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Cultural Globalization between Myth and Reality: The Case of the Contemporary Visual

Arts
Lara Buchholz and Ulf Wuggenig
I. Introduction
Soon after the concept of globalisation ascended to one of the most fashionable buzzwords
of contemporary political and academic debate (Scheuerman 2002), it began to fuel
discursive effects in the art field as well.[1] During the last decade the world of
international contemporary art increasingly began to understand itself as part of a global
space, with globally recruited artists, globally acting curators, and Biennales spread around
the four corners of the world (cf. Griffin 2003, Bydler 2004, Sassen 2004, Wu 2005). With
the documenta 11 in Kassel in 2002 at the latest, globalisation became a popular, widely
used term among art critics and curators for depicting recent tendencies in the artistic field.
We want to scrutinize whether this talk not only reflects a new discursive trend, but also
corresponds to changes in the social organization of the field of art. To what extent has the
globalisation of the art field actually progressed? What structural consequences do the
presumed changes bring about? We will begin with a short introduction into the general
social scientific discourse on globalisation and then outline aspects of the discussion on
cultural globalisation in order to develop a theoretical framework. Afterwards, we will trace
how the art field itself has discussed the issue of art and globalisation before we will
critically dissect some of its strong claims empirically.
2. Discourses on (Cultural) Globalisation
Meanwhile, the social scientific discourse on globalisation has produced a large body of
literature with a great variety of definitions of the very phenomenon it purports to analyse.
Some of the more prominent accounts of conceptualizing globalisation refer to ideas such as
actions, that is to say, the effects of actions over distances, time and space compression,
global integration and accelerated interdependence, a new order of inter-regional power
relationships or to a subjective factor such as the increasing consciousness of the global
condition (cf. Held and McGrew 2000, p. 3). One definition, which encompasses temporal
as well as spatial aspects, conceives globalisation as a process of the deepening and
acceleration of boundary crossing transactions () which incurs simultaneous spatial
expansion (Menzel 2001, p. 226). Another approach pays especially attention to increasing
reciprocal interdependencies, thus writing in the tradition of theories of differentiation by
Adam Smith, Herbert Spencer and Emile Durkheim: Globalisation refers to a set of
processes that increasingly makes the parts of the world interdependently integrated
(Roberts and Hite 2000, p. 16). In addition, one finds theoretical perspectives, which seek to
connect objective aspects of the globalisation process with changes of subjective
consciousness. According to Robertson (1992, p. 8), for instance, globalisation refers both
to the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a
whole. Lechner in turn (2005, p. 330) conceives it as the worldwide diffusion of practices,
expansion of relations across continents, organisation of social life on a global scale, and
growth of a shared global consciousness. The work by Allan Cochrane and Kathy Pain
considers a variety of important dimensions, except subjective aspects. In their view
globalisation denotes the expansion of social relationships beyond regional and national state
borders. It leads to growing density of worldwide interaction, made possible by electronic
flows and communication networks. Moreover, the increasing availability of products from
vastly distant cultures, the rise in migration and the strengthening of a global infrastructure
that the operation of emergent globalised networks permits have a growing interpenetration
of people as their consequence (cf. Cochrane and Pain 2000, pp. 15ff.).
All these definitions of dominant versions of the academic globalisation discourse share an
essential difference to previous, more conflict orientated theories like dependency theory,
imperialism or world system theories which likewise dealt with inter- and trans-national as
well as with global processes without, however, using the term globalisation (cf. Frank 1971,
Wallerstein 1979, Galtung 1980). Instead of critically highlighting social polarisation, one-
sided dependencies, and asymmetrical relationships between social units such as centres,
semi-peripheries, and peripheries in world system theory globalisation theories especially
emphasize integration, reciprocal interdependencies or a commonly shared consciousness.
Giddens, for example, who early advocated the use of the term globalisation (cf. Giddens
1990), stresses interdependency when connecting globalisation with the intensification of
worldwide social relations and interdependences. Globalization refers to the fact that we are
increasingly living in one world, where our actions have consequences for others and the
worlds problems have consequences for us (Giddens 2001, p. 74).
Nevertheless, after its assertion on a broader basis, the concept of globalisation began partly
to play a role within the frame of critical theories against which it was originally created as
well. Yet, whereas critical sociologists like Pierre Bourdieu or Immanuel Wallerstein
considered globalisation being a myth or an imposed discourse, Antonio Negri and Michael
Hardt deploy the term in an attempt to conceptualise a new era of global domination. Others,
like Galtung (2000a) in his more recent work, try to combine critical and descriptive
approaches, what we consider to be a fruitful idea.
In a lecture in Athens in 1996 Bourdieu denounced the talk of globalisation as a myth in
the strongest sense of the word, as a power discourse, an idea power (Bourdieu 1998, p.
34), a position that he repeated in Tokio in 2000, when he stressed, that globalization is a
descriptive as well as prescriptive pseudo-concept, which by now replaces the notion
modernization (Bourdieu 2003, p. 202). Correspondingly, Bourdieu coined the notion of a
politics of globalisation, underlining that there are no determinist social laws or tendencies
and that there are alternatives to this kind of politics. In a similar way, Immanuel Wallerstein
adopts a rather sceptical attitude towards the discourse on globalization: The 1990's have
been deluged with a discourse about globalization. We are told by virtually everyone that we
are now living, and for the first time, in an era of globalization. We are told that
globalization has changed everything: the sovereignty of states has declined; everyone's
ability to resist the rules of the market has disappeared; our possibility of cultural autonomy
has been virtually annulled; and the stability of all our identities has come into serious
question. This state of presumed globalization has been celebrated by some, and bemoaned
by others. This discourse is in fact a gigantic misreading of current reality - a deception
imposed upon us by powerful groups, and even worse one that we have imposed upon
ourselves, often despairingly. Wallerstein (1999). On the other hand, Antonio Negri and
Michael Hardt (2000, p. XI) not only point to a new, sovereign global power, namely
Empire, but they also stress in a rather deterministic manner an inexorable and
irreversible globalisation of economic and cultural exchange processes. By contrast to
preceding critical macro-theories, however, they maintain that this form of power cannot be
identified with a territorially delineated centre; it rather signifies a decentralised and
deterritorialised apparatus of domination: In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no
territorial centre of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers (p. XII). Aside
from their attention to domination, Negris and Hardts thesis of deterritorialisation
converges with assumptions of mainstream globalisation theory. In a popular textbook on the
subject, for example, Waters underlines that the specificity of globalisation lies in the fact
that it results in greater connectedness and deterritorialisation (Waters 1995, p. 136).
George Ritzer sought to challenge mainstream theories of globalisation in a slightly different
way. He reproaches them to identify globalisation primarily with symmetrical flows or more
or less balanced interactions of the local with the global. Such accounts would ignore the
imperialist expansion tendencies of nation-states or enterprises, their ambitions to power,
influence and profit as well as the hegemonic relations thereby established. Accordingly,
Ritzer (2004) launched the term grobalisation (in contrast to glocalisation), which links
globalisation with growth and which refers to similar processes of power and influence as
specified in theories of dependency, world system, or imperialism. The driving sub-
processes of such grobalization processes are, however, not located in a quasi anonymous,
non-territorial power structure (like in the approach of Negri and Hardt), but attributed to the
dynamics of capitalism (cf. e. g. Amin 2001), Americanisation (cf. e. g. Bourdieu 2003),
Western cosmology (cf. Galtung 1996), or McDonaldisation (cf. Ritzer 1993, 2004).
Nevertheless, these critical approaches did not develop an analytically specific perspective
on the very process that we are primarily interested in, namely cultural globalisation in the
more narrow sense of culture. Yet, different social spheres (e.g. economy, politics, popular
culture, art) display dissimilar, relatively autonomous development patterns, which are not
reducible to each other. That is one of the reasons why theoretical approaches, which are
based on the idea of social differentiation, in contrast to anti-differentiation approaches like
e. g. those of Wallerstein or Giddens seem to be especially fruitful for the analyses of
questions regarding the globalisation of culture and art. Arjun Appadurai (1996), for
example, distinguishes in his globalisation studies between flows of images, histories and
information (mediascapes), flows of cultural and political ideologies (ideoscapes),
finance flows (finanscapes), and flows of migrants, tourists and refugees (ethnoscapes).
All these disjunctive flows proceed according to their own restrictions and incentives.
For our purposes, however, Appadurais initial differentiation does not go far enough.
Considering the flow of images, for instance, it is in no way irrelevant whether one deals
with flows in high art (e.g. the fine arts) or popular art (e.g. film, TV, popular music).
Perhaps in regard to this omission, Appadurai later introduced the term artscape
(Appadurai 2003, p. 236). Yet in comparison with the field concept (cf. Martin 2003), which
Bourdieu (1993, 1996) and his school (e. g. Verger 1987, Pinto (ed.) 2002) heavily
employed for the analysis of art and legitimate culture, the notion artscape appears diffuse.
It tends to underestimate relations of power as well as processes of asymmetric exchange
and inchange the intra-actor effects of exchange and interaction.
The tendency to disregard aspects of power and conflict can also be discerned in Diana
Cranes meta-typology of models of cultural globalisation which pays great attention to
approaches emphasising positive aspects and externalities of globalisation processes.
Against cultural imperialism theories, she especially highlights accounts like those of
Appadurai. According to Crane they stress more or less symmetrical interactions within
cultural flows or networks: In contrast to cultural imperialism theory in which the source of
cultural influence is Western civilisation, with non-Western and less developed countries
viewed as being on the periphery as the receivers of cultural influences the cultural flows
or network model offers an alternative conception of the transmission process, as influences
that do not necessarily originate in the same place or flow in the same direction. Receivers
also may be originators. In this model, cultural globalization corresponds to a network with
no clearly defined center or periphery (see, for example, Appadurai 1990). Globalization as
an aggregation of cultural flows or networks is a less coherent and unitary process than
cultural imperialism and one in which cultural influences move in many directions. The
effect of these cultural flows, which Arjun Appadurai identifies as consisting of media,
technology, ideologies, and ethnicities on recipient nations is likely to be cultural
hybridisation rather than homogenisation (Crane 2002, pp. 3f.). In addition, Crane points to
reception theories as they are typically found in the mass media research wing of Cultural
Studies (cf. e.g. Barker 2000, pp. 114 ff., 259 ff.). They tend to emphasise the sovereignty of
consumers in the appropriation of globally distributed cultural goods, or the cultural
embeddedness of reception processes (cf. Wu 2005 for contrasting mass media and art
reception in this respect). It seems worth stressing that Cranes portrayal of cultural
imperialism theories is much too simplistic as she argues that they would operate with the
assumption of conscious domination intentions. Yet, there are complex and highly
sophisticated imperialism theories which are neither actor-oriented nor intentionalist but
emphasise structure, as for example, the position in a (worldwide) division of labour, that is
to say, the position in global exchange and inchange processes. These approaches are
dedicated to the analysis of the effects of differing structural positions for systems
reproduction and the intended as well as paradoxical outcomes with respect to the units
involved. Crane ignores elaborated dependency and world system theories such as those of
J ohan Galtung (1980) or Samir Amin (2001). Both approaches are based on homogenisation
assumptions but do not rely on those binary centre-periphery models, attributed to this
tradition by Crane and a broad cultural studies literature following Tomlinson (1991).
In our view, however, the analytical options highlighted by Crane are not satisfying as they
tend to capture globalisation processes in a one-sided, euphemising way. For specifying the
implications of globalisation in the realm of high art, we will therefore operate with conflict
theoretical tools and perspectives, like Bourdieus concept of the field of art. Generally
spoken, Bourdieu conceives the realm of cultural production as a game functioning
according to a relatively autonomous logic of competitive exchanges. The concept of the
field of art is in so far especially fruitful for analysing effects of international exchange
processes as it does not rely on an interactionist perspective but conceptualises the dynamics
of high-culture as objectively and relationally structured by the unequal distribution of
artistic and symbolic capital. Bourdieu elaborated these notions and a general theory of
cultural fields in the context of his analysis of the French literary and artistic sphere (cf.
Bourdieu 1996). In connection with Pascale Casanovas (2004) further elaboration of this
approach for as the space of world literature, it promises to offer a fruitful theoretical
framework for analysing the relationship between globalisation and the field of art.
One of the central debates in the literature on cultural globalisation concerns the question
whether high or popular arts have progressed further with regard to globalisation processes.
On the one hand, Victoria Alexander holds that popular culture demonstrates more distinct
signs of globalisation by dint of its highly commercial and heteronomous nature: Fine arts
circulate internationally in patterns considerably different from those of the popular arts. One
obvious difference is that the markets for fine arts are smaller and more decentralised.
Moreover, the global context is highly commercial, and while non-commercial art is part of
the global economy, it plays a relatively minor role in it (Alexander 2003, pp. 166f.). David
Held and his collaborators assess the difference between high and popular culture in a
similar way: Elite cultures, high culture, academic and scientific cultures (...) are drowned
in the high seas of business information systems and commercialised popular culture. No
historic parallel exists for such intensive and extensive forms of cultural flow that are
primarily forms of commercial enrichment and entertainment (Held et al. 1999, p. 368). On
the other hand, Malcolm Waters maintains precisely the opposite thesis in his standard work
on globalisation theory. By referring to cultural diffusion processes at the end of the last
century, he arrives at the conclusion that high culture has played the role of an avant-garde in
cultural globalisation: By the end of the 19
th
century, a global but mainly European cultural
tradition had been established in which the same music, the same art and the same literature
and science were equally highly regarded in many parts of the globe. () However, popular
culture remained nation-state specific until the development of cinematographic and
electronic mass mediation (Waters 1995, pp. 142f.). Waters claim is echoed in recent
German cultural sciences in which the higher degree of globalisation in the realm of high
culture, specifically that of the fine arts, is particularly emphasised: In almost no other
sphere of culture is the shrinking of North and South, of East and West so intense as in the
fine arts (Kramer 2001, p. 178).
While it is beyond the scope of this contribution to empirically compare the level of
globalisation in popular culture and high culture, Waters remarks sensitise for another main
question at stake in debates around globalisation: the question of its beginning and of
decisive historical breaks. One may derive very different assumptions about the kind and
extent of globalisation processes whether one conceptualises them as a phenomenon of the
end of the 19
th
century or of most recent history as, for example, Appadurai (2003, p. 234)
does: When I talk about the age of globalisation, I wish with that to describe an historical
break which is registered in the last half of the recently ended century and here, above all, in
the last twenty years. Sociological or historical approaches on the macro-level even hold
that globalisation began very much earlier in history. Thus, not infrequently, it is related to
Western expansion or to the development of (proto)capitalism around 1500 (cf. e. g.
Muldoon 1991, Hall 2003) or to Western modernity (cf. e. g. Giddens 1990). Some authors,
such as the economist Andr Gunder Frank, who is known for having coined the phrase the
development of underdevelopment in the 1960s, object to such assumptions that they are
implicitly based on the supposition of European exceptionalism and Euro-centrism already
present in the works of such differing economists and sociologists as Adam Smith, Karl
Marx, Max Weber and Immanuel Wallerstein (cf. Frank 1998, pp. 12ff.). His rational choice
approach, embedded in a macro-historical frame, stresses that global connections, at least at
the level of trade, are a more ancient phenomenon which can be traced back 5000 years ago,
a period in which Europe belonged to the periphery, while East Asia dominated the world
trade. Accordingly, theorists like Gunder Frank who operate with macro historical
perspectives of the longue dure appear to be little impressed by developments of the most
recent period such as the emergence of new communication technologies which, according
to Appadurai, initiated a deep historical break during the last two decades. Against such kind
of theories, Frank (1998, p. 343) emphasizes on the base of his empirical material: The
currently fashionable globalisation thesis has it that the 1990s mark a new departure in this
worldwide process. () Yet this book demonstrates that globalism (even more than
globalisation) was a fact of life since at least 1500 for the whole world, excepting a few
sparsely settled islands in the Pacific (though only a little while).
Part of the dissent surrounding the question of the beginning of globalisation is doubtless
due to the fact, that some processes have their origins centuries ago, while others can be
dated to the 19
th
and 20
th
centuries. Most social scientists meanwhile take more or less a
middle position between the extreme poles delineated on the one side e. g. by Frank (1998)
and Friedman (1994), and on the other by Appadurai (1999). The main-stream position is
well expressed in the following statement by Victoria Alexander (2003, p. 158): The
process of globalisation is not new, although global flows have increased to an
unprecedented level. Stuart Hall takes a similar position while providing a more precise
framework for the different phases of globalisation. Yet he thereby adopts the common
Western social science, Euro-centric position concerning the origins of capitalism and
modernity (cf. the critical views on Euro-centrism in the social sciences of Amin 1989, Blaut
2000, Collins 1999).
In Halls (2003, p. 193) perspective, globalisation dates back to the moment when Western
Europe breaks out of its confinement, at the end of the 15
th
century, and the era of
exploration and conquest of the non-European world begins. () Somewhere around 1492
we begin to see this project as having a global rather than a national or continental character
() However, this thesis is connected to the assumption of an acceleration of globalisation
in recent time. On that basis, he differentiates between four periods following that historical
break. After the initial phase in about 1500, processes of globalisation enter a second phase
characterised by formal and informal colonisation. The third phase, after the Second World
War, is marked by the decline of European empires that were dominant during the second
phase. The fourth period, which is of greatest concern for our research referring to the field
of contemporary art begins for Hall in its radically reconstructed, transnational form in the
mid-1970s. To this phase, the current one, he assigns the title of Globalisation tout
court (p. 194). Whereas earlier phases were characterised by conquest, trade, direct
colonisation and informal rule, the new global system operates via the market, geopolitical
and global management, and strategic military intervention. According to Hall, culture and
the economy permeate each other, the movement of power is inseparable from the
movement of images, the movement of capital, and the movement of information. In the
new globalisation of the fourth period everything appears to be in motion. Even migration
has witnessed an explosive increase, although it is, as Hall is thoroughly aware,
fundamentally subject to restrictions. In contrast to the authors of Empire, the US are seen as
the centre of influence of the informal networks during the most recent phase of
globalization: Though Hardt and Negri describe it as a system with no center, post-
September 11 developments suggest that it is a global system in which the US as the only
global superpower has overwhelming influence. (Hall 2003, p. 195). While there are
problems with Halls dating of the beginning of globalisation around 1500, his general
framework may serve us as a reference-point for chronologically anchoring our analysis in
the fourth globalisation period without, however, presupposing a radical historical break in
Appadurais sense.
3. The field of Art and Globalisation
In the first decade of Halls posited fourth globalisation phase, the artist and critic Rasheed
Araeen who went on to become the editor of Third Text railed against what he
considered to be a myth, namely the Internationalism of contemporary art. In his manifesto
presented in 1978 at the ICA in London he stated: The myth of the internationalism of
Western art has to be exploded. () Western art expresses exclusively the peculiarities of
the West () It is merely a transatlantic art. It only reflects the culture of Europe and North
America. The current Internationalism of Western art is nothing more than a function of
the political and economic power of the West, enforcing its values on other people. () The
word international should mean more than just a couple of Western countries (...) (Araeen
1997 (1978), p. 98). Since the time of Araeens intervention, the field of art, without doubt,
has undergone some changes. In recent years, protagonists in the art world increasingly
began to associate this dynamics with the emergence of a new, global art space, which would
profoundly challenge the predominance of North-Western art. Marc Scheps, for example,
asserts in the context of the highly ambitiously organised exhibition Global Art that a strong
globalisation had taken place over the two previous decades. The exhibition, curated by
Scheps, took place in 2000 in one of the institutional centres of the European art field,
namely the Peter Ludwig Museum in Cologne. In an essay for the exhibitions hefty
accompanying catalogue he writes that since the 1980s art entered a global presence which
manifests itself in the heightened mobility of artists, in exhibitions of non-Western art in the
West as well as in the dissemination of activities of art institutions in non-Western countries.
Accordingly, Scheps concludes that non-Western art contexts have become increasingly
integrated into a symmetrical worldwide cultural network of connections. Moreover, since
1989, he tells us, art has led a global dialogue, enabled through a new visual language, that
is to say through new media and new forms of artistic practices such as video, computer or
installation art (cf. Scheps 1999, pp. 16 ff.).
Similarly, Christian Kravagna, one of the leading European art critics who has concerned
himself most intensely with non-Western contemporary art, posits a remarkable change in
the art field since the late 1980s, especially with respect to the greater inclusion of actors
from countries outside the North-Western corne of the world. He observes a rapid transition
from the invisibility of non-European artists to an excessive visibility in numerous
exhibitions of art of different regions or in projects, in which Western and non-Western art
are exhibited alongside each other under the sign of global art (Kravagna 2004, p. 98; see
also Kravagna 2002). In spite of its neo-primitivist alignment, he thereby regards Hubert
Martins exhibition, Magiciens de la Terre (Paris, 1989), as a decisive turning point.
Kravagna furthermore states that non-Western curators, critics and artists are more and more
actively involved in the international business of contemporary art exhibitions.
Yilmaz Dziewior (1999, p. 345), a Hamburg based critic and curator, notes a far greater
participation of non-occidental artists in large mainstream exhibitions particularly since the
1990s, citing, for instance, the Venice Biennial and Documenta in Kassel. This tendency
attained its climax with documenta 11 in 2002, organised by the diaspora intellectual Okwui
Enwezor. Also in Kravagnas (2002, p. 99) view, the nomination of Enwezor as artistic
director marked a fundamental change: When the USA residing Nigerian curator was
chosen as the leader of documenta 11, this was a clear sign of an opening to non-Western
perspectives. () In a background of questions on Western representation and reception of
African art Enwezors appointment holds great significance for a general development if one
realises that almost half a century of documenta history up to 1992 had passed before the
invitation of two African artists to documenta 9.
Given these statements, it seems to be not surprising that a discussion[2] in one of the
leading art-market journals, namely Artforum, classified documenta 11 along with the Venice
Biennale and a number of so-called peripheral biennales of the last decades (like the
Biennales and Triennales of Sao Paolo, Brisbane, Dakkar, Havanna, Tirana, Vilnius,
J ohannesburg, Istanbul, Cairo and Kwang J u, cf. Bydler 2004) as examples of a newly
emerging type of global exhibitions; not only because of the very choice of the main
curator and the inclusion of non-Western artists, but also for the reason that they took place
in locations all over the world (like documenta 11 with its platforms in Europe, Africa,
Asia, and in the Caribbean region) and that they dealt with issues closely associated with the
globalisation discourse: This type of exhibition, endowed with a transnational circuitry,
assumed the unique position of both reflecting globalism since these shows happen in
locations throughout the world, however remote and taking up globalism itself as an idea
(Griffin 2003, p. 153).
For Hou Hanru (1999), tendencies of a globalising art field were especially revealed through
the proliferation of art biennales outside Europe and North America since the 1980s as well
as the example of the New York Guggenheim Museum, which expanded in the 1990s, when
the generalization of its Bilbao strategy (cf. Thon 2004), still appeared possible to pursue.




The worldwide proliferation of biennales is an interesting phenomenon in connection with
the question of the globalization of the field of art. That is why we collected data on this
process and depicted some of them in figure 1. The biennalization of the art world starts,
according to this data, documented in more detail in Buchholz (2005, pp. 67ff.), in the midth
of the 1980ies. Since this time the curves of the number of biennales show upwards not only
in the West, but also in the rest (for this differentiation cf. Hall 1992, p. 280). Whereas
in 1980 there were three biennales of contemporary art in the Northwest of the world, and
one in the Southwest, one in the Southeast and one in the Northeast. In 2005 the number of
biennales had risen from 6 to 49 and the distribution was as follows: 19 in the Northwest, 10
in the Northeast, 9 in the Southeast and 11 in the Southwest.[3] This process clearly
indicates a tendency of globalization.
In a recent study art historian and critic Charlotte Bydler (2004) has provided a
comprehensive summary of indicators showing an advancement of globalisation in the field
of contemporary art. Her inquiry is not based on quantitative data, but upon insider
perspectives by curators and critics. It focuses on the globalisation of the fields
institutional structures. Bydler not only mentions the rise of international exhibitions, but
also refers to other, less well-illuminated aspects in the art discourse. Thus, she highlights
the emergence of an international job market for artists and curators as well as the growing
establishment of international residence and exchange programmes. She informs that these
last two changes largely rest upon specific legal privileges for artists and curators which, in
the face of usually highly restrictive immigration legislation, facilitated the heightened
artistic mobility. Her remarks remind that the worldwide circulation of people in contrast to
the movement of capital and goods is still subject to severe legal regulations, a discrepancy
which induced Samir Amin (2001) to speak of a halved globalisation.
The assumption of a globalising art field is also supported by the sparse sociological
literature on the subject. Focussing on the dynamics of the art market, the French sociologist
Raymonde Moulin captures the development of the last three decades as a trend towards a
growing web of international interdependencies, fostering the circulation of people and
artefacts beyond national boundaries. She writes: The specificity of the last three decades,
lies in the fact that the art market regarding extremely expensive works as well as
contemporary works, does not function anymore as coexistence of national markets, which
communicate with each other more or less quite well, but like a global market. Each national
artistic space is embedded in a world wide system of cultural and economic exchange
processes. The circulation of people, works and information, favours the networking of the
market (Moulin 2003, p. 81). Saskia Sassen (2004) observed, that the proliferation of art
biennales caused an intensified transnational engagement of artists, curators, museums and
cities as well as to the rise of a transnational class of curators.
Considering all the aforementioned objective indicators in the frame of the concept of
globalisation provided by Allan Cochrane and Kathy Paine, one arrives at the conclusion
that one may indeed speak of a globalisation of the field of art: First, the dissemination of
new art biennales in non-Western countries and the international spread of art institutions
like the Guggenheim museum (even if these expansionist tendencies stopped in the
meantime), seem to correspond with the idea that globalisation involves spatial extension of
social relationships. Secondly, the heightened mobility of artists and curators, the emerging
worldwide communication network, and the rise of a job market as well as an art market that
transgress national borders all appear to indicate what Cochrane and Paine considered as a
crucial dimension of globalisation processes, namely the increasing density of social
interactions, partly based on new electronic communications technologies. And, last but not
least, the fact that non-Western artists and curators have been more and more included in
mainstream exhibitions and also in so-called new global exhibitions during the last 20
years seems to resonate with the thesis that globalisation typically results in greater cultural
interpenetration.
But, do these tendencies justify the assumption that the field of art has entered a global age
in which old centre-periphery structures become obsolete or the unequal distribution of
power between Western and non-Western art contexts dissolves? This is what the statements
of Marc Scheps seem to imply: An emerging network is replacing the structure of centre
and periphery. The nodes of this network consist of cultural and artistic centres that can
communicate with each other at any time in a non-hierarchical way. () The disappearance
of the categories of centre and periphery implicates that the differentiation between the West
and the Non-West will become historical memory (Scheps 1999, p. 20). These claims are
echoed by Dziewior (1999, p. 345) who postulates a slow, but continual dissolving of the
traditional division of centre and periphery.
Yet, there are also some critical voices in the art field, which call such assessments strongly
into question and refuse to participate in the euphoria around the globalisation of the artistic
field. Georg Schoellhammer (1999), for example, editor of the Austrian culture and art
magazine springerin, argues that although international exhibitions and trade transports have
made previously unexposed art scenes visible in the West, this trend does not significantly
alter inclusion and exclusion relationships in the field of art; in his view, it rather serves to
obfuscate their persistence.
Especially among the diaspora intellectuals involved in the art field there is a wide-spread
scepticism regarding the idea that its structure and functioning has determinedly changed.
Thus, in the middle of the 1990s, the artist and critic Everlyn Nicodemus (1995, p. 12) saw
no reason for being optimistic about inclusion tendencies with regard to third-world
intellectuals: In the Western art field, the tendencies we observe today, its closed circuits
and the extension of its power structure an internationalisation that seems to counteract
rather than facilitate an opening up to a new inter-cultural internationalism does not inspire
great optimism.
Gerardo Mosquera, co-founder of the Havana Biennale, in the meantime active in New
York, still the centre of the centre (Galtung) of the art field, maintains that the field of art
finds itself in a state of transition far from entailing broader participation: What is called the
international art scene and the international artistic language reveals a hegemonic construct
of globalism more than true globalisation, understood as a generalised participation.
(Mosquera 2003, p. 145).
Although it has become routine for some artists to exhibit worldwide, the situation should
not be overestimated. On the one hand, the number of artists involved remains relatively
insignificant. On the other hand, existing structures could only be challenged if these artists
gained real agency, that is to say, if they obtained the necessary amount of symbolic capital
and symbolic power in order to take part in the truly relevant moves of the art game:
Regional and international art circulation has dramatically expanded through a variety of
spaces, events, networks, circuits, and electronic communications. () Nevertheless, the
fact that a certain number of artists coming from every corner of the world are now
exhibiting internationally only means, in itself, a (not so dramatic) quantitative
internationalisation. But number is not the issue. The question for these new subjects is
agency: the challenge of mutating a hegemonic and restrictive situation toward active and
enriching plurality, instead of being digested not only by the mainstream, but also by new
non-mainstream establishments (Mosquera 2003, p. 146).
Apart from the question of actual structural changes, several critics in the art field argue that
increasing cultural interpenetration did not bear any noteworthy effects on the power
structure as well; it would be still the Western representational regime that dictates modes of
appropriation of non-Western art, and it would be still the symbolic power of the West that
attributes non-occidental art the role of playing its exotic, but nevertheless self-assuring
other. Elsbeth Courth, for example, who as a curator and writer participated in the
exhibition Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa in London (cf. Deliss 1995), observes
that Western primitivist projections still play a significant role in the increasing number of
exhibitions of (previously ignored) modern and contemporary African art since the 1990s.
Whereas an old modernist canon of the African tribal sculpture has been overcome, the fact
that notions of authenticity continue to be applied in this area indicates that the old
paradigm still retains some force (Court 1999, p. 157).
In a similar way, Christian Kravagna (2004) arrives at the assessment that the heightened
visibility of non-Western art is not only due to post-colonial discourses of deconstruction,
but also to an ethno boom and fashion trend for exoticism. Thus, an increasing attention to
non-Western art appears to be also determined by neo-primitivist impulses, which exalt an
imaginary, irrational otherness to Western reason. The ethnologist J onathan Friedman,
who is close to world system theory, goes so far as to establish a tight connection between
the manufacture of such neo-primitivism and the postmodernist discourses of the last
decades in the West. He grasps the postmodernist pole of the cultural logic of the global
system by contrast to the modern and traditional poles in the following way: It defines the
primitive as all that freedom from civilised control is meant to be, the confusion of the sexes,
the liberation of infantile desire and its capacity for merging with the other, the expression of
immediate feeling, a social existence based on communion rather than social distance. The
conception of the modern here is that of culture as a set of imprisoning constraints, culture as
opposed to nature, and repressive of nature. As such this position is also opposed to
traditionalism, which is conceived as an expression of increased control, a reaction to the
false freedom generated by modernity (Friedman 1994, pp. 98f.).
Other critics in turn warn to become absorbed in questions of representation or symbolic
politics and plead to pay more attention to the fundamental structures of the art system itself.
For Rashed Araeen there is no doubt that the consideration of non-Western artists on the
international scene has grown since the decade when he recited the ICA-Manifesto in the
late 1970s. The young, post-colonial artists from Africa or Asia are no longer segregated
from their white/European counterparts: Both of them display and circulate within the same
space and the same art market, recognised and legitimated by the same institutions (Araeen
2001, p. 23). In his view, the concomitant glorification of difference bears no other effect
than the erection of thick walls of multiculturalism which serve to protect existing
structures. In addition, Araeen not only dismisses the politics of identity, as propagated
from Stuart Hall to Homi Bhabhas post-colonial theory, but also questions the Third
Texts publication policy. It is important to change the system itself, not just the social
representation within the system. For him, the art system represents Third World artists
meanwhile to an adequate extent: There is no point in us representing what is already
represented by the system. Third Text should not be considered a black art magazine;
neither are we representing what is geographically described as Third World. It was
perhaps a mistake our trying to represent what was no longer definable in geographical
terms. It should not be our responsibility to represent artists just because they are from the
Third World. However, we should continue to publish critical material about artists whose
work has been neglected and suppressed (Araeen 2000, p. 19).
In contrast to Araeen, artist and writer Olu Oguibe even questions that a decisive change has
taken place regarding the amount of non-Western artists represented in the dominant
institutions of the art field. Oguibe draws on the notion of culture game, which reminds of
the game concept used in Bourdieus (1993, 1996) field theory. According to Oguibe a
presumably global cultural game neither did lead to equal visibility, nor to accessibility.
And, the sparse tendencies of inclusion observable have not ceased to follow a hegemonic
logic: The art field merely opens some rationed slots, a certain contingent number of
acquisitions of museums as well as a token number of places at important exhibitions.
Selection processes themselves are guided by the stigmatising emphasis on the ethnic or
regional background of non-Western artists, a procedure that strikingly differs from the
selection of their Western colleagues. Inquiring into the backstage of the culture game,
Oguibe eventually holds, one discovers that it is the cynical calculation of an essentially
closed field which gives rise to recurrent inclusion tendencies. Oguibes observations
deserve to be cited in-depth as they put the shared assumption of increasing inclusion
tendencies by Scheps, Araeen and others, though they are embedded in different explanatory
frames, thoroughly into perspective: The culture game operates on a number of related
levels. There is the systemic, structural level where it is methodologically implemented and
perpetuated by contemporary art institutions through acquisitions, programming, criticism,
and general discourse. On this level the game may take the form of minimal exhibition
allocations for art that comes from a particular province or constituency. Such slots, it
appears, are rationed over ten-year periods, and because the opportunity to display is so rare,
it becomes the tendency to seek to remedy the situation by consigning all such work to
humongous, inchoate, and badly conceived group or period exhibitions, after which heroic
gestures institutions return to their regular, clinical programming, satisfied that they have
paid their dues. In other words, every ten years over a designated period, there are huge
African, Asian or Latin American exhibitions after which the pained rhetoric of institutions
becomes, Well, but we just had an African or Asian or Latin American show! Having staged
the routine decade shows, museums and galleries feel no further obligation to touch any art
or artist from these provenances (). Ultimately, things degenerate to a game of numbers:
We had five Africans in the Biennale, seven Chinese, two Southeast Asians, and even two
Australian Aborigines. We do our best to ensure that this years exhibition was
representative. What is masked in such a seemingly liberal gesture is that Western artists are
seldom subjected to the same game of numbers, unless of course, they too belong outside the
mainstream: folk artists, Northwest artists, Native Americans, self-taught artists, prison
artists (Oguibe 2004, pp. XIIf.).
Oguibes assessment is partly echoed by a statement of Stuart Hall in the context of the
documenta 11 platform in Santa Lucia. He thinks of the possibility that documenta 11 might
not mark a real break in the history of exhibitions, but merely an interlude of cultural
diversity: There has been a certain, rather ambivalent, globalisation of the art world. And
yet, at the same time, this is a limited process, which only happens on certain strict terms.
Huge spaces and gaps keep emerging. The agendas of inclusion are short-term and have a
limited life and scope (Hall 2003, pp. 198f.). Accordingly, it seems likely that such new
global exhibitions do not signal the dawn of a global art world free from old structurings
and inequalities, but merely one of the bigger rationed slots in the culture game.
4. Deconstructing myths. Some time series data on the art field in the new
globalisation period (1970 2005)
One possibility to assess the impact of globalisation processes on the structure of the art field
consists in scrutinising the dynamics of the distribution of symbolic capital among Western
and non-Western artists (cf. Wuggenig 2005). Since 1970 the German business magazine
Capital has offered empirical indicators by an annually published artist-ranking. This list
of the worldwide top 100 artists called Kunstkompass (art-compass) registers the
symbolic capital of artists on the basis of their presence and visibility in the international
exhibition circuit. The results are based on the consideration of the representation of visual
artists in individual or group exhibitions at important art institutions, as defined by the art-
establishment, and secondarily, on their presence in leading art journals. In 2001, for
instance, 160 art institutions, 130 group exhibitions and 5 art magazines were considered.
First, the art institutions and group exhibitions are classified according to expert ratings.
Then reputation scores according to these evaluations are assigned to them. In a second step
the artists who display the highest frequency in these institutions/exhibitions with high
reputation are determined. They too get scores expressing their symbolic capital. This
measure of visibility and symbolic capital was first developed and applied by the German
economist Willy Bongard, who as an art dealer also was part of the art field. Rohr-Bongard
(2002, 2003, 2004, 2005) continued the annual surveys after his death.
This procedure is the best available to differentiate the core of the art field, i.e. living artists
with charismatic consecration based on the distinguished approval of the art establishment,
from the periphery and semi-periphery of artists, who possess neither the symbolic capital
nor the symbolic power that would enable them to participate with decisive moves in the
games of the field or the culture game in the sense of Oguibe. Though not without
problems (cf. Graw 2003), this method of determining the symbolic capital of artists, widely
used in the economics of art (e. g. Frey and Pommerehne 1989, Klein 1993), appears to be
sufficiently valid and reliable for our purpose, that is to say to analyse effects of the broadly
assumed globalisation of the art field in the last decades on the level of the distribution of
reputation and power. It concentrates on the dominant pole of the art field, on artists
evaluated by professional critics and curators. It separates them from artists whose success is
short-lived and coupled with the vicissitudes of fashion. And it also separates them from
artists without reputation in the circles of insiders. The available empirical evidence on
artistic recognition shows that in contrast to popular myths, like those on the fate of van
Gogh (who in fact was highly respected by art field peers), lack of recognition by peers is a
certain sign, that an artist will never become part of the (international) history of art (cf.
Heinich 1991). It also demonstrates that high symbolic capital in the visual arts in the long
run can regularly be converted into high economic capital (cf. Abbing 2004). In 1971, to
give some examples for these rankings, the artists leading the list were Robert
Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, J asper J ohns, J ean Tinguely and Yves Klein. In 1986
J oseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella could be found on the
top. In 2000 Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Bruce Nauman, Rosemarie Trockel and
Pipilotti Rist were ranked the highest (cf. Rohr-Bongard 2002, pp. 42, 72, 126), in 2005
Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Bruce Nauman, Rosemarie Trockel, Louise Bourgeois and
Cindy Sherman were the living artists with the highest symbolic capital according to this
measurement device (cf. Rohr-Bongard 2005, p. 169).
From the very beginning, the art-compass also displayed the artists country of origin,
which allows us to address questions of inclusion and exclusion through origin and territorial
criteria. For investigating the changes of social-spatial concentration over time, we again
used the simple geographical model proposed by J ohan Galtung. He drafted a world map
that crosses the North-South with the East-West dichotomy, thus yielding four corners of
the world. In this cartography, the Northwest encompasses Anglo-Saxon North America
and Western Europe (countries of the EU in the borders before 2004); the Northeast
includes the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Turkey, the former Soviet republics with
a Muslim majority, Pakistan and Iran. The Southwest comprises Latin America, Mexico,
the Caribbean, West Asia, the Arab world, Africa, South Asia and India; the Southeast
East Asia, Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, China and J apan (cf. Galtung 2000b, p.14.).
There exist at least two very different analytical perspectives for investigating globalisation
effects. Whereas Allan Cochranes and Kathy Pains approach represents a process-oriented
theory of globalisation, highlighting increasing spatial expansion as well as the
intensification and the acceleration of interdependences, one could also deploy an ideal type
model. Such a perspective conceptualises globalisation as an idealised state of universal
order. It can be invoked as a point of reference for measuring the scale and limits of
globalisation processes (cf. Held and McGrew 2000, p. 4).
It is characteristic for process-oriented approaches that they tend to exaggerate the scale and
range of globalisation, since there is an inclination to compare the present with the (recent)
past only. In addition they often concentrate on input factors while outcome factors like
effects regarding hierarchy, inequality and polarisation for example, are largely ignored.
In view of this systematic bias we will dissect the question of effects not only on the basis of
process-oriented approaches, but also with regard to ideal-type models of globalisation. A
conception of an ideal typical state would read as follows: At the end of the globalisation
process there will be a single state world, formed by a population considering itself as one
nation (or a world nation) (Galtung 2000a, p. 42). For a start, we take a simple model. It
would suggest high entropy of the social-spatial recruiting of actors occupying positions
with high symbolic capital in the art field. Territorial borders and regional fixations should
not play an important role. In such a world status is achieved and not based on ascription (e.
g. gender, class, race, territory). The population of none of the major global regions
should, by definition, have an advantage in advance. A possible yardstick would be the
absolute irrelevance of territorial origin. Empirically this would imply a balanced
recruitment of successful artists from all four corners of the world, and not, as Araeen stated
in the 1970s, from a select few Western countries.
The number of artists in the Kunstkompass top 100 that do not originate from the Northwest
can be used as an indicator for effects and implications of the much cited forced
globalisation of the art field in the past decades. In addition, a test of the deterritorialisation
proposition of postmodernist theory can also be carried out this way.






The figures 24 display the shares of artists from the Northeast, Southwest and Southeast in
the list of the top 100 artists for the comparatively dynamic period between 1970 and
2005,[4] both individually for these three regions and as the sum for non-Euroamerican art.
The data represented in these figures first of all display the central finding that the sum of the
shares of artists from non-Northwest countries which reached its peak in 2002 never
exceeded 11%. Moreover, this share had already reached 8% in the early 1970s making a
difference of only 3% in 35 years of the age of globalisation. Instead of a linear or
exponential increase, which the notion of a globalisation boom over the last three decades
would imply, we can discern a U-shaped curve. From the middle 1970s, a time when the
international solidarity of the new social movements was petering out in the West, a
pronounced decline in the globalisation-effects is visible. This trend was only reversed in the
1990s. In this decade, changes in the distribution of symbolic capital first reached
proportions that can be interpreted as being indicative of an increased globalisation of the
international art field. However, the change in the 1990s should not be overestimated. The
data for the last years show that the there is a stagnation around the relatively modest peak
level of 10-11% since the late 1990s. Moreover, during the period which supporters of the
globalisation thesis conceive as the global age, like e.g. Martin Albrow or Arjun
Appadurai, artists from three of the four corners of the world, considered separately only
reached shares of 5% at the maximum. This is demonstrated by the curves referring to artists
from the Southwest, the Northeast and the Southeast in the figures 2, 3 and 4.
The data reveal the blatant exclusion of Eastern Europe, Latin America, Australia as well as
Africa and Asia from the centre of the self proclaimed, global art-world. A sober
examination of the distribution of positions in the centre of the art field clearly shows that
inclusion processes have remained very modest. The chances of gaining a position in global
art-history in the 20
th
or 21
st
century are strongly and systematically linked to territorial
origin in the North-West. Moreover, taking the strong correlation between territory, culture,
ethnicity or race into account, evidently a highly unequal social and cultural distribution of
these chances persists. The Southeast (including Southern and Eastern Asia) shares only 3-5
% of ranked positions between 2000 and 2005. After its complete exclusion in the 1980s, the
Northeast, including Russia and the Eastern European countries, is represented with only 3%
for the period between 2000 and 2004. The Southwest, comprising Latin America, Africa
and the Caribbean, was represented by 3-4% from 2000 to 2005. This result also suffices to
demonstrate that the strong visibility of African artists at documenta 11 in 2002 as well as in
the Western exhibition circuit in the post-Magicien period after 1990 had no immediate
bearing on their presence at the very centre of the field of art.
These data, indicating the distribution of symbolic capital in the international field of art
provide rather conclusive proof of Olu Oguibes Slot assumption. For artists from African
countries, for instance, there has been one single slot in the centre of the contemporary art-
world since the late 1990s. This regional slot has been occupied by William Kentridge and
by South Africa since 1998. In recent times this country has brought forth a number of artists
who have been present on the contemporary-art circuit, if not present enough to be listed in
the top 100 Capital ranking. Nevertheless, South Africa is not representative of the African
continent as it is a semi-periphery in the precise sense of Wallersteins (1979) world
system perspective and not a periphery. Structurally, semi-peripheral nations display
characteristics of both central and peripheral nations. Two other countries that also
correspond to this category are South Korea and Brazil. Like South Africa, both of them
boasted one top-100 artist in 2004 (Nam J une Paik and Ernesto Neto, respectively).
Peripheral countries, or the Fourth World in the sense of Amin, however, do not appear at
all in the ranking.
One position that opposes globalisation theses captures recent tendencies of transnational
exchange as a process of trilateral regionalisation. It was put forward in the context of
debates about economic globalisation. It also rests upon the fact that two thirds of all
worldwide economic activities are concentrated in the capitalistic triad, the US, EU, and
J apan (cf. Thompson 2000, pp. 110ff.). In the 1990s, these regions encompassed merely 15%
of the global population. Samir Amin (2001) had this group of countries in mind when he
spoke of a new collective imperialism replacing the old imperialism, which was marked
by sharp internal antagonisms.




With regard to the centre of the art field, figure 5 illustrates to what extent it recruits from
two of the economically powerful regions of this triad: the US and the EU. The sum of the
triads proportional representation at the centre of the art field from 1970 to 2005 is between
82% and 95%. The respective figures for 2004 and 2005 are 86% and 87%. The statistics for
the EU during the whole period of 1970 to 2004 encompass the 15 member states prior to the
Unions Eastern Expansion in 2004. Furthermore, Switzerland as a non-EU European
country adds a significant share of 3% e.g. in the last three years to the curve depicted. Thus,
the triads share of successful artists far outweighs even its share of global economic
activity. Yet, if one interprets the economic concentration in these three regions as evidence
against the globalisation thesis which assumes a specific ideal-type model interpretation
as opposed to a process-oriented one in alluding to Hirst and Thomposon (1999), who
speak of the myth of economic globalisation one could analogically speak of the myth of
globalisation of the field of art.
However, the case of J apan with a share of 0-2% over all the globalisation period considered
puts the analogy to trilateral globalisation slightly into perspective. Despite its economic rise
in the 1970s and 1980s, the global visibility of artists from this country has not risen
analogous to its economic upward mobility. From a quantitative perspective, its artistic
presence in the art field equals that of semi-peripheral countries like Brazil or Korea. The
recourse to depth culture, a theoretical construct of Galtung referring to cosmologies or
civilizisations[5], could be fruitful for explaining the under-representation of a nation like
J apan in comparison with small European countries like Switzerland or Austria (2% in
2005), for example. High visibility in the field of art seems to be partly connected with
economic power and partly with a cultural context characterised by a Christian-J ewish
tradition, which in Galtungs (1996) scheme is part of the occident I cosmology. The
chances of attaining a high international profile are slight if one of these factors is not given.
In J apans case the adequate cosmology seems to be missing, whereas in Latin Americas
case a privileged economic situation is absent. The interaction between economic and
cultural factors becomes apparent when one considers the extremely low visibility of artists
from economically underprivileged countries with no Christian-J ewish occident I tradition.
These observations allow two conclusions about processes of globalisation in the field of art.
First, the importance of economic status suggests that structural factors are crucial for
assessing the effects of cultural exchange processes. Contrary to theories of cultural
globalisation, which stress symmetrical interactions within cultural flows or networks, the
unequally distributed economic power and distance to necessity (Bourdieu) appears to be
important. Notwithstanding, one should keep in mind that the art field functions in a
relatively autonomous logic with regard to external economic as well as political influences:
On the one hand, the worldwide allocation of legitimate symbolic capital is, as already
noted, also bound up with contextual, cultural attributes. On the other hand, symbolic
consecration in the (avant-garde) art field follows an essentially anti-economic logic, as not
only Bourdieus critical theory (1996) but also French pragmatist sociology (cf. Heinich
2004) and the more enlightened approaches in the economics of art (cf. Chiapello 1993,
Abbing 2004, Velthuis 2005) suggest. Thus, massive commercialisation of a national field of
art may have negative effects on the degree of international reputation of its artists. As an
example, figure 4 shows that the change of the position of US art does not correspond to the
political and military ascent of the US to the hegemon of hegemones (Galtung) in the
1990s. Instead, the symbolic capital of US-art declined continuously since the 1970s.The
proportion of artists from the US, ranked in the centre of the art field reached its peak in
1978 with nearly 50%, but has decreased since then to about 31%. As the time from the late
1970s was a period of strongly increasing corporate intervention in the US art market (e.g.
corporate collecting, corporate sponsoring etc., cf. Wu 2002, pp. 47ff.), this loss of
international influence may have been the price of the heteronomisation of the US-
American field of art.
Secondly, the data suggest that international success in the field of art is still based on
territorial, social and (macro)cultural characteristics, that is to say, highly contextual
attributes. Economical and Cultural closure reigns, there is no universalistic foundation of
access into the field. Thus, the field of art strikingly differs e. g. from a branch of the culture
and entertainment industry like professional sports. There, numerous chances of success,
visibility and symbolic capital (at the Olympic Games, for instance) for participants of non-
Western, non capitalistic-triad, non Euro-American, non-Christian/J ewish cultural origin or a
non-legitimate skin colour exist. Professional sports, a field of popular culture, therefore
comparatively appears to embody a model of universalism, openness and formal equality of
chances much more. Conversely, the field of art turns out to be one of the social spheres
whose social mechanisms of selection blatantly contradict a universalistic logic, a feature
that has been assumed to be a central characteristic of institutions of Western modernity. In
the reception of the highly influential pattern variables of Talcott Parsons, ascription,
particularism and collective orientation are accorded the status of traditional or primitive
values, whereas self orientation, achievement and universalism are interpreted as modern
ones (cf. Parsons 1951 and the use of his pattern variables for constructing the opposition of
traditional vs. modern in Wallace and Wolff 1991, pp. 31ff. and Banuri 1990, p. 33).
According to our data, the Northwest clearly dominates the centre of the art field, headed by
the EU-US dyad. Yet, the predominance of this region becomes even more apparent if one
takes into account that the majority of non-Northwestern artists with high visibility lives
(lived) and works (worked) in North-Western art metropolises, usually New York, but also
London, Paris, Cologne and Berlin (cf. also the list of the residences of artists in the
catalogue of documenta 11). Real bodily (and not only virtual) integration into one of these
territorially demarcated areas which are the centres of art production and the networks of
weak and strong ties of artists, critics, curators and dealers is in most cases a prerequisite
for success and recognition in the field of contemporary art (cf. Giuffre 1999, J anssen 2001,
Heinich 2004). As Raymond Moulin observes, one reason for the high territorial
concentration of art centres in the West lies in the close interdependence of the art market
and the financial market, which in turn, as Saskia Sassen (2000) has demonstrated, tends
towards territorial concentration The art market displays the two characteristics of being
both internationalised and simultaneously centralised in a few world metropolis similar to
the financial market network as both universes are interdependent (Moulin 2003, p. 83.).
Consequently, one realizes that greater international mobility of artists and curators - one of
the indicators for the thesis of globalisation in the art field - does not weaken the territorial
gravity of main North-Western art centres; nor does the proliferation of art biennales and art
institutions outside countries of the Northwest alter the traditional cartography of centres and
peripheries in the art field, as euphoric voices in the art world have suggested.
For globalisation theories that claim increasing deterritorialisation and that dismiss centre-
periphery models (e.g. Hardt and Negri 2000), such regional concentrations represent
anomalies in the Kuhnian sense which prove difficult to integrate. These highly
speculative, theories ignore empirical evidence for the persistence of demarcated power
centres. They also ignore, that networks are from being structures being free from hierarchy
and exploitation, but are new means and media for highly asymmetric forms of exchange (cf.
Boltanski / Chiapello 2005). In some versions of globalisation theory, regional
concentrations of power such as manifested in global cities (cf. Sassen 2000) are even
reinterpreted as indicators for increasing globalisation (cf. e.g. Cochran and Pain 2000, p.
17).
Centre-periphery models, however, not only allow grasping processes of compression and
regional concentration, they also illuminate that the chances to benefit from emerging
international flows are territorially unequally distributed. The migration of scientists and
artists from the peripheries and semi-peripheries to the centres of the Northwest, for
example, demonstrates a classical brain-drain pattern. Without doubt, it benefits the
centres of the centres and the centres of the peripheries more than the peripheries of the
peripheries (cf. Galtung 1980). The worldwide dissemination of art biennales and art
institutions, in turn, does not necessarily mark a sign of globalisation to be celebrated. One
could instead pose the question to what extent it implies patterns of cultural imperialism that
involve the establishment of bridgeheads in centres of the peripheries, supported by a
culturally penetrated indigenous elite. One could also ask, whether such cultural bridgeheads
might serve the development of counter-power in the periphery, as Hou Hanru (1999, p.
347.) assumes, or whether the elites of the periphery tend to lose power due to globalisation:
The local representative (in the centre of the periphery, L. B. and U. W.) will become
superfluous under conditions of trans-continental real-time communication; purchases will
be made directly from the centre, via internet, and delivery follows via centrally controlled
channels. This poses a major threat to the elite of the periphery (Galtung 2000, p. 132).
However, bearing in mind the limited importance of e-commerce and the still pronounced
digital gap (cf. Achhar et al (ed.) 2003, p. 10, Warnier 2004, p. 42.) this centre-periphery
scenario would appear to describe a development for the distant future.
Analysing the effects of internationalisation in the field of art suggests that typical
assumptions of globalisation theories, such as deterritorialisation, the acceleration of
worldwide interdependencies, or mutual interpenetration of cultural life, tend to obscure the
reality of persisting asymmetries and power structures. What appears as the emergence of a
global art field turns out to be the business of dyadic regionalization associated with the
worldwide establishment of some institutional satellites and restricted slots for non-
occidental artists. The talk about the globalisation of art in important respects seems to refer
to no more than a myth. Pragmatic sociology postulates that deconstructing such myths
should not be the whole task for a scientific study of societies and their fields (cf. Heinich
2004). Sociology of art also is supposed to explore the logic of such myths in detail and to
find out, why they can gain such high popularity in view of so much evidence to the
contrary.

[1] The notion of globalization was introduced in the social sciences in the 1980s (cf.
Rosenau 1980, Levitt 1983, Robertson 1983), and increasingly used since the early 1990s
(cf. e. g. Albrow / King (eds.) 1990, Appadurai 1990, Featherstone (ed.) 1990, Giddens
1990, Sklair 1991, McGrew 1992).
[2] In this discussion the artists Martha Rosler, Yinka Shonibare as well as a new class of
curators participated, who are active worldwide and thus have a worldwide status. Amongst
them Okwui Enwezor, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Cathrine David and Franceso Bonami are listed.
[3] The four regions of the world were differentiated on the base of a cartography of Galtung
(2000) in the following way: a) NORTHWEST: North America (USA, Canada), Western
Europe (European Union in the borders after the inclusion of countries in 1995, not
including the eastern countries, which only joined in 2004). b) SOUTHWEST: Latin
America, Caribean Countries, Western Asia, Arab World, Africa, Southern Asia, India. c)
NORTHEAST: former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Turkey, Pakistan, Iran. d)
SOUTHEAST: Southern Asia, Eastern Asia, Pacific Islands, China, J apan.
The Rest in figure 1 refers to SOUTHWEST +SOUTHEAST +NORTHEAST, the
West to the NORTHWEST.
[4] The results for the 5 years (1980, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1987) in which the rankings did not
take place or were established using other criteria, have been determined by linear
interpolation.
[5] The use of the notion of an unconscious depth-culture, in the sense of a cosmology, and
contrary to surface culture based on debatable ideologies is, in this case, a reference to
Galtungs theory. The notion of deep culture is not essentialist as e.g. Menzel 2001
maintains. Galtung 2003, p. 9 emphasises that it is used as a theoretical construct, an as-if
concept, in the sense of a fictive supposition that can be referenced for prediction purposes.


Lara Buchholz (DE) and Ulf Wuggenig (DE)
Lara Buchholz is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Sociology, SUNY at Stony Brook,
New York, USA. Ulf Wuggenig is the director of the Institute for Cultural Theory and the
co-director of the Art Gallery of the University of Lueneburg, Germany.


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