migrations: Contemporary Art and Globalization.”

pedro erber is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages
and Literatures at Rutgers University. His publications include Política e Verdade no
Pensamento de Martin Heidegger (2003); “Theory Materialized: Conceptual Art and Its
Others” (2006); and “O Maio japonês: Arte, política e contemporaneidade” (2008).

esther gabara is Associate Professor of Romance Studies and Art, Art History, and Visual
Studies at Duke University. Her publications include Errant Modernism: The Ethos of
Photography in Mexico and Brazil (2008); “Fighting It Out: Being Naco in the Global
Lucha Libre” (2009); and “Recycled Photographs: Moving Still Images of Mexico City,
1950–2000” (2006).

charles green is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Melbourne. His
books include The Third Hand: Artist Collaborations from Conceptualism to Postmodernism
(2001). He has been Australian correspondent for Artforum for many years. As Adjunct
Senior Curator, Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Victoria, he was lead curator and
editor of the books accompanying Fieldwork: Australian Art, 1968–2002 (2002); World
Rush 4 Artists: Doug Aitken, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Lee Bul, Sarah Sze (2003); 2004: Australian
Visual Culture Now (2004); and 2006: Contemporary Commonwealth (2006). He is also an
artist working in collaboration with Lyndell Brown. In early 2007 they were Australian
Official War Artists, working on location in Iraq and Afghanistan. Recent publications
include “The Atlas Effect: Constraint, Freedom and the Circulation of Images” (2009).

michele greet is an Assistant Professor of Twentieth-Century Latin American and European art
at George Mason University. She recently received a Research Fellowship at the Phillips
Collection in Washington, DC, to begin work on a new book project on Latin American
287 notes on the contributors

artists in Paris between the two world wars. Selected publications include “From Indigen-
ism to Surrealism: Camilo Egas in New York, 1927–1946” (forthcoming); “Manifestations
of Masculinity: The Indigenous Body as a Site for Modernist Experimentation in Andean
Art” (2007); “Inventing Wifredo Lam: The Parisian Avant-Garde’s Primitivist Fixation”
(2003); and Beyond National Identity: Pictorial Indigenism as a Modernist Strategy in An-
dean Art, 1920–1960 (2009).

marina grzinic, a philosopher, artist, and theoretician is Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts
in Vienna, Institute of Fine Arts, Post-conceptual Art Practices and Researcher at the In-
stitute of Philosophy at the zrc sazu (Scientific and Research Center of the Slovenian
Academy of Science and Art) in Ljubljana. She also works as freelance media theorist,
art critic, and curator. Her most recent book is Re-politicizing Art, Theory, Representation,
and New Media Technology (2008). Grzinic has been involved with video art since 1982.
In collaboration with Aina Smid, she has realized over forty video art projects.

suman gupta is Professor of Literature and Cultural History, the Open University, and Honor-
ary Senior Research Fellow, Roehampton University, United Kingdom. His nine single-
authored books include The Theory and Reality of Democracy (2006); Social Construction-
ist Identity Politics and Literary Studies (2007); and Literature and Globalization (2008).
He has also published seven coedited volumes, as well as numerous book chapters, jour-
nal papers, and reviews.

jonathan harris is Professor of Art History in the School of Architecture, University of Liver-
pool. His books include Art, Money, Parties: New Institutions in the Political Economy of
Contemporary Art (2004); Writing Back to Modern Art: After Greenberg, Fried, and Clark
(2005); and Art History: The Key Concepts (2006).

shigemi inaga is a Professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies as well as
the Department of the Japanese Studies of the Faculty of Cultural Sciences in the Gradu-
ate University of Advanced Studies, Kyoto. His publications include Kaiga no Tasogare
(1997) and Kaiga noTôhô (1999). Books he has compiled and edited include Crossing Cul-
tural Borders: Toward an Ethics of Intercultural Communication (1999); and Traditional
Japanese Arts and Crafts: A Reconsideration from Inside and Outside Kyoto (2007).

mark jarzombek is Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture and is currently Associ-
ate Dean of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning. He has taught at MIT since
1995, where he has worked extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century aesthetics
as well as a range of historical topics, from the Renaissance to the modern. He has pub-
lished numerous books, including a textbook, A Global History of Architecture (2006),
with co-author Vikramaditya Prakash and the noted illustrator Francis D. K. Ching.

caroline jones teaches contemporary art and theory in the History, Theory, and Criticism
Section of the Department of Architecture at MIT. She is producer/director of two
documentary films and curator of many exhibitions. Her most recent books include Eye-
sight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (2005)
and Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art (edited, 2006).
288 notes on the contributors

Fellowships in Berlin and Paris and at the Newhouse Humanities Center will inform her
next project, titled “Desires for the World Picture: The Global Work of Art.”

anthony d. king, Emeritus Professor of Art History and Sociology, Binghamton University
SUNY, now lives in the United Kingdom. His books on globalization include Urbanism,
Colonialism and the World-Economy (1990); Culture, Globalization and the World-System
(edited, 1991); Spaces of Global Cultures: Architecture, Urbanism, Identity (2004). With
Thomas A. Markus he coedits Routledge’s Architext series on architecture and social/
cultural theory.

isla leaver-yap is Exhibition Organiser of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, and
editor of map magazine. At the ica she co-organized Nought to Sixty (2008) and Talk
Show (2009), and is the curator of Artists’ Film Club. Recently she realized a solo exhibi-
tion and publication by artist Rosalind Nashashibi, ica and Bergen Kunsthall.

karl eric leitzel is a full-time professional artist living in Spring Mills, Pennsylvania. He
works primarily in oil and acrylic, depicting a variety of representational subjects. He
is the founder and director of Landscape Artists International and is a member of Oil
Painters of America, International Plein Air Painters, and Farmland Preservation Artists
of Central Pennsylvania.

carolyn loeb teaches in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State
University. Her publications include Entrepreneurial Vernacular: Developers’ Subdivisions
in the 1920s (2001); “Planning Reunification: The Planning History of the Fall of the Ber-
lin Wall” (2006); and “The City as Subject: Contemporary Public Sculpture in Berlin”
(2009).

suzana milevska teaches at the Accademia Italiana in Skopje, Macedonia. Her publications
include “The Hope and Potentiality of the Paradigm of Regional Identity” (2008); “Cu-
rating as an Agency of Cultural and Geopolitical Change” (2008); and “Participatory Art
and Its Hierarchies” (2009).

angela miller is a Professor of Art History and American Studies at Washington University
in St. Louis. Her book Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cul-
tural Politics, 1825–1875 (1993) won awards from the Smithsonian Institution and the
American Studies Association. She is a lead author, along with five others, of American
Encounters: Cultural Identity and the Visual Arts from the Beginning to the Present (2008),
focusing on intercultural exchange as a driving force in the history of American arts.
Recent essays include “Beyond the National Self: Cross-Cultural Exchange and Postco-
lonial Studies” (2008).

partha mitter is Emeritus Professor in Art History, University of Sussex. He has held fellow-
ships at Cambridge University; the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University;
the Getty Research Institute; the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass.; and casva,
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. His publications include Much Maligned
Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art (1977, 1992); The Triumph of Mod-
289 notes on the contributors

ernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-garde, 1922–1947 (2007); and “Decentering Modern-
ism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery” (2008).

nina möntmann, a curator and professor, is Head of the Department of Art Theory and the
History of Ideas at the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm. She curated
the group shows If We Can’t Get It Together .  .  . Artists Rethinking the (Mal)function
of Communities (Toronto, 2008/9) and The Jerusalem Show: Jerusalem Syndrome (2009,
with Jack Persekian), as well as the Pavilion of the Republic of Armenia at the 52nd
Venice Biennial (2007). Selected publications include New Communities (edited, 2009);
Manifesta 7: Companion (coedited, 2008); and Art and Its Institutions (edited, 2006).

keith moxey is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Art History at Barnard College and Columbia
University. His recent publications include “Mimesis and Iconoclasm” (2009); “Visual
Studies and the Iconic Turn” (2008); “Aesthetics Is Dead: Long Live Aesthetics” (2006);
and “Dialogue with Mark Cheetham and Michael Ann Holly” (2005).

bhaskar mukhopadhyay, an Indian researcher and activist, is a lecturer in Postcolonial Studies

at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London. He has written
an ethnography of vernacular globalization, The Rumour of Globalisation: Decentring the
Global from Vernacular Margins (forthcoming). His works on folk and vernacular art, on
kitsch, and on indigenous and new media in India have been published in international
journals.

hyungmin pai was trained as an architect and urban designer at Seoul National University and
received his PhD from the History, Theory, and Criticism program at MIT. Twice a Ful-
bright Scholar, he is professor at the University of Seoul. His books include The Portfolio
and the Diagram: Architecture, Discourse, and Modernity (2002) and Sensuous Plan: The
Architecture of Seung H-Sang (2007). In 2008 he was curator for the Korean Pavilion at
the Venice Biennale.

saskia sassen is the Lynd Professor of Sociology and Member, the Committee on Global
Thought, Columbia University. Her recent books include A Sociology of Globalization
(2007); Cities in a World Economy (3rd ed., 2006); and Deciphering the Global (edited,
2007). She wrote a lead essay in the 2006 Venice Biennale of Architecture Catalogue and
has just completed a five-year project for Unesco on sustainable human settlement with
a network of researchers and activists in over thirty countries; it is published as one of
the volumes of the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems.

andrzej szczerski is Lecturer and Director of Postgraduate Curatorial Studies at the Institute
of Art History, Jagiellonian University, Kraków. He has been a visiting lecturer at Goethe
University, Frankfurt, and St. Andrews University. His books include Patterns of Identity:
The Reception of British Art in Central Europe Around 1900 (2002); Art in the People’s Re-
public of Poland (coedited, 1999); and The Mousetrap Book (coedited, 2007). He recently
co-curated the exhibition Symbolism in Poland and Britain at Tate Britain (2009). He is
advisor to Małopolska Foundation Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków and cur-
rent President of the Polish Section of the International Association of Art Critics.
290 notes on the contributors

ming tiampo is Associate Professor of Art History at Carleton University. Her book Gutai:
Decentering Modernism (forthcoming) examines Gutai’s transnational activities as a case
study to suggest new ways of framing modernism. She has published and lectured in
Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the Unit-
ed States. Her previous projects include the AICA award-winning exhibition Electrifying
Art: Atsuko Tanaka, 1954–1968 (New York and Vancouver, 2004).

reiko tomii is a New York–based independent scholar and curator. She is a co-founder of
PoNJA-GenKon (www.ponja-genkon.net), a scholarly listserv group for contemporary
Japanese art. Her publications include Making a Home: Japanese Contemporary Artists in
New York (2007); Kazuo Shiraga: Six Decades (2009); and “‘International Contempora-
neity’ in the 1960s: Discoursing on Art in Japan and Beyond” (2009).

zhivka valiavicharska studied art history at the Academy of Arts in Sofia and the School of
the Art Institute in Chicago. Currently she is finishing her PhD at the Department of
Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley. She has written on contemporary art, cul-
tural policy, and neoliberal governance in postsocialist southeastern Europe. Currently
she is working on a project exploring the fate of the legacy of Marx and the Left in post-
socialist eastern Europe, and on recovering the multiplicity of east European Marxisms
during socialism.

c. j. w.-l. wee is an Associate Professor of English in the National Institute of Education, Nan-
yang Technological University, Singapore. He is the author of Culture, Empire, and the
Question of Being Modern (2003) and The Asian Modern: Culture, Capitalist Development,
Singapore (2007), and the editor of Local Cultures and the “New Asia”: The State, Culture,
and Capitalism in Southeast Asia (Singapore, 2002). Most recently, he coedited the an-
thology Contesting Performance: Global Sites of Research (2009). His essays have appeared
in journals such as Public Culture, Critical Inquiry, the Drama Review, and positions: east
asia cultures critique.
index
academia, 281–22
Adorno, Theodor, 22, 125
aesthetics, 18, 20–21, 25, 30
n. 18, 31, 41. See also
border aesthetic
affinity, 268
Africa, 77; photography in, 31
Agamben, Giorgio, 209
Ahmadaliev, 104
Akanayev, Amandos, 98
Alcock, Rutherford, 28
allochronism, 185
America, as like the Roman
Empire, 17
Anderson, Benedict, 161
Anglocentric, 271 n. 51
anti-aesthetic, 3
Anti-Art, 173
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 32
Appadurai, Arjun, 94, 213, 261,
276
Araeen, Rasheed, 184, 272,
275; critical of the
Seminars, 252
Archetti, Eduardo, 142
architecture, 188–94
Argentine art, 53
art, status of in Japan, 26–27,
30
Art Basel Miami, 105
Art History versus Aesthetics,
51 n. 1
art market, as not being stud-
ied by scholars, 105
art history, 67, 52, 59; as a
broken vase, 81, 100,
103–4, 106–7, 170,
214; on death row in
the early 1990s, 44.
See also Is Art History
Global?
art journals, not read by stu-
dents, 1 n. 1
Art Seminar book series, viii n.
1. See also Art History
versus Aesthetics; Is
Art History Global?;
Landscape Theory;
Photography Theory;
State of Art Criticism
Art Since 1900, 264, 278
autonomy, 22, 59, 102, 119
Avicenna (Ibun Sînâ), 23
Baier, Simon, 228
Ján Bakos̆, 251
Barkan, Elliot, 253 n. 11
Barlow, Tani, 277, 279
Barr, Alfred H., Jr., 166
Barriendos, Joaquín, 257, 273
n. 54
Baumgarten, Alexander Gott-
lieb, 41
Baumgarten, Tilo, 13
Baxandall, Michael, 59 n. 20,
206
Beck, Ulrich, 144
Behrens, Howard, 3, 98
belatedness, 264–67, 274
belonging, 18
Belting, Hans, 40, 54, 206, 262
Benjamin, Walter, 67, 74, 79,
280
Berry, Chris, 261, 264
Bhabha, Homi, 55–61
biennales, 71, 87; as celebra-
tory, 2, 95, 97, 105–7
Bloom, Harold, 168
Bonami, Francesco, 3 n. 8
Bonnard, Pierre, 13
border aesthetic, 53
Bourdieu, Pierre, 16
Bourriaud, Nicolas, 238
Boyadzhiev, Zlatyu, 233–36,
252
Bravo, Alvarez, 166
bricolage, 53
British Museum, 31
Brown, Wendy, 92
Browne, Sir Thomas, 107
Brzyski, Anna, 271 n. 49
Buchloh, Benjamin, 2
Buck-Morss, Susan, 130, 158,
169, 197, 210–13, 215,
246; on postcolonial
narratives, 256–57; on
universality, 261
Buden, Boris, 164
Burke, Peter, 57
Butler, Judith, 111
Cai Guo-qiang, 53, 166, 174
Canclini, Néstor García. See
García Canclini, Néstor
Carrier, David, 262, 281 n. 73
Caygill, Howard, 41 n. 10
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 18, 115 n.
6, 155, 255, 262
Chan, Paul, 118, 213
Chatterjee, Partha, 59 n. 18
Chicago World Fair, 30
Clark, John, 252, 262, 269,
274; Westernness in,
281
Clark, Lygia, 133
Clark, T. J., 21, 69–70, 80, 206
class, excluded in discussions
of hybridity, 57
Clifford, James, 142
commodification, 22, 87, 95,
125
communication, new forms
of, 15
community, 165
consumption, 15
contact zones, 57
contemporaneities, 171–75
contemporary, the, 173
contemporary art: ease of
speaking about, 97–99;
as a focus of scholar-
ship, 38; lacking in this
book, 210; as Western,
253
cosmopolitanism, 73, 110, 116;
baleful history of, 46–47
crafts, 25, 89, 158; in Japan,
26, 30
Critical Art Ensemble, 105
critical geography. See geogra-
phy, discipline of
Cuban Revolution, 17
cubism, 268
cultural categories, unmarked,
31
cultural imperialism, 13
culture: homogeneity or het-
erogeneity of, 29–30,
60; material, 42
Dadi, Iftikhar, 195, 228, 246,
264, 270–71, 273, 275;
distinction between
modernism and global-
ization, 183–87, 262
Danto, Arthur, 166
Davis, Whitney, 262
de Certeau, Michel, 64–65, 256
deconstruction, 279
de Duve, Thierry, 41 n. 11
Deleuze, Gilles, on
nationalism, 17
292 index
DeLue, Rachael, 276 n. 61
De Marchi, Neil, 15
Demos, T. J., 251–52, 258,
260–61, 270
denationalism, 239, 253. See
also transnationalism
Derrida, Jacques, 58, 74, 119 n.
16, 232, 280. See also
deconstruction
Documenta, 37, 87, 155
Dussel, Enrique, 257
Dyer, Richard, 58
Ecuadorian artists, 32
Eitel, Tim, 13
Elkins, James, 130–32, 136,
176, 224
el-Salahi, Ibrahim, 228
Empire, 17, 77–96, 212
English, Darby, 143, 210
Erasmus, Garth, 121
Erber, Pedro, 132, 210
Errington, Shelly, 158, 161, 229,
231, 246
Euramerica, 181–82, 263, 267,
281. See also North
Atlantic
Euro+ model of art historical
narrative, 192–93
Eurocentrism, 271 n. 51
Exposition universelle, 30
failures of the Seminars,
97–108, 258–61
Fairbanks, Douglas, 25
Fanon, Frantz, 74–75, 110, 159
Farago, Claire, 218
Florensky, Pavel, 83
Flores, Patrick, 257
Fluxus, 166
Foster, Hal, 190–91
Foucault, Michel, 40, 43; truth
and, 76
Freud, 63–64
Frey, Bruno, 130 n. 2
Frueh, Joanna, 280
Fukuoka Asian Art Museum,
178–79
Gabara, Esther, 251–52, 275
Galison, Peter, 63
Gaonkar, Dilip, 277
Gao Shiming, 256
Garcés, Marina, 150
García Canclini, Néstor, 19–20,
56, 94, 220, 225,
255–57
Gehry, Frank, 190–91
gendai, 173
Genpei, Akasegawa, 172
geography, discipline of, 6
Germany, art history in, 40.
See also names of
individual scholars Harvey, Penelope, 142–43
Gerz, Jochen, 117 Hatoum, Mona, 166
global art practices: distin- Hegel, G. W. F., narrative of art,
guished from mod- 27, 40
ernism, 183–87; as Heidegger, Martin, 24, 58; on
Western, 146–7, 181–82. Western metaphys-
See also glocal art ics, 74
practices; local art heterogeneity. See culture,
practices; regional art homogeneity or hetero-
practices geneity of
global capitalism, 119, 131 n. Heynen, Julian, 2
4, 148–49, 164–65, Hill, Mike, 58
200, 212 Hokusai, 26
Global Conceptualism, 172, Holly, Michael Ann, 170, 225 n.
267 5, 226
globalism, 38, 40; as aesthetic huacas, 34, 82, 279
strategies opposed to Hussain, M. F., 122
globalization, 129–37; Husserl, Edmund, 82
discourses outside of Huyssen, Andreas, 184, 277
art, 6; ease of talking hybridity, 51–62, 142–45, 229,
about, 97, 105 277; arguments summa-
globalization: as an inad- rized, 254–55. See also
equate concept, 238; mestiçagem, mestizaje
incoherent in a Marxist
world order, 222; more identity, postcolonial theories
represented than lived, of, 58–59
46; as a new phenom- Igarashi, Hitoshi, 23
enon, 13–14, 38–39, Ikegami, Hiroko, 262
42–43, 254; as as Iliad of X, the, 266–67
opposed to globalism, images, methodological work
129–37, 259–60 done by, 79
globalized art market, 105 Inaga, Shigemi, 130, 146, 168,
globalized world, 46, 115 169 n. 5, 195, 197–98,
glocal art practices, 178 n. 202, 211, 229–30
8. See also local art indigenous practices, 143, 154,
practices; regional art 184–85, 202, 212, 242,
practices 277
Gombrich, E. H., 28, 206 influence, 265
Gopnik, Blake, 253 interdisciplinarity, 76–78
governmentalities, 77–96 International Gothic style, 39
Green, Charles, 264, 269, 271 IRWIN group, 122–24, 210
n. 51 Is Art History Global?, 25, 29,
Greet, Michele, 143, 226 44, 117; disagreements
Grünewald, 31 about the uniformity
Gruzinsky, Serge, 47 of art history, 99–100,
Guangzhou Triennial, 256–57 280; lexica in, 34
guojia, 33
Gupta, Suman, 251–52, 262, Jacobs, Karen, 154
282 Jameson, Fredric, 130–33, 134
Gutai, 166–69; as stereotypical n. 16, 143, 146, 170,
Western interest, 25–26 177, 201, 209, 211, 212,
n. 8 220, 222; aesthetics
Gu Wenda. See Wenda Gu in, 20–21; critical of
García Canclini, 19, 143;
Hacking, Ian, 274 criticized for opinion
Hall, Stuart, 142 on Wong Kar-wai, 253;
Hallward, Peter, 61 n. 21 criticized for views of
Hanru, Hou, 177 nation-states, 252–3;
Hardt, Michael, 17, 77–96, 212, as nostalgic about
253 America, 162; on post-
Harootunian, Harry, 158, 198, modernism, 21
246, 248 n. 4, 256 Jarzombek, Mark, 195, 260,
Hart, Gillian, 77, 121 264
293 index
Jirō, Yoshihara, 168
Jones, Caroline, 155, 166, 169,
187, 195, 220, 259–60,
275, 279
Journal of Visual Culture, 76
Kahlo, Frida, 166
Kant, 27, 81–82, 115, 116 n. 8
Kantorowicz, Ernst, 93 n. 8
Kapoor, Anish, 95, 155
Kapur, Keeta, 120
Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta,
130–32, 159, 161, 170,
201 n. 8, 203, 209–11,
222, 225 n. 5, 226–28,
246, 251
Kawabata, Yasunari, 25
Kazakhstan, 34, 98, 104, 123,
131, 136, 260
Kentridge, William, 166
Kim, Alice, 131 n. 5, 140
Kōjin, Karatani, 167
kokka, 33
Koselleck, Reinhart, 93 n. 9
Kraniaukas, John, 143
Kris, Ernst, 27
Kubin, Alfred, 123
Kuitca, Guillermo, 53
kumys, 34
kuni, 33
Kunstgewerbe, 29
Kunstindustrie, 29
Kyrgyzstan, 98, 103
Lam, Wilfredo, 166
Landscape Artists International,
138–39
Landscape Theory, 276 n. 61
Latin America, 32, 43–44, 52,
56, 58, 82, 200–201,
224–25, 257
Lee, Pamela, 210
Lippit, Yukio, 102
Leitzel, Karl Eric, 251, 279
local art practices, 131–37, 143,
145, 146, 151, 152, 154,
166–67, 172–74, 179,
184, 202, 208, 212,
218–21; definitions of,
275–79; as an illusion,
187. See also glocal art
practices; regional art
practices
localities, 253
local, the. See local art prac-
tices, definitions of
Loeb, Carolyn, 267
Löwith, Karl, 24
Louvre, 28
Lukács, Georg, 125
Mack, Bill, 3 n. 7
Maharaj, Sarat, 256
Manas, 267
Mandel, Ernest, 130
Manet, Edouard, 26
Mansbach, Steven, 271
Marx, Karl, 46, 125; on revolu-
tion, 19
Mashadi, Admad, 265
McKenzie, Jon, 150
Medalla, David, 118
Meireles, Cildo, 200–204, 275
Melville, Stephen, 77
Mendieta, Ana, 166
mestiçagem, 202
mestizaje, 47–48, 51–53, 57,
144
methods, interpretive, 279–80
Meuchian, Martiros, 3 n. 7
Miegroet, Hans van, 15
Mignolo, Walter, 149–51
Milevska, Suzana, 165, 176,
210
Miller, Angela, 143
Mitter, Partha, 261, 264–65
modernism at large, 184, 277
modernisms, alternate, 69–70,
171. See also Eurameri-
ca, North Atlantic
modernities, alternate, 6
Möntmann, Nina, 253, 259
Morris, William, 28
Moxey, Keith, 37, 53, 146, 161,
203, 213, 220, 225 n. 5
Mukherji, Parul Dave, 271 n. 50
Mukhopadhyay, Bhaskar, 136,
159, 176, 196, 212, 215,
224, 230
Murakami, Takashi, 166
Musée de l’Homme, 32
Musée Quai Branly, 32, 42
nation, as conceptual unit, 18;
as disappearing, 14; as
failing, 17; in Z̆iz̆ek, 132
nationalism. See denational-
ism, nation-states,
transnationalism
nation-states, 39, 46–47, 53 n.
5, 191, 207, 222, 238;
arguments summarized,
252–53; compared to
grammar, 162; contrast-
ed to states, 151–55; as
tied to labor, 14
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 165
Nechita, Alexandra, 3 n. 7
Negri, Tony, 17, 77–96, 212,
253
négritude, 59, 184
neoliberalism, 6–7, 77–96, 258
Neo Rauch, 13
netsuke, 27
Nobuo, Sekine, 175
North Atlantic, 241, 271 n. 51,
278. See also Eura-
merica
Obrist, Hans-Ulrich, 177
Oiticica, Hélio, 132–37, 166,
260, 275
Oldenburg, Claes, 175
On Kawara, 166
Other, the, 53
Pai, Hyungmin, 275
Panofsky, Erwin, 20, 117, 189,
206
Papastergiadis, Nikos, 142
particularity, 37
Peru, 34
phenomenological experience,
276
photography, African, 31
Photography Theory, viii–ix
n. 2
Pickford, Mary, 25
Pollock, Griselda, 80
postcolonial theory, 58, 73–83;
speculation on what
comes after, 256–57
postmodernism: in China, 14;
Jameson on, 21
postnationalism, 238
Powers, Martin, 264
Preziosi, Donald, 218
“primitive art,” 60
psychoanalysis, 279
purity, as an aberration, 57
Quemin, Alain, 205–6
Ra’ad, Walid, 136 n. 20
Rancière, Jacques, 105, 113
Rankin diane, 156
Rauschenberg, Robert, 14
Rea, Will, 154
readers, absence of, 1
regional art practices, 53, 77,
121, 179, 191, 196, 198,
207–8, 212, 234–35,
248. See also local art
practices
resistance, 15–16, 19, 54,
105–7
Richter, Gerhard, 172, 205
Riegl, Alois, 27–28; of the
future, 136
Rivera, Diego, 166
Roman Empire, 17
Roy, Jamini, 119, 122, 176, 224
Rückaberle, Christoph, 13
Rushdie, Salman, 23–24
294 index
Said, Edward, 167, 210, 269
Salcedo, Doris, 170
Samarqand, 66
Sassen, Saskia, 99, 159, 253,
275
Satinsky, Abigail, 53 n. 5
Schefer, Jean-Louis, 80
Scheibitz, Thomas, 2–3
Schwartz, Martha, 13
Schjeldahl, Peter, 1 n. 2
Schlosser, Julius von, 27–28
School of the Art Institute of
Chicago, 1
Schwartz, Gary, 15
Sebald, W. G., 107
Sehgal, Tino, 2–3
semiotics, 279
Shonobare, Yinka, 166
Simmel, Georg, 64
Singapore, Biennale, 265
Smith, Terry, 171
society, 34
Södertörn University College,
43
Solanas, Fernando, 32
Spivak, Gayatri, 162, 280
Stallabrass, Julian, 115
state. See nation-states
State of Art Criticism, viii nn.
2, 3, 280 n. 71
Stenger, Isabelle, 41
Stone, Howard and Donna, ix–x
styles: mixed, 60; national and
international, 39, 60
subjectivity: Balkan, 61 n. 23;
constructions of, 15
suf painters, 260
Sugimoto, Hiroshi, 166
Sumic-Riha, Jelica, 149–50
Summers, David, 86, 100
superflex, 105
suzhi, 216
Sweden, art history in, 43–44
Sydykhanov, Abdrashit, 104
Tagore, Abanindranath, 122
Tagore, Rabindranath, 275
Tanizaki, Jun’ichirô, 24–25, 277
Tashkent, 66, 104
Taylor, Brandon, 155
Taylor, Charles, 164
Taylorization, 64–65
temporality, 63–72, 255–6
Tetsurô, Watsuji, 24
thick description, 276
Thiong’o, Ngugi wa, 83, 110,
261
Third Text, 184, 275; absent
from the Seminars, 141;
and aesthetics, 272
Tiampo, Ming, 268–69
time. See temporality zen’ei, 173, 267
toilets, 25, 195 Zero Dimension, 174
Tomii, Reiko, 267–8 Zeshin, 27
translation, 76, 83, 131; argu- Zhang Xiaogang, 178
ments summarized,
253–54
transnationalism, 13, 17, 48,
53, 55, 86, 88, 99, 135,
145, 154, 159, 163, 165,
238, 245–46, 248, 253.
See also denationalism
Tsing, Anna, 81
Turner Prize, 154
unesco, 192
universality of art, 37, 101–17,
261; in relation to the
market, 45
utopias, 19–20, 74
Uzbekistan, 98
Valiavicharska, Zhivka, 156,
159, 167, 169, 176, 197,
200 n. 4, 209, 211, 219,
246, 251, 258, 261
Vansina, Jan, 77
vase metaphor. See art history,
as a broken vase
Veh, Karen von, 156
visual culture, 45
visual studies, 42, 44–45, 77,
79 n. 6, 118, 119 n. 16
Visual Studies: A Skeptical
Introduction, 273 n. 54,
280 n. 70
Wall, Jeff, 13, 102
Wallerstein, Immanuel, 17, 38
Warburg, Aby, 41, 79–80, 280
Wee, C. J. W.-L., 196, 259, 265,
282
Weischler, Matthias, 13
Weltliteratur, 30
Wenda Gu, 33, 53
Werber, Pnina, 142
Whiteness studies, 31, 58
Wickhoff, Franz, 27
Wigley, Mark, 219, 276
Williams, Raymond, 152–54
Wollen, Peter, 20
Wong Kar–wai, 15, 131, 253
Wright, Alistair, 275
Wu, Chin-tao, 156
Xu Bing, 53–54, 135, 174, 216
Yin Xiuzhen, 13
Young, Robert, 142
Yúdice, George, 91 n. 6, 145
n. 7