Globalization and the Contemporary Art World

• Variation in uses of the term "culture" in the globalization discourse.
  • Reminder of the way discourses construct objects of knowledge, objects that do not pre-exist the discourses which form them.
• Internationalization and/vs. globalization in the contemporary art world
• What is happening in the trend toward internationalizing the art world?
  • Art and the International Art Fair (Biennials, the art market, and large commercial art fairs)
  • International professionalization of the art world: curators, dealers, auction house specialists all part of international network
  • Art now requires an internationally networked market of galleries, collectors, museum donors
• Do the centers of artworld prestige, influence, and power map onto the "world cities" cluster?
  • Major city concentrations and power centers: following resource concentration and cultural economy of cities
  • Does art follow the same concentrations of capital? Are there discontinuities and disruptions? Plurality of voices, local voices?
• Artworld is now professionalized internationally, but is this the same as, or a reflex of, globalization?
  • Distinction between culture and art: world of multiple cultures, but the artworld provides the criteria for defining art.
  • Crisis in artworld cultural categories: many cultural artifacts now compete to be including in category of "fine art" (e.g., Quilts from Gee's Bend)
• The Art Biennial: emergence of international criteria for the arts?
  • Art Biennial as a space for artistic legitimization
  • The role of Biennial curators: the reign of the curator-auteurs.
  • The impact of the Biennial on local culture and host cities
    
    
• Case study: Julie Mehretu, an "international" artist with critical and commercial success. Works at ArtBasel/Miami (a painting sold for $80,000). Walker Art Center traveling exhibition. Smithsonian African Museum exhibition.
  • A artist with multiple identity roots, using hybrid art media forms, combined into her own vision for the possibility of painting and drawing today.
  • Working with personal and historical narratives; art and collective and personal ethnography.
  • Trends toward allegory and story-telling in recent art
  • Awareness of past moments in abstract and representational art, recombining them in new context that invokes history, memory, personal identity.
  • Working with and between abstraction and representation
  • Working with layers and layering process: that works record their own making, a map of the layers of lived reality in the globalized world
  • Hybrid art for a world that's always already hybrid