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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: https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2013.816585

Published online: 01 Aug 2013.

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1. Nicos Poulantzas, State,
Power, Socialism, New Left,
London, 1979
Third Text, 2013
Vol. 27, No. 4, 439– 441, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2013.816585
Introduction:
The ABC of Globalization and
Contemporary Art
Jonathan Harris
This selection of essays reflects and problematizes the range of issues,
themes, questions, dilemmas and opportunities posed by the topic of glo-
balization’s 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 auton-
omous 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 con-
tinued 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 doesn’t settle down into a set of dis-
ciplinary orthodoxies able to be reproduced within the universities. The
field or problematic’s relation to both art history and visual studies/
culture programmes remains agreeably opaque: both globalization dis-
course 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
# 2013 Third Text
440
2. Jonathan Harris, ed,
Globalization and
Contemporary Art, Wiley-
Blackwell, 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, Wiley-
Blackwell, Oxford, 2013, pp
246 –286
4. Art Basel’s 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 trans-
lation processes; with anti-globalization dissent and activism; with the
rise of Asian art and economies; with culture and art’s role in global spec-
tacle; 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 world’s 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 – con-
cerns the operation of ideologies of specific models of globalization that
sit alongside, or float majestically above, the actual messiness in the devel-
opment of global relations. That term ‘development’, as I have suggested,
has powerful ideological underpinnings and its still dominant use con-
tinues 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 afflu-
ent 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 consump-
tion. 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, ‘postcolo-
nial’, 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, special-
ized 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

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.
441
still to come ‘from’ China or Korea – that is, to exhibit signs of authentic
difference that help brand it at the international marketplace. To compli-
cate matters, then, the inside/outside dyad is, therefore, both a real intel-
lectual 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
globalization’s conceptual-ideological slippage in general – is key to
the overall concerns of this special edition.
‘Globalization’ remains, most valuably, a hypothesis, or set of hypoth-
eses. 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 Bar-
reiro-Lopez, August Davis, Menene Gras, Anna Maria Guasch and Basia
Sliwinska.