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Introduction: The ABC of Globalization and

Contemporary Art
Jonathan Harris
To cite this article: Jonathan Harris (2013) Introduction: The ABC of Globalization and
Contemporary Art, Third Text, 27:4, 439-441, DOI: 10.1080/09528822.2013.816585
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2013.816585

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Third Text, 2013

Vol. 27, No. 4, 439 441, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2013.816585

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Introduction:
The ABC of Globalization and
Contemporary Art
Jonathan Harris

1. Nicos Poulantzas, State,

Power, Socialism, New Left,
London, 1979

This selection of essays reflects and problematizes the range of issues,

themes, questions, dilemmas and opportunities posed by the topic of globalizations relation to contemporary art. The competing alternative
titular locutions and categories themselves remain productively jarring:
(A) Globalization put on one side and Contemporary Art on the
other with the possibility of the latter being seen as distinct, even autonomous from whatever Globalization is held to be); (B) Globalized Art
a set of integral practices transformed, penetrated, corrupted even, but
certainly fixed by external socio-economic processes and interests; (C)
the Global Art World understood as a form-specific condensation of
the globalized body politic, with the presupposition that some stability
has been reached and that the entity (as Nicos Poulantzas claimed
about the state) had both attained real discursive autonomy and yet continued to embody/embed the class struggle motoring late capitalist social
development.1
At this point in the eruption of discourse on globalization I hesitate
to call this process evolutionary or developmental, particularly loaded
as these terms are there remains a need for these A, B and Cs to be held
in some kind of mutual critical relation of both possibility and disavowal.
That is to say, this field or problematic of study will remain interesting,
even urgently useful, for as long as it doesnt settle down into a set of disciplinary orthodoxies able to be reproduced within the universities. The
field or problematics relation to both art history and visual studies/
culture programmes remains agreeably opaque: both globalization discourse in its epistemological untidiness and much of contemporary art
itself arguably outrun art history in their new knowledge productivities.
Conventional academics, that is, do not know what to do with either and
this is helping to keep creative investigation and analysis going.
The essays that comprise this issue deal, then, with biennales and
art fairs; with artists and critics continent-hopping itineracies; with
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2. Jonathan Harris, ed,

Globalization and
Contemporary Art, WileyBlackwell, Oxford, 2011
3. Jonathan Harris, Mother
Nature on the Run:
Austerity-Globalist
Depletions in the 1970s,
Chapter 6 in Harris, The
Utopian Globalists: Artists
of Worldwide Revolution,
1919 2009, WileyBlackwell, Oxford, 2013, pp
246 286
4. Art Basels recent acquisition
of the Hong Kong Art Fair is
an important development in
the further monopolization
of Asian contemporary art
market mechanisms by
Western gatekeeper
organizations.

West East post-Cold War cultural stand-offs, with colonizing and translation processes; with anti-globalization dissent and activism; with the
rise of Asian art and economies; with culture and arts role in global spectacle; and with the gender-specific characteristics of labour in art and the
globalized neoliberal division of production and consumption practices.
Where does global/ized art come from? The term from has, of course,
been problematized in accounts of globalization, but its sense as
meaning of somewhere actually different has not become redundant,
though the kinds and grounds of difference have certainly drastically
altered. Including new voices from places other than those within the
global art worlds European and North American heartlands is harder
to do than it may initially sound. As I found when trying to commission
writers for my 2011 edited collection Globalization and Contemporary
Art, maintaining regular internet contact with people in some parts of
the world is actually difficult those based in Central American countries
being the chief example.2
A particularly significant underlying theme in the issue given more
or less direct prominence depending on the objectives of each essay concerns the operation of ideologies of specific models of globalization that
sit alongside, or float majestically above, the actual messiness in the development of global relations. That term development, as I have suggested,
has powerful ideological underpinnings and its still dominant use continues to mystify our understanding of the real globalizing processes
and forces. In the 1950s, as the Cold War grew, it was promoted by
Western democratic-capitalist governments and understood broadly as
a necessary and necessarily singular process, active within both the affluent northern world and in the poorer south. But not only, or centrally,
was this idea an implicit model of preferred socio-economic extension,
with the poorer undeveloped states becoming in time more like those
of the developed north, through industrialization and mass consumption. This notion of development, masquerading as a neutral and
inherently progressive process, actually presumed a continuation of
north-western domination of the world via neo-imperialist, postcolonial, globalization processes reproducing an international division of
labour, resources and power. In this scenario, the southern regions
would advance the quality of life of their own peoples only by servicing
the north-western states through the production of raw materials, specialized food export crops, migrant and unskilled labour and tourism, while
their superior partners would produce advanced technologies and finish
off manufacturing processes.3
The situation in the global and still globalizing economy is certainly
more complicated now than it was in the 1950s in terms especially of
the rise of Asian economies, and the shift of some high-tech production
(and consumption) to Japan, Korea and other nation-states in the
region. The situation of art produced in Asia is another important
case and analogizes, I would say, the fate of art produced anywhere
outside the Western societies of Europe and North America. The same
problem with from, however, plagues outside. The international
markets for contemporary art have been created and cornered by
Western institutions auction houses, dealing galleries, museums and
broadly what might be called, in Althusserian fashion, the art discourse
apparatus.4 Taken together, this global art world power nexus needs art

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5. Boris Groys, On the New,

in Groys, Art Power, MIT
Press, London, 2008, pp
23 42; and Jonathan
Harris, With
Postmodernism Grounded:
Prospects for Renewal in
Critical Art History, in
Harris, ed, Value: Art:
Politics. Criticism, Meaning
and Interpretation after
Postmodernism, Liverpool
University Press, Liverpool,
2007, pp 1 22.

still to come from China or Korea that is, to exhibit signs of authentic
difference that help brand it at the international marketplace. To complicate matters, then, the inside/outside dyad is, therefore, both a real intellectual puzzle and an ideological projection which the players in the
market organize. And sometimes, to complicate matters further, the
players themselves actually believe in the ideology. This suggests that
the idea of authenticity, at the very point of its invention or coinage,
was actually ideological tout court. This dilemma representative of
globalizations conceptual-ideological slippage in general is key to
the overall concerns of this special edition.
Globalization remains, most valuably, a hypothesis, or set of hypotheses. That is, its account of the world, and the world of art, is heuristic
based on empirical, trial and error work. Its reification into a final truth
or set of facts is only an ideological possibility. Modernism suffered this
fate, while Postmodernism has disappeared into the vortex of Theory,
though it occasionally mirages a presence in some attempts to make
sense of art and the world since the 1990s. Along with contemporary,
this cluster of terms still form the field or problematic out of which we
try to make sense of the present, the now, the new, for art, artists and
everyone else.5 These essays help to point out some of the ways in
which the enquiry might lead.
I would like to thank everyone involved in the production of this
special issue, particularly Yvie Andrews, Richard Appignanesi, Paula Barreiro-Lopez, August Davis, Menene Gras, Anna Maria Guasch and Basia
Sliwinska.