— Pepe Karmel
As an art historian and sometime curator, my version of this question is to ask: how should we teach and exhibit “global” art?
For art prior to around 1870, the answer is relatively unproblematic. Encyclopedic museums in the West have long had departments of East Asian art, South Asian art, etc., devoted to the study of historic art from different regions. And, within the limits of available instructors, art history departments regularly offer courses on these diverse traditions.
The teaching and presentation of global art only become problematic with the emergence of modernism, which—like the philosophy of the Enlightenment—lays claim to universal validity despite its specifically Western origins. After roughly 1870, art made within regional traditions, like Salon painting within the Western tradition, is not considered worthy of study or display.
Historically, the rise of modernism, with abstract painting as its paradigm, presented a conundrum for non-Western artists: either they continued to work in their own traditions, in which case they were ignored as not modern, or they learned to paint abstractly, in which case they were condemned as derivative.
The montage esthetic of postmodernism, with installation as its paradigm, seems to solve this problem, by allowing global artists to incorporate local themes and images into their work. However, it still shunts aside contemporary art made within more traditional formats. The Metropolitan’s 2013 exhibition Ink Art included mostly artists working in postmodern formats, and was very popular; in contrast, the BMFA’s 2010 exhibition Fresh Ink: Ten Takes on Chinese Tradition concentrated on traditional media but attracted little attention.
The tension between these approaches is not limited to the West. Okwui Enwezor’s 1997 Johannesburg Biennale, Trade Routes, was widely admired in the West, but was criticized by South African critics as insufficiently inclusive of work reflecting local traditions. (Sabine Marschall, “The Impact of the Two Johannesburg Biennials,” in The Biennial Reader, 2010, p. 459).
This presents us with a question that is both practical and philosophical: when we study or exhibit “global” art, should the emphasis be on global postmodernism or other forms of global art?
We also need to ask what counts as the relevant context for the study of art from “non-Western” regions. It obviously needs to be understood within the particular contexts of local histories and cultures. But do we also need to place it within the contexts of global history and the global economy?
It seems striking that the epoch of modernist art, 1870-1970, coincides with the period of classical imperialism as defined by Hobson (1903) and Lenin (1917), during which the industrialized nations of the West dominated other regions, limiting them to the roles of exporters of raw materials and consumers of imported manufactured goods. This economic polarization between “advanced” and “backward” nations supported the belief that Western modernism was the sole form of “advanced” art.
Since 1970, much manufacturing has moved to the former Third World, with important effects on both West and non-West. In the West, as Fredric Jameson has argued, the evolution of a postindustrial economy has fostered the emergence of a new postmodernist esthetic. Elsewhere, the regions experiencing industrialization have also seen the emergence of new art movements and new art markets. Meanwhile, there has emerged a tradition of “biennials of resistance” (eg. Havana 1993) opposed to the “hegemony” of modernism on the grounds that it is an expression of “neo-liberal” capitalism.
It seems likely, then that we also need to interpret the “global” art of the modern and postmodern eras as a series of responses to the structures and tensions of the global economy.