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1
To be published in: Art History and Visual Studies in Europe: a handbook. Eds. Matthew Rampley et
al. Leiden: Brill 2010 forthcoming.
World Art Studies
Kitty Zijlmans & Wilfried van Damme
Some contributions to the public encyclopaedic endeavour Wikipedia are prefaced by the following
warning: ‘This entry does not have a worldwide focus.’ Reflecting a growing awareness in our
globalizing era of the need for a worldwide perspective in scholarship, this caveat is attached to entries
that could reasonably be said to require treatment across cultures and throughout time (although it
could equally reasonably be argued that in the end all topics benefit from a discussion in global terms,
for example by putting into relief the topics’ local contingencies). Should a similar warning be issued
against the subject of this volume: the European study of art?
Some scholars would deny that there is a need for such a caution, not because they opine that
European studies of art have a worldwide focus, but because they consider ‘art’ a recent Western
intellectual construct that is by definition a local phenomenon, not a worldwide occurrence in space
and time. Art is conceived in this mental framework as a cultural particularistic concept that describes
not only certain products but the practices, discourses and attitudes that accompany them. Western
conceptualizations and attending practices may, however, influence developments outside the West,
which would require extending one’s inquiries accordingly. Indeed, such an internationalization of
relatively recent Western views on art as an ‘autonomous’ activity, highly individualistic, aiming at
originality, and often produced for an international art market, is precisely what seems to have
happened the last few decades or more – one need but think of the art presented at Biennales across
the globe today. In this process of internationalization, ‘modern’ Western art practices and views have
become entangled with diverse traditions and developments outside the West, creating a variety of
‘other modernities’ in art worldwide.1 Despite this diversity, one presently talks of ‘global art’ that
may be produced anywhere in the world today but that ‘is always created as art to begin with’,2 as
opposed to, say, ‘ethnographic art’, which is seen rather as ‘art by appropriation’, never originally
intended as ‘art’ (whatever the precise interpretation of that concept). This type of global art has also
been referred to recently as ‘international art’ or as Weltgegenwartskunst.3 When European studies of
art do take into account these present-day artistic expressions from all over the globe, they may be said
to display a worldwide focus, albeit predominantly in space, considerably less so in time. Moreover,
emphasis remains on what André Malraux called ‘art by destination’ (as opposed to ‘art by
metamorphosis’), leaving aside a multitude of contemporary visual expressions created in contexts
other than academic art worlds.
Other scholars entertain a broader and more liberal understanding of the English word art and
its equivalents in other Western languages (as in other domains one would pragmatically use such
terms as language, music, religion, politics, etc. to broadly designate or heuristically define particular
fields of human endeavour). Art may then be deployed as an umbrella term to refer to the human
tendency to create, use, and respond to arresting visual images. The term art is thus used to concisely
1
See John Clark, Modern Asian Art (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998).
Hans Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art”, in The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets, and Museums,
ed. Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009) 44.
3
Klaus Volkenandt, ed., Kunstgeschichte und Weltgegenwartskunst: Konzepte, Methoden, Perspektiven (Berlin:
Reimer, 2004).
2
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capture the universal propensity to transform visual media in order to attract beholders’ attention –
through shape, colour, and line, as well as through the subjects, meanings, and emotions that might be
communicated or elicited by arrangements of such stimuli – and to deploy the resulting products in a
variety of religious, political, social, educational, etc. contexts. This is an understanding of human
artistic behaviour and its products that allows for an extension of the study of art not only in space but
also in time, while at the same time allowing one to go beyond the confines of ‘art by destination’.
Following this or related conceptions, it seems safe to say, however, that the European study of art,
and the teaching of its results, has to this day overwhelmingly lacked a worldwide focus, especially
when we consider its institutionalized forms as practiced in art history departments at European
universities. A few provisos, however, are in order.
To begin with, around the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century several German scholars
especially did propose that art scholarship take a global perspective – that it encompass ‘the art of all
times and peoples’, to cite the title of Karl Woermann’s multivolume overview of ‘world art’, first
published between 1900 and 1911.4 The global orientation evident in some German-language art
scholarship in the period between c. 1890 and 1933 has recently been surveyed by Marlite Halbertsma
and Ulrich Pfisterer.5 Pfisterer observes that an openness to the art of the rest of the world, from both
the present and the past, was promoted especially by the nascent field of Kunstwissenschaft (literally,
the science of art), which strove to distinguish itself from the more conventional Kunstgeschichte (the
history of art). Whereas the latter focused on the West, Kunstwissenschaft proposed to investigate art
in the context of humanity as a whole. This proposal was inspired in part by contemporary
developments towards a global perspective in anthropology and psychology, and a positivistic
intellectual climate favouring empirical approaches on a worldwide scale more generally. Pfisterer
situates the intellectual battle between these two fields against the background of the late-nineteenthcentury struggle for the academic institutionalization of the study of art.6 The idea of studying art from
a worldwide perspective, while leading to some interesting publications and arousing considerable
public interest, eventually did not triumph in German academia. Various interrelated factors have been
suggested to explain this lack of success, including shifting intellectual interests, the rise of German
nationalism, and the coming to power in 1933 of the Nazis and their views on Aryan racial and
cultural superiority.7
A second proviso concerns the fact that the situation has started to slowly change at European
universities over the last few years. At the University of East Anglia in Norwich, the School of World
Art Studies and Museology opened its doors in 1992; the art history department of Leiden University
has provided BA students with the opportunity to follow a minor in World Art Studies since 2003, and
has been offering intercultural courses on art within the context of an international Research Master
since 2005; the Institute for Art History at Berlin’s Free University started an MA programme
dedicated to ‘Art History in Global Perspective’, with an emphasis on Asia, in 2008. Similar initiatives
4
Karl Woermann, Die Kunst aller Zeiten und Völker, 6 vols (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1900-1911).
Marlite Halbertsma, “The Many Beginnings and One End of World Art History in Germany, 1900-1933”, in
World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches, ed. Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried van Damme
(Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008); Ulrich Pfisterer, “Origins and Principles of World Art History: 1900 (and 2000)”, in
World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches, ed. Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried van Damme
(Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008).
6
Pfisterer, “Origins and Principles of World Art History: 1900 (and 2000)” 71.
5
7
Halbertsma, “The Many Beginnings and One End of World Art History in Germany, 1900-1933” 103,
Pfisterer, “Origins and Principles of World Art History: 1900 (and 2000)” 83-4.
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are being developed elsewhere in Europe, including the University of Sussex and Copenhagen
University.8
This essay considers the question of how such initiatives towards a worldwide perspective in
the study of art might be conceptually framed. It will also consider several topics of research that seem
relevant once we start looking at the visual arts as a global phenomenon in time and space. To these
ends, this contribution will briefly introduce the idea of ‘world art studies’ and three extensive themes
of investigation that might be pursued within this paradigmatic context. World art studies will also be
positioned within the contemporary debate on art and globalization, and related to the cognate field of
postcolonial art studies . As a preliminary remark, we suggest that readers interpret world art studies as
world art studies. In this way one might avoid the intimation that this field deals with world art
studies, at least if the term ‘world art’ is conceived to designate not the art of the whole world in time
and space, but to refer, in what has been called a ‘modernist’ and ‘colonialist’ fashion, to all the
world's art except for modern Western art, and today's global or international art.9
World art studies, world art history, and global art history
The concept of world art studies was coined in the early 1990s by John Onians, a professor of art
history at the University of East Anglia in the UK. It was Onians also who suggested that this new
field of study be not only global in orientation but multidisciplinary in approach.10 The
multidisciplinary character that world art studies is developing, ranging from neuroscience to
anthropology to philosophy, is one major way in which this nascent field distinguishes itself from
related fields that are emerging today, specifically ‘world art history’ and ‘global art history’. The
emphasis on multidisciplinarity brings world art studies in fact closer to yet another recent
development, namely Bildwissenschaft or ‘image-ology’, which equally draws on a variety of relevant
scholarly disciplines in its examination of visual images.11
There is presently some conceptual confusion as to the meaning of the qualifiers ‘world’ and
‘global’ in relation to ‘art history’. One way to approach this problem is to take a lead from historian
Bruce Mazlish's use of the term ‘global history’ in distinction to ‘world history’.12 Mazlish suggests
that ‘global history’ distinguish itself from ‘world history’ by concentrating on recent historical
phenomena that reflect and affect a truly globalized, interconnected world. Examples would include
the United Nations, established in 1945, but also for instance the recent development of ‘world music’,
or the rise of a globalized economy with its multinational corporations and environmental problems on
a worldwide scale. By analogy with Mazlish’s suggestion, one could propose that ‘global art history’
focus on worldwide and interrelated artistic developments in the present and the recent past.13 ‘World
art history’, by contrast, would then take into account the art of the whole of human history,14 with the
exception, perhaps, of the globalized art worlds of the last few decades (which would then be the
domain of ‘global art history’). Incidentally, one disadvantage of the label ‘world art history’,
8
See James Elkins, “Can We Invent A World Art Studies?”, in World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and
Approaches, ed. Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried van Damme (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008) 109.
9
See Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art” 41-4.
10
John Onians, “World Art Studies and the Need for a New Natural History of Art”, Art Bulletin 78 (1996).
11
See, for example, Klaus Sachs-Hombach, ed., Bildwissenschaft: Disziplinen, Themen, Methoden (Frankfurt a.
M.: Surhkamp, 2005).
12
Bruce Mazlish, “An Introduction to Global History”, in Conceptualizing Global History, ed. Bruce Mazlish
and Ralph Buultjens (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993).
13
But see Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art” 44.
14
In one recent and prominent use of the term, however, world art history is limited to ‘the West’ and
‘the East’, David Carrier, A World Art History and Its Objects (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania
State Univerity Press, 2008).
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acknowledged by some of its proponents,15 is the use of ‘history’ in the singular, potentially
suggesting one homogeneous ‘story of art’ on a worldwide scale – hence also the plural Stories of Art
of the title of James Elkins's book of 2002, exploring the question of whether or not the study of art's
history might become more ‘multicultural’.16
World art studies shares the topics and concerns now being examined in the developing field
of world art history, albeit world art studies tends to construe the investigation of its issues, when
appropriate, in interdisciplinary terms (calling on, say, evolutionary cognitive psychology or social
anthropology, as the case may be). World art studies, being concerned with art in all its manifestations
across time and space, pays attention also to the topics of what has been suggested might be called
global art history. World art studies may then add to the examination of these topics through the
comprehensive perspective it offers not only in space but in time. It may thus, for example, situate
recent international developments in art within the context of encounters and exchanges between art
traditions that have occurred previously in humanity's past.
World art studies: three initial topics of investigation
Through its combined global and multidisciplinary approach, world art studies is creating a new
framework or vantage point in the study of art from which to raise many new questions and address
older ones afresh. In order to provisionally guide research is this budding field of research, the present
authors have recently suggested that world art studies take on three basic themes of investigation that
seem relevant once we start looking at the visual arts as a worldwide phenomenon across cultures and
throughout history.17 These three extensive themes may be discussed here briefly.
The first of these concerns the earliest manifestations of art in human existence. This theme
leads to examining questions such as: When and where did visual artistic behaviour first emerge in the
evolution of Homo sapiens? What conditions made this behaviour possible – physical, mental, social,
cultural? Why has the making and using of visual art been retained in the evolution of our species?
After decades of relative neglect, the issue of art's origins is today hotly debated by specialists from an
ever growing range of disciplines, including not only archaeology and art history, but cultural
anthropology, evolutionary biology and neuroscience. One important impetus to rejuvenating the
study of the origins of art are the archaeological discoveries that have recently been made in Africa.
These discoveries prompt us completely to reconsider early artistic behaviour in terms of both time
and place. Indeed, it is now known that, rather than in Europe some 35,000 years ago, the oldest
known types of visual artistic behaviour, in the form of bead production and the creation of geometric
patterns, are to be found in Africa some 100,000 years ago. There are even indications that
anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) may have already created sculptures and paintings
before they left Africa to colonize the rest of the world perhaps some 65,000 years ago. Adding
excitement to the field are various new, multidisciplinary theories attempting to explain the emergence
of human art-making. These include David Lewis-Williams’s neuropsychological theory suggesting
that the first images were created to record hallucinations of geometric patterns and animals as
experienced by shamans in a state of trance.18 An alternative account of Palaeolithic animal imagery
15
See, for example, David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism
(London: Phaidon, 2003) 12.
16
James Elkins Stories of Art (New York: Routlegde, 2002). See also James Elkins, ed., Is Art History Global?
(New York: Routlegde, 2007).
17
See Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried van Damme, eds, World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches
(Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008).
18
David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Orgins of Art (London: Thames and
Hudson, 2002).
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has recently been provided by R. Dale Guthrie, who argues that such imagery resulted from their
creators’ profanely inspired fascination with the local wildlife.19
The second theme deals with the intercultural comparison of art in its context. The idea of
comparing art in disparate human settings worldwide is a theoretically complicated and even
controversial issue, involving conceptual, epistemological, and methodological problems. Indeed,
some scholars deny the very possibility of intercultural comparison on the grounds that cultures and
their art forms are incommensurable. They assume that each culture constitutes a closed conceptual
and semantic universe that is sufficiently idiosyncratic to make comparisons with other cultures
unwarranted (at least beyond the point of this ‘comparative’ conclusion). Scholars who do
epistemologically allow intercultural comparisons to be made, face the problem of having to devise a
conceptual apparatus that is ‘culturally neutral’ enough to be used in intercultural analyses.
Specifically, they face the challenge of defining a tertium comparationis. This means they have to
circumscribe the actual object of comparative analysis in such a manner that the researcher’s cultural
bias is minimized and a heuristic starting point is provided for an examination across cultural
boundaries in time and space. In addition to these epistemological and conceptual considerations, one
also has to think about formulating proper methods for comparing artistic phenomena interculturally
(for example avoiding decontextualized analyses). Intercultural comparison thus faces many
theoretical challenges, yet it also holds the promise of elucidating a whole range of fundamental
questions concerning the place and role of the visual arts in human existence. The topics of
comparison are manifold, and may range from the more tangible to the more conceptual: from
materials and techniques to the various contexts of art's use to aesthetic evaluation and philosophies of
art. Aside from the topics to be investigated, intercultural comparison can take many forms, in terms
of scope, method, and goal. Comparisons may be regional or global, synchronic or diachronic, or
feature a combination of these. Intercultural comparison can proceed inductively, when cross-cultural
data are examined in order to arrive at generalizations, but it may also have a more deductive flavour,
when hypotheses concerning the visual arts are tested by drawing on available data from a variety of
cultures. Intercultural comparative analysis may aim at highlighting differences, but it can also seek to
establish commonalities on various levels of analysis. As an example of intercultural comparison in
art, one may refer to J. Borgatti’s study of portraits worldwide. Conceiving of a portrait (her tertium
comparationis) as any visual creation that references a specific human being, Borgatti’s comparative
examination across space and time has led to an intercultural classification that consists of three basic
types of portraits. In her analysis she distinguishes between representational portraits (which present a
physiognomic likeness of an individual), generic portraits (stereotypical depictions that may be
individualized by various means, including context of presentation, the addition of personal
belongings, and inscriptions), and emblematic portraits (which refer to an individual by way of
characteristic emblems or attributes).20
The third theme concerns interculturalization in the arts. This refers to the artistic influences
that are exerted by one culture or tradition on another, or the mutual artistic cross-fertilization that
takes place between two or more such analytical entities. Indeed, the concept of interculturalization
(also used is ‘transculturation’) intends to avoid the connotation of one-way traffic that has become
attached to the older concept of acculturation, by describing a potentially two-way process of cultural,
in this case specifically artistic, exchanges between socio-cultural settings. Artistic exchanges between
cultures have obviously become vary salient in recent years, yet such exchanges have been occurring
in one form or another for most of human history. The processes of visual artistic exchange between
19
R. Dale Guthrie, The Nature of Paleolithic Art (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005).
See Jean M. Borgatti and Richard Brilliant, Likeness and Beyond: Portraits from Africa and the World (New
York: Museum for African Art, 1990).
20
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two or more cultures or contexts may be analysed on various levels. Thus one may focus on the
preconditions of intercultural exchanges, which would include attention to both the availability of
external artistic sources and individuals' willingness and motivations to incorporate such sources.
People's agency in the processes of intercultural exchange also constitutes a varied topic of
examination (artistic influences are selectively incorporated, adaptated, disseminated, and so on). The
analysis should of course be geared as well at the resulting artistic products, giving attention not only
to the nature of the observable influences but the impact and role of these objects in the setting in
which they occur. Such an analytic framework may then be deployed to investigate the traffic of
artistic influences going to and from a giving locality (from China, Korea, and Europe to Japan, from
Japan to Europe, and so on).
In today’s globalizing world, processes of interculturalization in the arts occur on an
unprecedented scale. Globalization, however, implies not only a greatly increased cross-fertilization
between various artistic traditions per se, but a host of related phenomena in the realm of art. These
include the globalization of the art world and the art market, the institutionalization of contemporary
art worldwide, and changing museum policies regarding the presentation and representation of art
from around the globe. Globalization also implies such phenomena as the contemporary artist’s
nomadism, cultures’ increased awareness of their artistic heritage, and a growing interest in writing
both local and intercultural art histories. These issues not only make up the complex field of
contemporary practices and discourses of art in a global context; as objects of scholarly investigation
they are also part of the field of world art studies.
Studying (Contemporary) Art in A Global Context
For some two decades now, a number of interrelated developments fuel the study of contemporary art
as a worldwide phenomenon. The first one is the recent acknowledgement that the global landscape of
modern art derives its diversity from the emergence of a multitude of modernities in art all over the
world in the course of the past century and a half. Each of them is constituted by different reactions to
the past, in which the Western concept of Modernism is seen as an important incentive, but not as the
sole source.21 A similar tendency to nuance the assumption that the West is constitutive of
developments in art outside of Euro-America, and to break away from the concomitant and simplistic
binary of the West versus the Non-West, can be observed in postcolonial studies.
Within the mapping of world art studies, postcolonial studies can be seen as an approach
which is particularly concerned with the impact of colonialism and its aftermath on art and culture.
From the late 1970s onwards, postcolonial studies, exploring the various aspects (cultural, historical,
political and economic) of the colonial encounter between the West and other cultures and how it has
shaped the world, has gained much ground; it has grown into a field of discourse which is as vast as it
is heterogeneous. Set in motion by scholars such as Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Stuart Hall and Homi
Bhabha22, Postcolonial Studies is best described as a site of numerous investigations from many
21
See Clark, Modern Asian Art; see alos Geeta Kapur, When was Modernism? Essays on contemporary Cultural
Practices in India (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2000).
22
Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) wrote amongst others Black Skin, White Masks (Peau Noire, masques blancs, Paris:
Seuil, 1952; English transl. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1968), an analysis of colonial subjugation on
humankind, and The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la Terre published shortly after his death in 1961,
English translation London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1965) on decolonization. Edward Said (1935-2003) was
groundbreaking with his studies Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan, 1978) and Culture and Imperialism
(London: Vintage 2003). Stuart Hall (* 1932), cultural theorist, is one of the founding fathers of Cultural Studies
(focusing on cultural identity, race and ethnicity) and gave an important incentive to Postcolonial Studies. See
amongst others: Representation. Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (London et
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disciplines and theoretical perspectives, studying issues such as the formation of empires, colonizing
and decolonizing practices, postcolonial history, culture and economy, the cultural productions of
colonized societies, of marginalized people, etc.23 It is predominantly a critical perspective
investigating power relations in various contexts and executed by an increasing number of scholars
from non-Euro-American countries.
One might suggest that the awareness of the postcolonial perspective in art and the
contemporary art production of the so-called ‘non-Western’ world was triggered – however belatedly –
by the debate following from the exhibition “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art (New York 1984) and
it’s equally contested response Magiciens de la Terre (Paris 1989). 24 Although “Primitivism” aimed at
showing the affinities between Western modern art and so-called tribal art, not intending to downgrade
the so-called tribal art25, the overall reception of the exhibition was negative, criticizing its organizer
William S. Rubin for presenting tribal art merely as source material for the triumphant Modern
(Western) Art. 26 To avoid stepping into the same trap, for Magiciens the French curator Jean-Hubert
Martin invited contemporary artists from both the Western and the non-Western world to jointly
exhibit their work in Paris in 1989. Fierce criticism pointed at the white, Western male connoisseur
who claimed the authority to select the artists from all over the world, and who ended up presenting
warn-out stereotypes of a culturally grounded ‘non-West’ versus a sophisticated, conceptual ’West’ and
leaving out the unequal economic and power relations between the West and the rest of the world.27
Martin was even accused of cultural imperialism.28 Except for his scathing judgment of the exhibition
in the Third Text, Rasheed Araeen29 responded right away with a counter exhibition The Other Story.
Afro-Asian Artists in Post-war Britain (London, South bank Centre 1990), showing contemporary
artists of mixed cultural background living in the UK, instead of going for the ‘exotic’. However much
criticism the exhibitions Primitivism and Magiciens received, they, and especially the latter, have
caused an avalanche of exhibitions all over the world and an ongoing discourse on modern and
contemporary art worldwide that continues to this very day. 30 At present, not only postcolonial studies
is taking part in the debate on contemporary art and the global, but also the disciplines of art history
and visual studies as well as museum studies.
Consequently, approaching contemporary art and the global beyond the binary ‘West’ – ‘nonWest’ is evident in a number of recent books which examine globalization in art. Examples are for
instance Geeta Kapur’s When was Modernism? (New Delhi 2000) and the recently published volume
Contemporary African Art since 1980, edited by the Nigerian-born scholars Okwui Enwezor and
Chika Okeke-Agulu, which investigates contemporary African art against the background of the major
al.: Sage 1997). Homi Bhabha (*1949) is an Indian postcolonial theorist. A pioneering work is The Location of
Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), reprinted 2005 with an new preface by the author.
23
For a first attempt to an overview of theoretical concepts and issues, see: Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and
Helen Tiffin, eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. (London/New York: Routledge, 1995)
24
“Primitivism” in 20th Century Art. Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, New York, Museum of Modern Art,
1984 curated by William S. Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe was followed five years later by Magiciens de la Terre,
Paris, Centre Pompidou and the Grande Halle de la Vilette. In this exhibition curator Jean-Hubert Martin aimed
at showing contemporary artists from all over the world on an equal basis claiming that art is not exclusively a
‘Western’ thing.
25
See: William S. Rubin, ed., “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art. Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. New
York: The Museum of Modern Art , 1984 (2 Volumes).
26
See for example Thomas McEvilley, “Doctor Lawyer Indian Chief, ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art” at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York’, in: Artforum International, No. 3 (1984).
27
“Thomas McEvilley on the Global Issue”, in: Artforum International, No.3 (1990).
28
Fischer, Jean, “Invisible Histories: Magiciens de la Terre,”, in: Artforum International 28 (1989) 158-61.
29
A landmark in discussing the exhibition Magiciens is Rasheed Araeen’s “Our Bauhaus, Others’ Mudhouse”,
in: the Third Text, No. 6 (Spring 1989) 3-16.
30
A case in point is the Documenta 11 exhibition of contemporary art in Kassel (Germany) in 2002 organized
for the first time by a non-Euro-American curator, the Nigerian born Okwui Enwezor.
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political and social changes of the period of decolonization, and a shifting perspective on and
eventually the dissolving of the construct of centre/periphery. These studies position artists in global
contexts and no longer in the binary of the ‘West and the Rest’.31
This quest for the revision of art history is only gaining ground. As people and places all over
the globe become more and more interconnected, art history, too, ‘should attend not just to local
questions, but to their larger, global dimensions’.32 The 1108 pages of the proceedings of the 32nd
International Congress in the History of Art (CIHA), from which this quote is taken, testify to a more
global awareness than any of the previous CIHA congresses. The basic question of the congress was:
what happens in the realm of art when one culture encounters another? This query was expressed by
the congress's title ‘Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence’, suggesting the opening
up of the discipline to the world once more – once more, considering the global orientation of the
discipline in its early beginnings in late-nineteenth-century Germany (as mentioned above), yet this
time in totally different circumstances. In addition to the numerous empirical perspectives, angles, and
case studies in the proceedings, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s section on 'The Idea of World Art
History' deals with methodological and ideological perspectives. Each of the contributions to this
section scrutinizes the way in which art can be addressed when viewed from a global frame of
reference, for example when seen from the margins (at the same time asking critically who it is that
defines these ‘margins’). The 2008 CIHA conference clearly shows major changes in thinking about
what constitutes the boundaries of the fields of art history and visual studies as well as a shift towards
world art studies.
A second change that is becoming visible, is a shift of focus in the study of art from the
modern to the contemporaneous, prompted by the vast contemporary art production worldwide.
Subject for debate is the notion of contemporaneity itself, referring to a shift away from modernism to
the conditions of the here and now and the way in which art alludes to the multiplicity of being in
space and time today.33 Contemporary world art studies would then imply an examination of art that is
contemporaneous and created by a diverse group of artists worldwide, basing their work on a variety
of local, regional, and intercultural artistic sources. This worldwide production of art operates in
opposition to the concept of art of traditional Western art history, ‘as it aims to reclaim equality
without the former borders separating art from indigenous and popular production’.34 This would also
imply a reconsideration of the structure and programmes of art museums as well as museums of
anthropology.
This brings us to a third major issue: the role of the museum in deciding which art is to be
presented and collected worldwide. Not only will Western museums of modern art and of
anthropology have to rethink their selection criteria and collection strategies in order to meet the needs
of the globalizing world of today, also museums outside the West are confronted with this challenge.
In all these cases, traditional notions of ‘the West’, of ‘non-Western’ art, of nationally defined versus
tribal cultures, etc., are to be critically assessed and revised. A new vocabulary and new presentation
31
Geeta Kapur, When was Modernism? Essays on contemporary Cultural Practices in India (New Delhi: Tulika
Books, 2000); Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu, eds, Contemporary African Art since 1980 (Bologna:
Damiani, 2009).
32
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, “Section: The Idea of World Art History”, in Crossing Cultures: Conflict,
Migration and Convergence: The Proceedings of the 32nd International Congress in the History of Art, ed. Jaynie
Anderson (Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 2009) 72.
33
Terry Smith, “Writing the History of Contemporary Art”, in Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and
Convergence. The Proceedings of the 32nd International Congress in the History of Art, ed. Jaynie Anderson,
Jaynie (Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 2009).
34
Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art”, 48.
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are needed, fuelled by an interconnected local/global input.35 The identification of the art concept as
solely a Western phenomenon not longer holds; instead the emphasis is on regionally and locally
connected art worlds and their multiple notions of art and culture.36
Of importance regarding the globalization of art, finally, is the study of the role of the art
market and of art-world systems, both locally and on a global scale, and more particularly, how these
markets and systems are related, and what the forces are behind decision making in cultural matters
worldwide.37 World trade, labour market and money flows are constituents of the art world where art is
seen not so much as a concept but as a commodity.
Interestingly, many contemporary art works discuss and criticize precisely these power plays and
intricacies of politics and economy. Contemporary art can therefore be seen as a school of study
opening up many vistas on the world, be it local and site-specific or more general and toughing upon
world issues such as global trade, the environment, or the migration of people. Seen as physical sites
of encounter, the artworks act as agents to stimulate discussion and exchange, and to incite further
exploration of the themes and subject matter presented. As forms of cultural analysis themselves, the
artworks then engage the viewer into a search for his/her connection to the world. In that respect,
contemporary art from around the globe is as explorative an investigation of being human as is world
art studies.
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