Today’s refugee crisis has overstepped the national landscape and become a global issue. At least this is the position of dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, the artist behind the 2017 exhibition Odyssey. Odyssey consists of a wallpaper installation that has been set up at various locations around the world. The cover of this book depicts the 2017 installation at the Zisa Contemporary Arts Zone in Palermo, Italy. Here the wallpaper was spread across the entire surface of the space, propelling people to both tower over and tread on the imagery they came to observe. The content of the wallpaper depicts a fusion of texts and Greco-Roman frieze-style illustrations, spotlighting the historical, political, and social conditions that generate the plight of refugees around the world.1
Concurrent with this and other installations of Odyssey, Ai published two limited-edition prints of the wallpaper for the Public Art Fund, and made them vendible exclusively through eBay. Of these proceeds 100% went to offset the costs of his 2017–2018 citywide public art exhibition Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, which was sponsored by the Public Art Fund and opened across New York City.2 This exhibition consisted of over 300 installations all around the city that dealt with themes of immigration through symbolic displays of fencing and borders. While matters of immigration occupy Ai’s artistic practice, immigration was also a prevalent political issue in the USA at the time. Through Ai’s efforts, New York City became a locus for a rich transnational dialogue regarding a global crisis.
I chose to discuss these works and exhibitions to demonstrate the state of contemporary art in our global age. Ai was able to raise awareness of a growing global issue by utilizing global networks (eBay) and local, independent resources (Public Art Fund) to give voice to a pertinent issue affecting millions of people worldwide. He utilized local, transnational, and global means to tell a story to the widest audience possible. All of this transpired in our age of globalization, and was only possible because of the cultural and technological innovations of our present condition.
Today we live in an interconnected world that weaves together cultural elements including customs, traditions, languages, ethics, religions, economic systems, governments, and the arts into an intricate, global, ever-expanding, cultural tapestry, and our understanding of the world is profoundly shaped by the interlaced, sometimes divergent, relations between social systems. Sometimes the tapestry (to carry on the metaphor) gets so complex that it loses its sense of balance, creating either knots or holes, but if one goes just a few inches in any direction, the interlacing resumes unbroken. The cultural tapestry is thus unavoidable, and the social interactions that transpire in this complex global milieu demark the new collective condition that we have entered—that of a global pluralistic age. This new condition affects every aspect of worldmaking, including the way distinct perceptions of reality are cultivated. This book focuses on the way globalization has affected the ways we understand art today.
In recent years, an abundance of literature has confronted the multifaceted effects of globalization to local and traditional locales.3 Many of these studies, however, focus on the economic side of globalization, addressing the cultural upheavals that emerge out of a new global economy. And although money drives the preponderance of what is affected, scholarship has begun to address globalization’s effects on art criticism and history.4 Among the more influential leaders of this endeavor are critic/historians James Elkins, Hans Belting, and Caroline Jones. Another great driver for much of the discussion surrounding contemporary art, globalization, and postcolonial studies is the journal Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture. Third Text was founded and established as an international journal in 1987 by artist, writer, and critic Rasheed Araeen, as a journal that would deal with the art, ethnicity, and social matters of the “third world.”5 But even while great strides are being made in art history and criticism, what is still lacking is scholarship speaking to the manner in which globalization has forced philosophies of art to refocus.6 The purpose of this book is to offer a theory of art that adequately addresses the present era’s shift toward global pluralism.
Today’s condition of global pluralism can be understood sociologically as a network of worlds. Hans Belting writes that “the global is no longer synonymous with the totalizing term world. It denotes the space of a ‘multiplicity of worlds’ in societies and cultures at large.”7 In other words, there is no global, unified system that governs all other systems. Rather, smaller systems cohabit a wider global context. Art also exists as a system; so, to follow suit, in a global pluralistic condition one must think of a multiplicity of artworlds that cohabit a global context. Complications often arise when one tries to navigate the spaces between systems.8 Because cultural boundaries delimit a person’s range of comprehension, understanding and evaluating cultural products (like art) can become rather difficult. This book does not seek merely to win a philosophical argument concerning the nature of today’s global condition, but also to equip readers to classify, evaluate, and judge art across cultures in a globalized world.
This book’s essential argument is that a focus on the extrinsic rather than intrinsic qualities of art will help us evaluate art across cultural boundaries, as intrinsic qualities shift according to the values of the viewing public. The theory of art portrayed in this book seeks to address both the classification and evaluation of art around the world. Art can be universally classified by an evaluation of its guiding narrative, and can be understood and judged through hermeneutical methods. Since artists engage culture through various local, transnational, and emerging global narratives, it is difficult to decipher what standards are used for evaluation, and which authoritative body evaluates the work. I suggest implementing a narrative-hermeneutical approach to properly classify an artwork and establish its meaning and value.
This book puts forth a modest proposal for an important issue. At best this book offers a fresh and useful approach for engaging art in a global pluralistic age, and at worst it merely raises awareness of the seismic shift in art theory due to the effects of globalization. Either way, this book is, I believe, a needed addition to the philosophical study of art. The world is increasingly globalized, and if we cannot find an appropriate way to engage art in today’s global pluralistic age, then collectively we will never be able to share our cultural riches for the betterment of humanity.
The Approach and Limitations of This Study
Later in this book (Chap. 5), we will discuss an idea posited by philosopher Nöel Carroll of a “narrative connection.” A narrative connection is a series of at least two logically ordered events.9 To form a connection the events must be causally linked and in sequence,10 but they do not need to trace the entire chronological lineage of an event. Carroll argues that only a short connection is necessary to establish a sense of narrative, which is sufficient for understanding how an artwork fits into its guiding narrative. One can view the argument of this book as utilizing narrative connections. We will consider interconnected ideas that emerge from the thought of certain prevalent philosophers and theorists (Taylor , Danto, Bourriaud, Carroll, Ricoeur, et al.), but we will not hash out entire histories of analytic or pragmatist aesthetics, or the phenomenologies and historical philosophies that have influenced these interlocutors. Instead, we will make narrative connections with their thought, tracing back only to antecedent ideas that prove relevant for the course of this study. Similarly, we will focus on contemporary artists around the world, and only reference their predecessors as they prove pivotal for understanding the present.
In order to offer a clear and concise study on the effects of globalization on art and the philosophy of art, some necessary boundaries had to be set. First, this book, while generally applicable across artistic disciplines, zeroes in on contemporary visual art. While music, film, dance, literature, and the dramatic arts are all integrally valuable and deserving of their own philosophical treatments, they all have long bibliographies containing their own critical methodologies, and there’s not enough space to adequately tread these paths. A survey of every art form would make this book’s illustrations surface-level and insubstantial. So, while the visual arts reflect my own training as an artist,11 they are also an excellent representative avenue for discussing globalization’s effects on the arts. With relational and postproduced forms gaining popularity since the 1990s, the visual arts have grown increasingly interdisciplinary, engaging multisensory experiences. Engaging the “visual arts,” therefore, does not preclude relational, performance-based, film-based, auditory, new media, or socially organized art. It is an umbrella term that discusses the wide range of visuality taken by the many variations of contemporary art.
Furthermore, this book does not take a global approach to discuss the global character of art today; that would require multiple comparative volumes. Instead, this book takes a Western approach in order to trace how Western art has opened up to the global, and how globalization has affected the old institutions of Western art. This boundary is necessary because I am a Westerner acknowledging the fact that I am writing philosophy from within a cultural-linguistic tradition. No one can stand outside his or her own cultural-linguistic tradition and should not pretend to posit a totally decontextualized assessment of any cultural concept. As Hyungmin Pai writes, “[o]ne must at once acknowledge its objectified structure and its different historicities as it unfolds within specific places and communities.”12 The best we can do is to find a method that seeks to assess cultural artifacts on their own terms and make judgments therein. Any assessment will always emerge from a confined cultural vantage point, but at least we are acknowledging our limitations as we seek to appreciate artwork around the world in an equitable fashion.
Furthermore, while the book hints at the historiographical paths of non-Western regions, it is not itself a work of history. We are not offering new historical methods for understanding culture; nor are we uncovering any previously untraced histories. Instead, this study is philosophically answering the big question: how has globalization affecte...