Critical Cartography of Art and Visuality in the Global Age (Anna Maria Guasch y Nasheli Jiménez del Val, eds.)

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014

The recent irruption—and ensuing expansion—of the term “global art” in academia, arts practice, and curatorship has signalled an attempt to supersede the territorial limits imposed by the old parameters of Eurocentrism, Western dominance, and the monocultural project of modernity. In the early 2000s, art historians such as K. Zijlmans, David Carrier or James Elkins, driven by theorizations of the end of universal and national art histories, forwarded the proposition of a world and global art history. Following suit, curatorial projects developed by intellectuals and theorists linked to ZKM at Karlsruhe (Hans Belting, Peter Weibel and Andrea Buddensieg) introduced the concept of “global art” into art discourse as a way of going beyond the formulas of modern internationalism as well as postmodern new internationalism. In the first book of what would later become a trilogy, Contemporary Art and the Museum (2007), Peter Weibel and Andrea Buddensieg documented the impact that globalization has had on contemporary art in an attempt to make visible a phenomenon that in recent years had been limited, for the most part, to so-called “peripheral biennales”: the will to supersede the concept of “Euro-Americanism” by championing the alternative project of a “beyond Euro-America”. Along these lines, Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg published The Global Art World. Audiences, Markets, and Museums in 2009, an exploration of the different processes of global art production. In this volume, Belting and Buddensieg distinguished between the concept of “World Art” and “global art”, the former referring to the world heritage of art spanning all periods and countries; the latter denoting a contemporary development of art that, like a phoenix, rises from the ashes of modern art towards the end of the twentieth century in clear opposition to the highly valued ideals of progress and hegemony.