The Effects of Globalization on Art and Aesthetics

Félix-Jäger, Steven

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-29706-0_3

The Effects of Globalization on Art and Aesthetics

Steven Félix-Jäger²

Chapter
First Online: 03 December 2019

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Abstract

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

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Notes

1.
Noël Carroll, “Art and Globalization: Then and Now,” in Susan Feagin, Ed., Global Theories of the Arts and Aesthetics (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 132.
2.
Carroll, “Art and Globalization: Then and Now,” 132.
3.
Carroll, “Art and Globalization: Then and Now,” 136.
4.
Carroll, “Art and Globalization: Then and Now,” 136.
5.
For instance, Caroline Jones says that the transnational suggests a moving beyond a singular world picture and has entered into a pluralistic era with several coexisting world pictures. Caroline Jones, The Global Work of Art: World Fairs, Biennials, and the Aesthetics of Experience (Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 2016), 159.
6.
Myers, Engaging Globalization, 37.
7.
Myers, Engaging Globalization, 37.
8.
Manfred Steger, The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 10–11.
9.
Myers, Engaging Globalization, 38.
10.
Tommaso Durante, “On the Global Imaginary: Visualizing and Interpreting Aesthetics of Global Change in Melbourne, Australia and Shanghai, People’s Republic of China,” The Global Studies Journal, Vol. 8, No. 5 (2015), 19.
11.
Caroline Jones, “Globalism/Globalization,” in James Elkins, Zhivka Valiavicharska, and Alice Kim, Eds., Art and Globalization (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 130.
12.
Jones, “Globalism/Globalization,” 134.
13.
Akshaya Kumar “The Aesthetics of Pirate Modernities: Bhojpuri Cinema and the Underclasses,” in Raminder Kaur and Parul Dave-Mukherji, Eds., Arts and Aesthetics in a Globalizing World (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 1.
14.
Myers, Engaging Globalization, 69.
15.
Myers, Engaging Globalization, 74–76.
16.
Myers, Engaging Globalization, 79.
17.
Gregory Clark and Robert Feenstra, “Technology in the Great Divergence,” in Michael Bordo, Alan Taylor, and Jeffrey Williamson, Globalization in Historical Perspective (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003), 298.
18.
Nina Möntmann, “Narratives of Belonging: On the Relation of the Art Institution and the Changing Nation-State,” in James Elkins, Zhivka Valiavicharska, and Alice Kim, Eds., Art and Globalization (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 162.
19.
Walter Mignolo, “Museums in the Colonial Horizon of Modernity: Fred Wilson’s Mining of the Museum (1992),” in Jonathan Harris, Ed., Globalization and Contemporary Art (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 71.
20.
Möntmann, “Narratives of Belonging,” 161.
21.
Myers, Engaging Globalization, 89.
22.
Myers, Engaging Globalization, 98.
23.
Myers, Engaging Globalization, 100.
24.
Myers, Engaging Globalization, 101.
25.
Iftikhar Dadi, “Globalization and Transnational Modernism,” in James Elkins, Zhivka Valiavicharska, and Alice Kim, Eds., Art and Globalization (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 183–184.
26.
Dadi, “Globalization and Transnational Modernism,” 186–187.
27.
Caroline Jones, The Global Work of Art: World’s Fairs, Biennials, and the Aesthetics of Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 3.
28.
Jones, The Global Work of Art, 3.
29.
Claudette Lauzon, “Reluctant Nomads: Biennial Culture and Its Discontents,” RACAR, Vol. 36, No. 2 (2011), 16.
30.
Jerry Saltz, “Biennial Culture,” Artnet, http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/saltz/saltz7-2-07.asp (accessed June 15, 2018).
31.
Charles Green and Anthony Gardner, Biennials, Triennials, and documenta: The Exhibition that Created Contemporary Art (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 6.
32.
Green and Gardner, Biennials, Triennials, and documenta, 276.
33.
Caroline Jones, The Global Work of Art: World’s Fairs, Biennials, and the Aesthetics of Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 83.
34.
Green and Gardner, Biennials, Triennials, and documenta, 49.
35.
Although a proper noun, the term is stylized with the lower case “d” in “documenta 5.”
36.
Green and Gardner, Biennials, Triennials, and documenta, 20.
37.
Green and Gardner, Biennials, Triennials, and documenta, 33.
38.
Green and Gardner, Biennials, Triennials, and documenta, 33.
39.
Green and Gardner, Biennials, Triennials, and documenta, 41.
40.
Jones, The Global Work of Art, 114.
41.
Green and Gardner, Biennials, Triennials, and documenta, 81–82.
42.
Green and Gardner, Biennials, Triennials, and documenta, 113.
43.
Green and Gardner, Biennials, Triennials, and documenta, 255.
44.
Green and Gardner, Biennials, Triennials, and documenta, 150.
45.
Jones, The Global Work of Art, 93.
46.
Jones, The Global Work of Art, 94.
47.
Green and Gardner, Biennials, Triennials, and documenta, 260.
48.
Jones, The Global Work of Art, 198.
49.
David Craven, “Institutionalized Globalization, Contemporary Art, and the Corporate Gulag in Chile,” in Jonathan Harris, Ed., Globalization and Contemporary Art (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 492.
50.
Kelly Richman-Abdou, “7 Most Important Art Fairs People Travel Across the World to See,” My Modern Met (2018) https://mymodernmet.com/art-fairs/ (accessed January 12, 2019).
51.
Alain Quemin, “International Contemporary Art Fairs in a ‘Globalized’ Art Market,” European Societies, Vol. 15, No. 2 (2013), 170.
52.
Christine Morgner, “The Art Fair as Network,” The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, Vol. 44 (2014), 38.
53.
Morgner, “The Art Fair as Network,” 43.
54.
Quemin, “International Contemporary Art Fairs in a ‘Globalized’ Art Market,” 174.
55.
Quemin, “International Contemporary Art Fairs in a ‘Globalized’ Art Market,” 172.
56.
Quemin, “International Contemporary Art Fairs in a ‘Globalized’ Art Market,” 170–171.
57.
I would add the philosophy of art to this list.
58.
James Elkins, “Introduction: Art History as a Global Discipline,” in James Elkins, Ed., Is Art History Global (London: Routledge, 2007), 16–20.
59.
Blake Gopnik, “The Oxymoron of Global Art,” in James Elkins, Zhivka Valiavicharska, and Alice Kim, Eds., Art and Globalization (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 146.
60.
Gopnik, “The Oxymoron of Global Art,” 146.
61.
Melvin DeFleur, Mass Communication Theories: Explaining Origins, Processes, and Effects (London: Routledge, 2016), 301.
62.
“Indestructible Object,” MoMA Learning, https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/man-ray-indestructible-object-1964-replica-of-1923-original (accessed June 14, 2018).
63.
“About Survival Research Labs,” Survival Research Laboratories, http://www.srl.org/about.html (accessed January 12, 2019).
64.
“Cai Guo-Qiang: The Artist Who ‘Paints’ With Explosives,” CNN Style, https://www.cnn.com/style/article/cai-guo-qiang-explosive-art/index.html (accessed June 14, 2018).
65.
Jonathan Jones, “Who’s the Vandal: Ai Weiwei or the Man Who Smashed His Han Urn?” The Guardian (2014), https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2014/feb/18/ai-weiwei-han-urn-smash-miami-art (accessed June 14, 2018).
66.
Jones, The Global Work of Art, 152.
67.
Jones, The Global Work of Art, 153–154.
68.
Victor Roudometof, Glocalization: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2016), 124.
69.
James Elkins, Section 8 of the Seminars, in James Elkins, Zhivka Valiavicharska, and Alice Kim, Eds., Art and Globalization (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 2010), 98–99.
70.
For a discussion about other options beyond the global or glocal, see Roudometof, Glocalization (London: Routledge, 2016). Roudometof discusses other terms such as “hybridity,” “creole,” and “mestizaje,” stating that these are sometimes used to discuss contemporary art as well, but they have their limitations. Hybridity refers to the mixing of two streams, but does not account for the origin of the streams (14). Creole and Mestizaje discuss the mixing of a native group with immigrant groups. These are also too limiting since most people experience the global from the vantage point of a dominant, and not mixed, heritage.
71.
Roudometof, Glocalization, 2.
72.
“Glocal,” Oxford Dictionary, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/glocal (accessed June 18, 2018).
73.
Thierry de Duve, “The Glocal and the Singuniversal: Reflection on Art and Culture in the Global World,” Third Text, Vol. 21, No. 6 (2007) 683.
74.
de Duve, “The Glocal and the Singuniversal,” 683.
75.
Roudometof, Glocalization, 49.
76.
Roudometof, Glocalization, 64.
77.
Roudometof, Glocalization, 64.
78.
Hal Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer,” in George Marcus and Fred Myers, Eds., The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 304.
79.
Nermin Saybasili, “Gesturing No(w)here,” in Jonathan Harris, Ed., Globalization and Contemporary Art (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 410.
80.
This idea will be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter.
81.
Roudometof, Glocalization, 76.
82.
Kathleen Marie Higgins, “Global Aesthetics – What Can We Do?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 75, No. 4 (2017), 339.
83.
Additionally, Higgins argues that the very term “global aesthetics” is problematic. The fact that aesthetics is modified with a qualifier (global) implies that a “global aesthetics” is not an aesthetics proper (340). Since aesthetics as a field of particular philosophical inquiry arose in the West, Western aesthetics has long been equated with aesthetics proper. Qualifying the more particular sense of the term to broaden its semantic range seems backward, however, and ignores the fact that cultures around the world have offered some sort of perceived or construed insight into aesthetical matters. But, as James Elkins points out, the West has indeed established the parameters of the field of aesthetics; hence this odd reversal.
84.
Higgins, “Global Aesthetics,” 342.
85.
Higgins, “Global Aesthetics,” 344.
86.
Higgins, “Global Aesthetics,” 344–345.
87.
This notion will be fleshed out in Chaps. 5 and 6.
88.
Raminder Kaur and Parul Dave-Mukherji, “Introduction,” in Raminder Kaur and Parul Dave-Mukherji, Eds., Arts and Aesthetics in a Globalizing World (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 1.
89.
The “ethnographic turn in art” was an idea initially espoused by Hal Foster in his 1995 essay, “The Artist as Ethnographer.” Foster claims that the subject of art “is now the cultural and/or ethnic other in whose name the artist often struggles” (302). Thus artists seek to uncover identity within and outside of local and immanent orientations.

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Assistant Professor and Chair of the Worship Arts and Media program, Life Pacific University, San Dimas, CA, USA
Steven Félix-Jäger

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

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29706-0_3
Published: 03 December 2019
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-29705-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-29706-0
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