Globalization and Contemporary Art

Harris_cover.indd 43 3/15/2011 8:20:45 PM HHarris_flast.inddarris_flast.indd xviiixviii 33/17/2011/17/2011 2:53:192:53:19 PMPM Globalization and Contemporary Art

HHarris_ffirs.inddarris_ffirs.indd i 33/17/2011/17/2011 2:53:062:53:06 PMPM To Albert and Myra Boime, citizens of Los Angeles and the world

HHarris_ffirs.inddarris_ffirs.indd iiii 33/17/2011/17/2011 2:53:062:53:06 PMPM Globalization and Contemporary Art

Edited by Jonathan Harris

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

HHarris_ffirs.inddarris_ffirs.indd iiiiii 33/17/2011/17/2011 2:53:062:53:06 PMPM This edition first published 2011 © 2011 Wiley-Blackwell Wiley-Blackwell is an imprint of John Wiley & Sons, formed by the merger of Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical and Medical business with Blackwell Publishing. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell. The right of Jonathan Harris to be identified as the editor of this work been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Globalization and Contemporary Art / Jonathan Harris. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4051-7951-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4051-7950-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Art and globalization–History–20th century. 2. Art and globalization–History–21st century. 3. Art, Modern–20th century. 4. Art, Modern–21st century. I. Harris, Jonathan (Jonathan P.), 1960– editor of compilation. N72.G55G59 2011 701′.0309048–dc22 2010043499 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs 9781444396980; ePub 9781444396997 Set in 11/13pt Dante by SPi Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India

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List of Illustrations ix Notes on Contributors xii

Introduction: Globalization and Contemporary Art: A Convergence of Peoples and Ideas 1 Jonathan Harris

Part 1: Institutions 17 Introduction 19 1 Real Time and Real Time at The Israel Museum, Jerusalem 25 Vivianne Barsky 2 Peddling Time When Standing Still: Art Remains in Lebanon and the Globalization That Was 43 Walid Sadek 3 Homogeneity or Individuation? A Long View of the Critical Paradox of Contemporary Art in a Stateless Nation 56 Peter Lord 4 Museums in the Colonial Horizon of Modernity: Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum (1992) 71 Walter Mignolo 5 Africus Johannesburg Biennale 1995: Butisi Tart? 86 Natasha Becker

Part 2: Formations 97 Introduction 99 6 Post-Crisis: Scenes of Cultural Change in Buenos Aires 105 Andrea Giunta

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7 Evolution within the Revolution: The Afro-Cuban Cultural Movement and Cuban Art Collectives, 1975 to 2000 123 Zoya Kocur 8 Ka Muhe’e, He i’a Hololua: Kanaka Maoli Art and the Challenge of the Global Market 137 Herman Pi’ikea Clark 9 Aboriginal Cosmopolitans: A Prehistory of Western Desert Painting 147 Ian McLean 10 Working to Learn Together: Failure as Tactic 161 Judith Rodenbeck

Part 3: Means and Forces of Production 173 Introduction 175 11 The Two Economies of World Art 179 Malcolm Bull 12 The Spectacle and Its Others: Labor, Conflict, and Art in the Age of Global Capital 191 Angela Dimitrakaki 13 Cultural Mercantilism: Modernism’s Means of Production: The Gutai Group as Case Study 212 Ming Tiampo 14 Audiovisionaries of the Network Planet 225 Sean Cubitt

Part 4: Identifications 237 Introduction 239 15 Contemporary Asian Art and the West 245 David Clarke 16 World Pictures: Globalization and Visual Culture 253 W. J. T. Mitchell 17 Leaves of Grass and Real Allegory: A Case Study of International Rebellion 265 Albert Boime 18 Collaboration in Art and Society: A Global Pursuit of Democratic Dialogue 275 Nikos Papastergiadis

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Part 5: Forms 289 Introduction 291 19 Globalization Questions and Contemporary Art’s Answers: Art in Palestine 297 Khaled Hourani 20 Political Islam and the Time of Contemporary Art 307 Amna Malik 21 Displaced Models: Techniques and Tactics of Reproduction across the Genres and Institutions of Western Art from Duchamp to Doujak 318 Lewis Johnson 22 White Man Got No Dreaming: Indigenous Art, Apartheid and the Emergence of “Global Style” Painting in Australia 333 Jeanette Hoorn 23 The Discourse of (L)imitation: A Case Study with Hole-Digging in 1960s Japan 344 Reiko Tomii

Part 6: Reproduction 357 Introduction 359 24 Art and Postcolonial Society 365 Rasheed Araeen 25 Why Art History is Global 375 James Elkins 26 The Agency of the Historian in the Construction of National Identity in Colombian Architecture 387 Felipe Hernández 27 Aboriginal Art and Australian Modernism: An Althusserian Critique 398 Darren Jorgensen 28 Gesturing No(w)here 409 Nermin Saybasili

Part 7: Organization 423 Introduction 425 29 The Emergence of Powerhouse Dealers in Contemporary Art 431 Derrick Chong

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30 The Art Market in Transition, the Global Economic Crisis, and the Rise of Asia 449 Iain Robertson 31 Global Contemporary? The Global Horizon of Art Events 464 Charlotte Bydler 32 “Institutionalized Globalization,” Contemporary Art, and the Corporate Gulag in Chile 479 David Craven 33 Culture, Neoliberal Development, and the Future of Progressive Politics in Southeastern Europe 496 Zhivka Valiavicharska

Select Bibliography 510 Illustration Credits 513 Index 516

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1.1 Adi Nes, Untitled, 1999 1.2 Barry Frydlender, The Flood, 2004 1.3 Sigalit Landau, Iranian Atom; RomaMania, from The Dining Hall, 2007 1.4 Ohad Meromi, The Boy from South Tel Aviv, 2001 1.5 (a) Al Mansfeld, sketch submitted to the architectural competition for a National Museum in Jerusalem, 1959 (b) The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 2010, east elevation 1.6 Computerized rendering of the Israel Museum’s new Entrance Gallery Pavilion 1.7 Pavel Wolberg, Purim, Hebron, 2004 1.8 Adi Nes, Untitled (from the Boys series), 2000 2.1 Billboard with LED day-counter at the Quntari crossroad in Beirut 2.2 Ghassan Salhab, Le Dernier Homme, 100 minutes, 2006. Still from film 3.1 “Welsh Not”: Paul Davies confronted by Mario Merz at the National Eisteddfod of Wales, Wrexham, 1977 3.2 Brith Gof performance, “Rhydcymerau,” 1984–5 4.1 Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum: Cabinetmaking, 1992 4.2 Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum, Metalwork, 1793–1880 4.3 Fred Wilson, Modes of Transportation, 1770–1910 4.4 Detail from Fred Wilson, Modes of Transportation, 1770–1910 4.5 Fred Wilson, Installation view, Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson 4.6 Fred Wilson, Site Unseen. Dwelling of the Demons, Goteborg, 2004 7.1 Juan-Sí González, Me han jodido el ánimo, street performance at Parque 23y G, Vedado, Havana, Cuba – 1988 7.2 Elio Rodríguez, Gone with the Macho, 1995, from the series The Pearls of your Mouth 9.1 Paddy Jupurrurla Nelson, Paddy Japaltjarri Sims, Paddy Cookie Japaltjarri Stewart, Neville Japangardi Poulson, Francis Jupurrurla Kelly, and Francis Bronson Jakamarra Nelson, Yarla, and Richard Long, Mud Circle, both instal- lations at Magicians of the Earth, Paris, 1989

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9.2 Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, Water Dreaming, 1972 9.3 Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri (assisted by Tim Leura), Warlugulong (1976) 11.1 The Art Pyramid. Top living artists as ranked in 2008 by artifacts.com and artprice.com 12.1 Dulce Pinzón, Spiderman, from The Real Story of Superheroes, 2005–9 12.2 Francis Alÿs, When Faith Moves Mountains (Cuando la fe mueve montañas), Lima 2002 13.1 Tanaka Atsuko, Stage Clothes, Outdoor Gutai Art Exhibition, Ashiya, 1956 13.2 Alfred H. Barr Jr., cover of the exhibition catalogue Cubism and Abstract Art, 1936 14.1 The Imposter in the Waiting Room, 2004 14.2 The Imposter in the Waiting Room, 2004 15.1 Wilson Shieh, Koala Place, 1999 16.1 William Blake, Europe, A Prophecy. Copy B, 1794 16.2 William Blake, The Song of Los. Copy A, 1795 16.3 William Blake, The Book of Urizen. Copy G, 1794 16.4 Cover of Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri 16.5 Hong Hao, The New World Order, 1995 18.1 Photograph of Qin Ga showing the tattoo of the Long March on his back 21.1 Sherrie Levine, President Profile, 1978 21.2 Ines Doujak, detail from Siegesgärten (Victory Garden), 2007 22.1 Julie Dowling, Warridah Melburra Ngupi, 2004 22.2 Julie Dowling, Aunties Playing Cards, 1999 23.1 Page of “The Future of Earthworks,” from “Japan’s Glory Upheld by Imitators,” Geijutsu Shincho¯ (August 1969) 23.2 Shinohara Ushio, Coca-Cola Plan, 1964 26.1 Las Torres del Parque, Bogotá (Colombia). Architect Rogelio Salmona 26.2 Library and Park Santo Domingo, Medellín (Colombia). Architect Giancarlo Mazzanti 26.3 Library and Park Santo Domingo, Medellín (Colombia). Architect Giancarlo Mazzanti 26.4 Library and Park Santo Domingo, Medellín (Colombia). Architect Giancarlo Mazzanti 27.1 Ninuku Artists painting, Ngintaka Group Canvas, 2009 27.2 Ina Scales and Yangi Yangi Fox looking at Ninuku Tjukurpa; Bilby Dreaming. Ninuku Arts Group Canvas 2008 28.1 Ergin Cavusoglu, Tahtakale, 2004 28.2 Jigsaw Furnishing, 2001. Artists: Muruvvet Turkyilmaz and Selim Birsel 29.1 25th anniversary luncheon photograph of the Leo Castelli Gallery. February 1, 1982 29.2 “The Art Eco-System Model” of Morris Hargreaves McIntyre, 2004, Taste Buds: How to Cultivate the Art Market 30.1 There is every indication that in the future buying will be dominated by state-backed cultural funds

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30.2 Contemporary (born post-1945) art July 2007–July 2008. Tertiary sales per country 30.3 The Art Market Confidence index 30.4 Global art market share in 2006 30.5 Performance table – Chinese ceramics, Old masters, American and contemporary art 30.6 Turnover of Asian modern and contemporary art in 2007 30.7 Contemporary art sales from the top ten auction houses 2007–8 30.8 Auction volume – Indian modern and contemporary art (2001–7) 32.1 Hans Haacke, Panel no. 1, “Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Board of Trustees,” 1974 32.2 Hans Haacke, Panel no. 5, “Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Board of Trustees,” 1974 32.3 Ramona Parra Brigade of Muralists. Street mural in Santiago, Chile, 1970 33.1 Dren Maliqi, Face to Face, 2003 33.2 A photo of the destruction of Dren Maliqi’s work (Illustration 1) in Kontekst Galerija, Belgrade, during the opening of the exhibition Exception: Contemporary Art from Pristina, February 7, 2008

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Rasheed Araeen is a civil engineer, an artist, writer and inventor – with an international patent. As an artist, he began his journey in 1953 and continued to pursue art while studying civil engineering at NED Engineering College in Karachi. After doing some important works in Karachi, seminal to his later pursuits, he left for London in 1964 and has since lived there. In 1965, he pioneered minimalist sculpture – representing perhaps the only Minimalism in Britain. After having been active in various groups supporting liberation struggles, democracy and human rights, he began to write in 1975, and then started publishing his own art journals: Black Phoenix (1978), Third Text (1987) and Third Text Asia (2008). He has also established online versions of Third Text in Cape Town, South Africa, entitled Third Text Africa, and the Spanish language Tercer Texto in Lima, Peru, both free to their readers. He has curated two important exhibitions: “The Essential Black Art” (1987), “The Other Story” (Hayward Gallery, 1989); and is a recipient of three honorary doctorates (PhDs) from universities of Southampton, East London, and Wolverhampton. He is now directing a project that will revise and produce the most comprehensive and inclusive history of art in postwar Britain. He has published an autobiographical book, Making Myself Visible (1984), comprising texts and visual images, and his latest book, Art Beyond Art/Ecoaesthetics: A Manifesto for the 21st Century, in September 2010.

Vivianne Barsky is an art historian living in West Jerusalem. Informed by a broader revision of the “national narrative,” her PhD dissertation (WSA University of Southampton) probes the genesis of the Israel Museum as an intermeshed ideological-political and architectural construction.

Natasha Becker is the Mellon Assistant Director in the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute since the summer of 2007. She oversees all Mellon- funded programming at the Clark. These include invitational colloquia, targeted at curators working on interdisciplinary exhibition projects and organizations serving the discipline, and major international collaborations, such as the contemporary

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African art workshops (2007–8) held at the Wits School of Arts in Johannesburg, the Clark, and New York City, and the East-Central European seminar series (2010–11) scheduled for Tallinn (Estonia), Brno (Czech Republic), and Bucharest (Romania). Before coming to the Clark, she taught courses on the history of photography in Africa, contemporary African art, and contemporary South African art, at Parsons School of Design, New School University, and the School of Visual Arts. Her areas of research are in contemporary art theory and methodology, contemporary South African art, and the history of exhibitions. Her research and scholarship privileges the empirical study of singular artist’s practices and art exhibitions. She is currently completing her PhD at Binghamton University in New York on the politics of art and representation in the Johannesburg Biennales, 1995 and 1997, in South Africa.

Albert Boime, who died in 2008, was one of the leading art historians of the second half of the twentieth century. Author of many books and hundreds of essays and reviews, his interest and faith in a fairer globalized world can be seen in his planned six-volume series, The Social History of Modern Art, published by University of Chicago Press between 1987 and 2008. He taught at the University of California, Los Angeles for many years.

Malcolm Bull teaches at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at the University of Oxford.

Charlotte Bydler is Lecturer at the Department of Art History, Södertörn University, Stockholm. Publications include The Global Art world, Inc.: On the Globalization of Contemporary Art (Uppsala University, diss. 2004) and “A local global art history,” in J. Elkins (ed.), Is Art History Global? (2007). She is currently working on Sámi art and cosmopolitanism in internet art context.

Derrick Chong studied business administration and art history at universities in Canada and England, and has a PhD from the University of London. He is a faculty member in the School of Management at Royal Holloway, University of London, and holds an adjunct position at Sotheby’s Institute of Art. His writing focuses on the varied and complex relationships between business and the arts. Books include Arts Management and The Art Business.

Herman Pi’ikea Clark is an Associate Professor of Indigenous Art and Education at Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarang, an indigenous University in New Zealand. Born and raised in Hawaii, Pi’ikea Clark has contributed to the field of indigenous art and design studies by way of his work as practicing artist, designer, educator, and researcher. Beyond artistic and academic work, Pi’ikea is a performing ukulele musician, husband, and father.

David Clarke is Professor in the Department of Fine Arts, University of Hong Kong. He has written extensively on both Chinese and western art and culture,

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with a primary focus on the twentieth century. His most recently book is Water and Art (2010), a cross-cultural study of water as medium and subject in modern and contemporary art.

David Craven is Distinguished Professor of Art History and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of New Mexico.

Sean Cubitt is Professor of Global Media and Communications at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. He is a Professorial Fellow in Media and Communications at the University of Melbourne, and an Honorary Professor of the University of Dundee. His publications include Timeshift (1991), Videography: Video Media as Art and Culture (1993), Digital Aesthetics (1998), Simulation and Social Theory (2001), The Cinema Effect (2004) and EcoMedia (2005). He is series editor for Leonardo Books at MIT Press.

Angela Dimitrakaki is Lecturer in Contemporary Art History at the University of Edinburgh. Her book Gender, Art/Work and the Global Imperative is forthcoming. She is co-editor of the volume Politics in A Glass Case: Exhibiting Feminist and Women’s Art, also forthcoming.

James Elkins is E. C. Chadbourne Professor in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His most recent book is Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History, Hong Kong University Press.

Andrea Giunta received her PhD from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. She was the first Director of the Center of Documentation, Research and Publications, Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires. In 2007 she published Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics. Argentine Art in the Sixties. The Association of Latin American Art – affiliated to the College Art Association – named this as the Best Scholarly Book on the art of Latin America from the Pre-Columbian era to the present. She is currently director of the Permanent Seminar on Latin American Art at the University of Texas at Austin where she teaches.

Jonathan Harris, Research Professor in global art and design studies at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, is the author and editor of fourteen books, including Modernism in Dispute: Art since the Forties (1993), The New Art History: A Critical Introduction (2001) and Inside the Death Drive: Excess and Apocalypse in the World of the Chapman Brothers (2010).

Felipe Hernández, PhD, is an architect and professor of architectural design, history and theory at the University of Cambridge. He has published extensively on contemporary architecture in Latin America as well as on the development of the continent’s cities. He is the author of Beyond Modernist Masters:

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Contemporary Architecture in Latin America (2009) and Bhabha for Architects (2010), as well as co-editor of Rethinking the Informal City: Critical Perspectives from Latin America (2009) and Transculturation: Cities, Space and Architecture in Latin America (2005).

Jeanette Hoorn is Professor of Visual Cultures and Head of Cinema and Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her most recent book, Reframing Darwin, Art and Evolution in Australia (2009), accompanied a major exhibition at the Ian Potter Museum of Art.

Khaled Hourani lives and works in Ramallah. He currently works as Artistic Director of the International Academy of Art – Palestine. Previously, Hourani worked as General Director of the Fine Arts Department at the Palestinian Ministry of Culture from 2004–6. He was General Coordinator of the Jifna International Artists Workshop Palestine, Spring 2005. As an artist, he has exhibited his works in Palestine, Tunisia, Qatar, Egypt, Italy, Jordan, Norway, Japan, New York, Germany, the UK, and Switzerland. He has participated in numerous workshops and arts meetings and has been a resident artist in Switzerland, England, France, Netherlands, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey, Norway, Croatia, Austria, Sweden, Jordan, and Sharjah. He also writes about art and organizes and curates art exhibitions. In 1997, he founded Al-Matal Gallery in Ramallah.

Lewis Johnson teaches history and theory of art in the Department of Photography and Video, Faculty of Communication at Bahçes¸ehir University, Istanbul. Recent publications include essays on Turkish art and visual culture, on Ömer Uluç and postwar gestural painting ( Journal of American Studies in Turkey, 2007) and Osman Hamdi as painter, photographer, and archeologist in Metamorphosis and Place (2009).

Darren Jorgensen lectures in art history at the University of Western Australia. He publishes on Aboriginal art in his own country, while internationally he publishes on science fiction, recently co-editing an edition of the journal Extrapolation the histories of the genre.

Zoya Kocur is an independent scholar who has served as an adjunct faculty member at New York University and at the Rhode Island School of Design. She is the editor, along with Simon Leung, of Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985, published by Blackwell. Her newest volume is Global Visual Cultures: An Anthology (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).

Peter Lord is Research Fellow at the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales (CREW), Swansea University. He is the author of The Visual Culture of Wales, a three-volume history of the subject, and, most recently, The Meaning of Pictures (2009).

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Amna Malik is Lecturer in Art History and Theory at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. Her publications have examined diaspora and contemporary art. Her current project examines geographical movement of artistic practices in the work of diaspora artists who have disappeared from mainstream narratives of art history.

Ian McLean is currently Professor in the History of Australian Art at the University of Western Australia, and in 2011 will take up an appointment as Research Professor in Australian Art at the University of Wollongong. He has written extensively on Australian art. His most recent book, How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art: Writings on Aboriginal Contemporary Art (2011), chronicles the critical reception of Aboriginal art since the early 1980s.

Walter Mignolo is William H. Wannamaker Professor at Duke University and holds appointments in the Program of Literature, Romance Studies and Cultural Anthropology. He is Director of the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities. He curated an exhibition on “Decolonial Aesthetics” (Bogota, Colombia, 2010). He published an article, leading to the exhibition, in Calle 14, an art magazine published in 2010. His essay “The Darker Side of Modernity” was published in the catalogue for the exhibit MODERNOLOGIES (MACBA, Fall 2009), curated by Sabine Breitwiese. “Decolonizzare la cognoscenza,” an interview by Luigi Fassi, appeared in MAG 1, 2010 (Galleria Arte Moderna di Milano, issuu. com/studio_labxyz/docs/mag). It was reprinted in La Differenze (Mensile de Cultura), Roma, 2010, http://www.differenza.org/articolo.asp?ID=522. His book, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options, is forthcoming (2011).

W. J. T. Mitchell is a theorist of art, literature, and media who has taught at the University of Chicago since 1977. He is the author of Iconology, Picture Theory, and What Do Pictures Want? His two latest books, Critical Terms for Media Studies (with Mark Hansen) and Cloning Terror, appeared in the spring and fall of 2010.

Nikos Papastergiadis is Professor of Media and Communications and Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. His most recent book is Spatial Aesthetics.

Iain Robertson, Head of Art Business Studies, Sotheby’s Institute of Art (2004– present), has worked for the British Council in East Asia and was a Senior Lecturer at City University’s Department of Arts Policy and Management. He has edited two books, Understanding International Art Markets and Management (2005) and The Art Business (2008). He has just completed another book, A New Art from Emerging Markets (2011). He is art market editor of the Art Market Report, advisor to the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong and consultant to the database, Artfacts.

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Judith Rodenbeck holds the Noble Chair in Modern Art and Culture at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY. Author of the first major study of Allan Kaprow’s early happenings, she is also past editor-in-chief of Art Journal, and has written for October, Grey Room, Artforum, and Modern Painters, among other publications.

Walid Sadek is an artist and writer living in Beirut. His work thinks art and social- ity in protracted civil war. He is Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture and Design at the American University of Beirut.

Nermin Saybasili is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts, Istanbul, Turkey. She received her doctorate in visual culture from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her research interests include contemporary art practices and critical theory with a particular emphasis on “visibilities” and “invisibilities” in the regime of the vision; the “element” of sound and voice in installation work and video art; urban space and migration in the networked culture. Saybasili’s recent publications include an essay in Norie Neumark, Ross Gibson, and Theo Van Leeuwen (eds), Voice: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media Art (2010).

Ming Tiampo is Associate Professor of Art History at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She specializes in post-1945 Japanese art and examines the cultural consequences of globalization through her interest in transnational modernism. Her book, Gutai: Decentering Modernism (forthcoming, 2011), uses Gutai’s transnational activities as a case study to suggest new ways of framing modernism.

Reiko Tomii, PhD, is a New York-based independent scholar who investigates post-1945 Japanese art in global and local contexts. Her publications include her 2007 contributions to Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art and Collectivism after Modernism. She co-founded PoNJA-GenKon (www.ponja-genkon.net), a scholarly listserv, in 2003.

Zhivka Valiavicharska is a PhD Candidate in Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Working across the fields of modern political philosophy, social theory, and cultural studies, she has written on various aspects of socialist and post-socialist material culture and intellectual thought. Her current project explores the fate of left discourses and politics in Eastern Europe after the fall of the socialist states.

HHarris_flast.inddarris_flast.indd xviixvii 33/17/2011/17/2011 2:53:192:53:19 PMPM HHarris_flast.inddarris_flast.indd xviiixviii 33/17/2011/17/2011 2:53:192:53:19 PMPM Introduction Globalization and Contemporary Art: A Convergence of Peoples and Ideas

“Globalization,” like the terms “modernism” and “renaissance” before it, has entered into the language of artists, art historians, critics, curators and all those other individuals and groups that make up the art world. And like those two historically preceding categories – still indispensable within the study of contemporary art as well as in its making – “globalization” carries with it three qualifications. Firstly, that the term, although specialized in its art-historical and art-practice senses, also refers to the whole organization of society beyond art. Secondly, that although the term names forces that have shaped societies and civilizations across the globe, these originated principally in one part of it – the “West” – and have achieved dominance beyond Europe and the United States partly through centuries-long histories of western colonial and imperial conquest. Thirdly, that the meanings of the term, though now confidently expounded in scholarship, teaching, and public arenas, remain uncertain: “globalization” is not a finally agreed quantity either historically or in its likely future effects within the art world, or the wider world beyond. “Globalization,” therefore, is best understood and most useful as an heuristic – “trial and error” – analytic construct: a practical concept containing a set of testable hypotheses concerning the progressive ordering of the world and its hitherto separable societies, their peoples, activities and products, into a single system. Globalization and Contemporary Art is concerned with one facet of this apparent systematization: the remaking of artists, art practices, styles, institutions for art collection, exhibition, sale and pedagogy within such a single, globalized order. These 33 essays all demonstrate that the artworks under scrutiny – contemporary or historical – cannot adequately be understood in isolation from the societies in which they were produced. This is true also of all art institutions and of the human agents active within the art world – artists themselves, dealers, curators, auction- eers, critics, academics, arts administrators and others. But the challenge the authors here have been set is to go radically beyond this established “social history

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of art” principle to examine how these agents, institutions, and products may now function within a single global system that transcends both national boundaries and regional or continental systems of interaction between peoples and nations which have existed for thousands of years. “Globalization” has a long history – it didn’t start at the end of World War Two in 1945 or when the USSR abolished itself in 1991 – and its epochal development over thousands of years includes regional and continental patterns of migration, trade, conquest, and cultural borrowings. A globalizing market for goods and services of all kinds has a very long history – with trading between regions extending radically and seemingly irreversibly since the sixteenth century with trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific exploration and migration – and within this market the place of art and metropolitan centers for its production and dissemination became increasingly important both economically and politically. Although the extension of these interactions has sometimes slackened or even been reversed at certain historical moments over the past, say, 1,500 years – due to a variety of causes, including mass disease or climate conditions – since 1945 the pace and depth of globalization (despite some powerful countervailing forces, such as the Cold War, 1945–1991) has dramatically increased in economic, cultural, ideological, and political terms. Much of this history is sketched out in the essays that follow. I said earlier that “globalization” refers to the claimed “progressive ordering” of human activities into a single system. The term “progressive” contains a double sense – it means both to “extend” and to “develop” (i.e., to “get better” or to “get worse”). These objective and subjective or evaluative observations certainly attend upon discussions of “globalization”: has it produced some radical homogenization in life that flattens and reduces human experiences and values? Would this be a common judgment on “global art” – one of the terms several authors introduce in their essays, naming, perhaps, a formulaic style of painting or video-installation produced by artists endlessly crossing continents to exhibit at art biennales, attempting to please the same group of jet-setting, carbon footprint-heavy international curators or New York-based dealers now operating out of Beijing or Shanghai? The contributors here provide no single answer to this question, and no answer, I would suggest, can yet be deemed entirely right or wrong. “Globalization” in contemporary art is at an early stage of understanding, although probably hundreds of books and essays have already been written on the subject over the past ten years or so. Its effective study, like the phenomenon itself, is inevitably, and rightly so, a matter of collective, collaborative effort. There will be no individual towering figure from an American Ivy League university or an “ancient” European academic center that comes to define and dominate the topic; no single civilization or culture will produce a man or woman to master this field and confidently clarify its meanings for the waiting world beyond. The study of “globalization” and contemporary art will be a matter of intellectual and scholarly convergence – a hard, collaborative labor of bringing into align- ment a set of ideas and methods necessarily drawn from a number of existing disciplines and analytic traditions. In the process, if a novel set of concepts and

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methods emerge from this convergence, then the conclusion might be drawn that some of the “donor” disciplines have run out of their own substantive usefulness in offering ways to understand the conditions, products, and meanings of contemporary art. The exemplary case is art history with its roots in the nineteenth century in Europe. This discipline may be redundant now, at least in the sense that the places, means, and functions of art in the twenty-first century require presupposi- tions, forms of attention, conceptual tools and methods of analysis elaborated within, and as a critique of, late modernity’s interlock of state, corporate capital, and electronic-digital technological forces. Globalization and Contemporary Art sets out to offer at least the outline of such a field and methods for its study appropriate to the wide range of phenomena its authors consider. This range is not “comprehensive” in global terms – no single book could be, given the inevitable limitations – but these 33 essays cross many national, regional, continental, medium, institutional, technological, political, and intellectual boundaries and represent as a whole a convergence of ideas able powerfully to describe, analyze, and evaluate the convergence of peoples that is globalization. And, like the minimum necessary definition of ‘globalization’ – that its forces and agents act globally in scope and in intent – this book sets out to encompass all the world (in implication, if not in case study) and to influence, progressively, the direction globalization might take for the more equitable benefit of all the world’s peoples.

What is Globalization?

The literature on the subject is now vast and, by its nature, intrinsically cross- and multidisciplinary. In many countries “globalization studies” has become a new academic discipline with its own research centers, departments, courses, students, and textbooks. Higher education is itself an evermore globalizing business – though the migration of students to universities to study all subjects (including globalization) continues to flow massively from the east and south towards northern and western institutions, though the latter category includes universities in Melbourne and Cape Town as much as in London, Madrid, and Los Angeles. Professional academics arguably move more evenly between universities around the world although the density and variety of subject areas and jobs still lies very firmly within Western Europe and North America. This temporary migration of hundreds of thousands of students indicates, however, how the knowledge and qualifications they seek to acquire abroad are required increasingly now in their home countries where new forms of high skill employment, including the development of higher education itself, are themselves evidence of globalizing forces. Consider the following three instances of “globalization” (note that when I use the term in inverted commas I am particularly drawing attention to it as an idea or hypothesis under critical examination). Firstly, the worldwide recession that occurred in the latter months of 2008, set off by the collapse of a number of investment banks and mortgage companies in the United States. These rapidly led to similar crises in

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banks in Great Britain and other European countries and rapidly destabilized capital assets in banks and corporations of many kinds all around the world. By the begin- ning of 2009, it was agreed that the global economy was in recession and might enter depression. These conditions quickly spread even to China, the powerhouse economy of the world over the past decade, and led to a large increase in unemploy- ment there. Governments in the “developed world” – this loaded term will be criti- cally considered in some of the essays to come – now predict large reductions in public spending over many coming years in order to meet the costs to the state (i.e., its taxpaying citizens) of rescuing the banks and large-scale failing industries. Secondly, there was the unexpected death of the black US singer Michael Jackson in June 2009 and the impact this had around the world in the following months – leading quickly to scenes of spontaneous public mourning and celebration of Jackson’s life and music in many cities (often filmed by individuals using their mobile phones and quickly posted on the YouTube web site of the internet). At the memorial event held in a large arena in Los Angeles later that year, many hundreds of people from overseas attended, while helicopter television pictures of his sup- posedly private funeral were beamed around the world by satellite a few weeks later. Jackson’s music corporation bosses took advantage of the singer’s death to rerelease CDs of his songs as part of a global marketing campaign, partly in order to recoup projected losses from the cancelled 50 nights of concerts Jackson was due to give in London – to audiences who, once again, had planned to fly in from all parts of the world. London – center of the financial world economy and home to the “O2” mobile phone-sponsored stadium where the star would have appeared – owes its privileged position within global networks of telecommunications largely to its historical role in the establishment of “world time” centered on the capital, once the metropolis of the British Empire (“Greenwich Meantime”). Thirdly, there was the spread of “swine flu” rapidly throughout the world in 2009, originating in Mexico but quickly infecting and killing people in countries around the world as a result of air travel. Such infections are not, of course, new and the number of deaths in 2009 remained far below those predicted by medical experts trying to assess the seriousness of the outbreak and the measures needed to prepare national and regional populations for inoculation and other protective measures. The production of large numbers of vaccines was a global – or at any rate a continental effort – and cross-national governmental agencies such as the European Union quickly became involved, along with supra-governmental bodies including the World Health Organization. In the 1980s and 1990s, the growth of HIV/AIDS infections around the world similarly preoccupied state agencies and private drug manufactur- ers – for this condition, though centered in African areas, also developed in other countries in the west and north partly because of air travel, “sexual tourism,” and the pooling of infected blood used in transfusion services offered by multinational companies contracted by governments to provide medical care for their people. What can we learn about “globalization” from these instances and what rele- vance might these lessons have for the study of globalization and contemporary art? These examples, I shall suggest, actually take us quite a long way into the

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range of concerns and forms of conceptualization set out in the following essays. At first glance, one might say that the three case studies indicate obvious, and separable, economic, cultural, and biological consequences of a world now organ- ized on the basis of five identifiable networks:

1 the global production, distribution, and consumption of goods; 2 the global electronic transfer and trading of capital and commodities; 3 the rapid global air transport of people; 4 the virtually instantaneous global communications systems engendered by internet, satellite, and computing technologies; 5 the appeal of entertainers whose talents (e.g., singing and acting) are made globally available as products through public broadcast and other reproductive systems including film, TV, video, CD, and internet downloading modes.

The first example – the recession of 2008 – it’s easy to call an “economic” feature (1 and 2, but also involving 4). The second – Michael Jackson’s globally experienced death and wake, we might call it – is a “cultural” facet (5, but also involving 4 and 3, and leading to 1 and 2). The third – the dangers of rapidly spreading infections – is a “biological” hazard (3, but with other implications relating to 1, 2, 4, and, with some thought, to 5 also: HIV/AIDS became one of the first “global appeal” issues like world poverty and the campaign to end the apartheid regime in South Africa). Quickly, then, we recognize that the categories “economic,” “cultural,” and “biological” interact in a variety of ways. Although we might identify Jackson primarily as a singer and his work as “cultural,” the dissemination and commodification of his songs and dancing talents had major economic significance, rooted in the commercial exploitation of his biological voice and body. The technological developments that have led to cheap cell (mobile) phones with cameras, and the YouTube site upon which were posted pictures of Jackson fans mourning his death, are closely tied in to the immensely powerful computing systems that allow financial trading across the world through day and night at centers in, for example, New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, and Beijing. These transactions are tracked and televised live by TV corporations that provide “global business news” across national boundaries, such as CNN, the BBC, RU-TV (Russia) and the Islam Channel. Money, in paper or electronic form, is, apart from its exchange function, a signifying material itself carrying cultural connotations of various kinds: a national currency and marker of the power of certain projected values and interests. The US dollar remains, as it is coyly called, the world’s “reserve currency.” Our knowledge of HIV/AIDS – for those not living in the parts of Africa where the disease has been particularly prevalent or with infected relatives or friends – has mostly come through TV and other media campaigns. These have sometimes involved the charity efforts of celebrities like Jackson appearing at concerts beamed by satellite around the world, while the production of drugs to combat the condition is a multi-billion dollar industry controlled by corporations who wish to maintain their profits often against the interests of governments and people who need cheap and widely available medicine.

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I hope to have demonstrated in this brief discussion how the categories of “economic,” “cultural,” and “biological” are inevitably interrelated. Though these terms certainly refer to real things, to call Michael Jackson’s music career “cultural” does not exhaust its meaning or impact in the world – rather exploring the economic and biological aspects of his performances, persona, and global projection through commodities deepens our knowledge of his cultural contribution. Similarly, the sequential ordering of this book’s essays into seven parts – “Institutions,” “Formations,” “Means and Forces of Production,” “Identifications,” “Forms,” “Reproduction,” and “Organization” – is offered as a practical, heuristic means to consider contemporary art world phenomena through a set of alternating analytic frames or perspectives. I explain more below about these parts, their sequence and function in the book. Economic, cultural, and biological phenomena, it should also be clear from the discussion above, all act and interact within the human social and historical world, as well as geographically across the terrain of the “earth.” A book on globalization and contemporary art must deal therefore with concepts and problems of space, place, and ground – facets, conditions, and resources of human exist- ence that have been underplayed in traditional histories of art and culture. Beyond “economic,” “cultural,” and “biological” could be added other terms argued to be equally central: for instance, “political,” “ideological,” “sexual,” “racial.” All these terms, and many more besides, indeed are implicated in the essays that follow. And they all also interrelate with each other. One way to think of their relation is in terms of the metaphors of “solution”/“dissolution” and “manifest”/“latent” meanings. For example, Michael Jackson’s singing and dancing is a manifest cultural form which has “dissolved” within it a set of latent economic and biological features and implications. Air travel, a means of transport with manifest global economic significance, has “dissolved” within it a set of latent cultural meanings and values, depending, for instance, on whether one can afford to fly first class or economy, or whether one is a professional pilot or a cleaner of aircraft between flights. If the click of a computer mouse sends 100 million dollars instantly to a trader in a Dubai tower selling crude oil – a manifest economic exchange – then the design and size of the colossal tankers that endlessly ply the world’s oceans carrying this and other commodities from shore to shore tell us, latently, about the power of the corporations operating the cycles of production, distribution, and consumption. Most people in the world first came to know about the economic crash of 2008, the death of Michael Jackson, and the emergence of “swine flu” through a media source linked to global communications – probably TV or an internet source. This indicates that globalization and our knowledge of globalization are bound up together. The production of this book was made possible because of the speed and reliability of internet communications: in the space of a few minutes I would often talk to authors based in Lebanon, Israel, the United States, Wales, South Africa, and Australia. The full implications of this “bound-togetherness” of globalization and our knowledge of it through electronic media may never be fully grasped – they certainly aren’t at present. If this book’s essays bring conceptual tools and methods of analysis to bear on a wide range of new empirical phenomena in the global art

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world, the question remains: how do the former actually make visible the reality of the latter? If globalizing developments in contemporary art have happened at such a rate that the disciplines of art history, criticism, and visual studies simply have not been able to recognize them, how can scholars truly identify such novel empirical phenomena in the first place? If “globalization studies” is an emerging discipline – and the study of the contemporary art world a part of it – then at present it’s the equivalent to a person standing in a very dark room with a flash- light: most of the things in the room, and the room itself, simply cannot be seen at all with the presently available poor, narrowly focused light. The “light” of this book is certainly switched on, but it is weak and narrowly focused in two ways in particular. Firstly, its form of linguistic expression is English – now the world’s “business language,” and, increasingly, the world language of academics. Though this may generate the biggest possible world readership, it inevitably diminishes the experiences and meanings of those (authors and readers) whose first language is not English. This is a damaging, homogenizing, and flat- tening effect of globalization processes dominated by Anglo-American culture. Secondly, and related to this, the book inevitably bears in particular the traces of the dominance of British and US scholarship – even though many of its authors writing from bases in these countries are not themselves either British or US citizens or are even writing about art in Britain or the United States of America. If globalization since 1945 has been set in motion at deep levels by western interests, predominantly those of forces based in the United States but also in Britain and some countries in Western Europe – though France and divided Germany for many decades stood somewhat apart from the United States for political and historical reasons – then it is not really surprising that the “globalization studies” industry also churns out many of its products from Harvard and Oxford universities. Anti- and “alter-globalization” movements also spring from these homelands, of course, as well as from agricultural workers, miners, teachers, and lecturers in Venezuela, Hawaii, and Papua New Guinea. Two part-synonyms for “globalization” are “Americanization” and “westernization.” “Imperialism” might be a third. Discussions of these terms and their closeness to, or distance from, “globalization” also feature strongly in many essays. Inescapably, too, this book’s organization is marked by my own background as a white, 50-year-old English male art historian, based in a provincial city in England, and thoroughly western in outlook socially and intellectually. My ambition, and motivation, however, has been to reach out far beyond art history (and contemporary art) to the globalized world beyond which is now, in fact, where we all live.

Contemporary Art Studied as a Global Phenomenon

A start has been made to deal with the definition of “globalization” and to set out themes and concepts through which to make sense of its origins, development, and impact on the world and its peoples. What, then, of “contemporary art”?

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A cursory look at the essays in this book demonstrates that “contemporary,” whatever it may mean, does not refer to art made only, say, in 2010. I have chosen to deal with the term in a range of pragmatic as well as theoretical ways, as the choice of authors and subjects here testifies. “Art” will include, for instance, discussion of painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, and digital media, installation and mixed media, but also architecture and design, the built environment, and the realms of popular and mass culture beyond. “Contemporary,” like “globalization” itself, has no finally secure single sense: it merges inevitably into “recent,” then “postmodern,” and back to “modern” itself. Its meanings are sometimes deemed a matter of style, or of choice of medium, or working situation (e.g., studio, “site-specific,” “relational aesthetic”). A major contention of this book as a whole is that awareness of global context and conditions has come to shape how artists now conceive, realize, manifest, and attempt to sell and in other ways propagate their works – parts here on “Institutions,” “Formations,” “Means and Forces of Production” and “Organization” focus on these questions in particular. In chronological terms – bearing complex relation, however, to histories and periodizations of style and culture – most authors deal with artworks made over the last twenty years. A few venture further back and one, indeed, to the mid-nineteenth century, where, the author claims, the origins can be found of one facet of modern globalization: transatlantic exchange in progressive political ideas and politicized naturalism in literature and art. Many authors consider whether the West monopolizes accounts of time and the ownership of history – that the quality of being “contemporary” belongs authentically to certain artists, histories, and cultures but not to others. But the book doesn’t concern itself exclusively with artworks and artists. They form a part of the contemporary art world which encompasses, beyond artefacts and their producers: (a) many different kinds of institution and less formal groupings of people; (b) the organization of a global art market for buying, selling, and propa- gating artworks; and (c) the broad discourse on art generated by intermediaries of many kinds: critics, historians, teachers, curators, conservationists, collectors, arts administrators, journalists, TV presenters, as well as artists as commentators themselves. The biggest constituency of all “within” this art world – though their location as part of it is particularly difficult to conceptualize and measure – is the general public for art who generally leave little or no evidence of their involvement beyond, perhaps, attending an exhibition or buying a postcard, or perhaps writing a short verdict on a show in response to an art gallery’s education program request. The public, then, constitutes the biggest absence within this collection – though it always hovers there in the background, and exists symbolically as a social and political force within many essays. They are the “multitude,” the peoples of the world made a resource and a raw material within globalization’s reordering and expansion of labor and markets; but they exist also as a potential force for liberation and in need of liberation. Dealing conceptually and methodologically with the public for art is a problem for several authors in particular who consider the relations between qualitative analysis of art (the traditional art-critical and historical tasks of selection, interpretation, and judgment, etc.) and quantitative analysis (how big is the art market? Who are

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the most successful artists within it? What is ‘global style’? etc.). Public museums and galleries around the world are themselves increasingly preoccupied with the size and character of their publics, as art becomes a subsidized vehicle for national govern- ment and regional powers’ “cultural policy” directed towards a variety of socioeco- nomic ends including “regeneration,” “reconciliation” and “social inclusion.” If “globalization” implies the creation of a single system within the world, one that erodes pre-existing though still active localized systems, then the same must hypothetically be true of the contemporary art world if it has become part of this system. Do art biennales, for instance, form a single network across the globe? Several authors here deal with the origins and histories of particular biennales and the historical evidence is that they can by no means be reduced to a single motivation or purpose. This fact, however, does not necessarily mean that, for instance, often the same artists and curators with international standing do not move between these events organizing and presenting works that respond to blandly generalized themes promoting, for instance, “diversity” and “multiculturalism.” This example indicates how an adequate answer to the question “Is there a global art?” must involve both qualitative and quantitative aspects. The problem is, however, that traditional art history offers little way of providing the latter skills or of finding a way to resolve the dilemmas generated when quantitative analysis encounters the long-held assumptions and perspectives that art-historical selective and interpretative practices presuppose. Art history, on the other hand, has dealt instructively with some problems of globalization since its own origins in the later nineteenth century. If globalization understood as an epochal process includes extending interactions between regions and cultures over thousands of years – a process, however, with no necessary conclusion: developments since 1945 were not implicit in medieval Chinese sea voyages towards Europe or in the first Iberian ships that reached the Caribbean and the North American continent – then the first professional art historians were “globalists” through and through. This term, implying commitment to a particular view or endorsement of globalization processes, is appropriately used to describe those central and Western European scholars who traced the beginnings of what would come to be called “European civilization” to the sculptures, murals, buildings, and other artefacts produced by the variegated peoples, now known homogeneously as “the Greeks,” whose settlements extended over the middle regions of the Eurasian landmass. In one sense one could say that this Euro–North American art history was founded on an early globalist representation which was at once an ideal and an obscuring myth of the purported origins and superiority of something called “western art.” Globalization and Contemporary Art undoes many stitches in the dense weave of this entity, as authors demonstrate that contemporary art made around the world, in its relations with western modern and renaissance art (and art history), both contains and yet offers to resist the burdens of this ideal and obscuring myth. This dramatically partial “globalism” within traditional art history – centered on the view that European art since the Renaissance was at once the beneficiary of cultural borrowings from “the Greeks” and many other peoples not deemed

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European as well as the high-point of global artistic civilization – led me to concede above that the discipline’s early understanding of globalization was “instructive.” But it should not, of course, be emulated. The part in this book called “Reproduction” concerns itself with the ways and means through which ideas and ideologies are transmitted and sometimes challenged and changed within institutional systems of education and training, as well as through the orthodoxies of concept and method that disciplines such as art history engendered in the twentieth century within teaching and research training – dominated, as the discipline was, by European and North American scholars, institutions, and resources. This reproduction of knowledge operates also in exhibition programs and art publishing. Though “reproduction” actually implies alteration and variation as much as repeti- tion (think of biological instances), it is clear that the crudest simplifications of argument and perspective evident within textbooks and some highly propagated manifestos – for example, Alfred H. Barr’s infamous 1936 diagram purporting to show the “roots of modern art” – have helped art history seem to many hopelessly ‘western-centric.’ The final part, “Organization,” overlapping with the concerns of “Reproduction” in many ways, attempts to deal with the contemporary art world as a globalized system within the globalized world as a whole. These essays range widely over phenomena including biennales, the art market, styles of art, broad political developments, and governmental involvement in cultural funding. As I will explain further below, all the book’s parts have declared or manifest, as well as “dissolved” or latent, analytic contents, and the aim of my short individual part introductions is to indicate these interrelations, as well as to articulate the coherence and significance of these discrete groups of essays. My purpose, overall, however, has not been to attempt to institute “globalization and contemporary art” as a new academic specialism within emergent globalization studies. The “and” is there in one sense, then, to keep the two entities apart, rather than to bring them together. My deeper and longer-standing theoretical project has been to reformulate the study of visual arts and culture based on the principles of a materialist history: hypotheses of “globalized art” and a “global art world” promise valuable case studies within this, and present important analytic challenges. Many before me have pointed out the range of existing disciplines that contribute to, as well as impede, an understanding of contemporary art within its global conditions and relations of production, dissemination, and consumption. As I’ve just suggested, sometimes the lessons are extremely negative but need to be learned. Art history, “anthropology of art” (the inverted commas indicate it never achieved full institutional status) and “world art studies” (lacking sufficient intellectual coherence to operate powerfully as a force internationally within academe) are all indelibly marked by the western colonial experience and the dominance still of European and US interests throughout the world. To remark that this has not been all bad, in light of the history and continuing legacies of colonialism and imperialism, seems to me a fatuous and impertinent thing to say. In addition, the West’s development of industrial and technological forces throughout the world in the last century

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