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I am a professor of International Studies and a former museum curator. This combination provides me with a unique perspective not only on the inner workings of the art world, but the way that those practices map on to broader social, political, and economic transformations that occur as a result of globalization. This leads me, for example, to an assessment of how free-trade zones affect the art market. In past research, I have focused on colonialism and French art in the nineteenth century, so I am attuned to power imbalances between the center and the periphery and I am fascinated to see how these are shifting in the present.
This book was the first to bring together a group of international artists, curators, and scholars to discuss and engage the changing nature of the art world, as a result of globalization.
The project was launched at the Center for Media and Art (ZKM) in Karlsrühe, Germany in 2006 with a series of conferences that turned into a series of books over time and an exhibition in 2013.
No other book considers so many new manifestations of the museum in the twenty-first century, illuminating new opportunities for the reader to explore distant lands vicariously and also to discover how many different ways institutions are being developed in cities around the world.
This is the second publication from the ongoing research series, Global Art and the Museum (GAM), which was initiated in 2001 by German art historian Hans Belting and artist, writer and curator Peter Weibel at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. The last 20 years have seen a rapid globalization of the art world, resulting in geographic decentralization and a shift away from a primarily Western perspective. GAM's aim is to analyze the effect of these changes on the art market, museums and art criticism. This volume comprises a collection of essays by experts--such as Claude…
I am a professor of International Studies and a former museum curator. This combination provides me with a unique perspective not only on the inner workings of the art world, but the way that those practices map on to broader social, political, and economic transformations that occur as a result of globalization. This leads me, for example, to an assessment of how free-trade zones affect the art market. In past research, I have focused on colonialism and French art in the nineteenth century, so I am attuned to power imbalances between the center and the periphery and I am fascinated to see how these are shifting in the present.
Adam is one of the foremost reporters to cover the art market and has worked for the Financial Times and the Art Newspaper. In her second book on the art market, she dives into the unsightly domain of the global art world, including speculation, forgery, art as an asset class, and freeports, the secret offshore warehouses where the rich stash their treasures tax-free. Her unique approach, focusing on classic categories such as supply, demand, and price among others brings a refreshing approach to the changing nature of the art market.
This book scrutinizes the excesses and extravagances that the 21st-century explosion of the contemporary art market brought in its wake. The buying of art as an investment, temptations to forgery and fraud, tax evasion, money laundering and pressure to produce more and more art all form part of this story, as do the upheavals in auction houses and the impact of the enhanced use of financial instruments on art transactions. Drawing on a series of tenaciously wrought interviews with artists, collectors, lawyers, bankers and convicted artist forgers, the author charts the voracious commodification of artists and art objects, and art's…
I am a professor of International Studies and a former museum curator. This combination provides me with a unique perspective not only on the inner workings of the art world, but the way that those practices map on to broader social, political, and economic transformations that occur as a result of globalization. This leads me, for example, to an assessment of how free-trade zones affect the art market. In past research, I have focused on colonialism and French art in the nineteenth century, so I am attuned to power imbalances between the center and the periphery and I am fascinated to see how these are shifting in the present.
This book tears the lid off the globalization conversation because, before this book, nobody had considered all of the ways that the tools of globalization, like transnational shipping and the geographical distribution of labor, could be used to commit international crimes.
According to the authors, globalization’s shadow hides in plain sight, whether we are discussing transnational Mexican cartels, the Dark Web, human trafficking through Eastern Europe, or wildlife smuggling.
One of the morals of this book is that there is always a dark side to success stories and also that the more we generate regulations to prevent unwanted activities, the more money someone is going to make by providing those services.
This collection of essays introduces the thriving illicit industries and activities within the global economy whose growth challenges traditional notions of wealth, power, and progress. Through essays contributed by leading experts and scholars, "Deviant Globalization" argues that far from being marginal, illicit activities are a fundamental part of globalization. Narcotrafficking, human trafficking, the organ trade, computer malware, transnational gangs are just as much artifacts of globalization as are CNN and McDonald's, free trade and capital mobility, accessible air travel and container shipping. In fact, almost every technology, process, and regulation that enables mainstream globalization is an enabler of deviant globalization.…
I am a professor of International Studies and a former museum curator. This combination provides me with a unique perspective not only on the inner workings of the art world, but the way that those practices map on to broader social, political, and economic transformations that occur as a result of globalization. This leads me, for example, to an assessment of how free-trade zones affect the art market. In past research, I have focused on colonialism and French art in the nineteenth century, so I am attuned to power imbalances between the center and the periphery and I am fascinated to see how these are shifting in the present.
This book chronicles the first major European biennial to be organized by an art collective from the Global South, ruangrupa.
Not only does this handbook catalogue all of the art collectives and artists they invited to participate in this global exhibition, it explains in clear terms what it meant for a collective from Jakarta to move to Germany and take on one of the biggest organizational projects in the art world.
The show proved controversial, for the wrong reasons, but the self-description of the organizers as aliens landing in Kässel to promote an alternative vision of contemporary art (not driven by capitalist relations) is quite provocative.
documenta fifteen is no ordinary art exhibition. Envisioned under the guiding concept of lumbung, the Indonesian collective ruangrupa is less concerned with individual works than with models of collaborative practice. The Handbook offers insights and orientation to the processes that evolved in the creation of the exhibition. A comprehensive resource both for visitors of documenta in Kassel as well as people interested in collective practices, this Handbook presents all documenta fifteen collectives and artists through profiles by international authors familiar with their different artistic practices and cultural contexts. Using the pivotal question of "what is lumbung?" as a vantage point,…
From the moment I could pick up a pencil, I’ve loved to draw. Since then, my art career has developed alongside my writing, and I’m now a professional illustrator. Despite this background, I still feel alienated from the “art world”. Contemporary art seems like a scam. Its pieces leave me cold, there’s rarely any skill to be appreciated, and their “meaning” is often obscure or trivial – at the end of the day, a pickled sheep is a pickled sheep, right? Pale Kings is a satire of all this, where a group of chancers set out to scam the scammers at their own game. But would anyone really buy a hole?
The staggering thing about contemporary art is the money involved. Why would anyone pay $12 million for a dead shark preserved in formaldehyde?
This question drives Don Thompson’s book, as he explores the contemporary art market from the point of view of a professional economist. It’s a relatively unbiased work, free of ridicule or outrage, and is perhaps the better for that. Thompson shows us how the market works, and the role of each player – the buyers and collectors and investors, the rock star artists, the museums and galleries and auction houses – but also explores the psychology at work.
Why did hedge fund manager Steven A. Cohen buy Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living for $12 million?
Why would a smart New York investment banker pay $12 million for the decaying, stuffed carcass of a shark? By what alchemy does Jackson Pollock's drip painting No. 5, 1948 sell for $140 million?
Intriguing and entertaining, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark is a Freakonomics approach to the economics and psychology of the contemporary art world. Why were record prices achieved at auction for works by 131 contemporary artists in 2006 alone, with astonishing new heights reached in 2007? Don Thompson explores the money, lust, and self-aggrandizement of the art world in an attempt to determine what makes a particular…
I have been professionally involved with contemporary art since the 1980s, when I was a curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. In the forty years since I've seen an enormous shift in the orientation of American curators and scholars from Western art to a global perspective. After earning my PhD at Harvard, and writing several books on contemporary art, I wanted to tackle the challenge of a truly comparative contemporary art history. To do so, I've depended on the burgeoning scholarship from a new more diverse generation of art historians, as well as on many decades of travel and research. My book Heritage and Debt is an attempt to synthesize that knowledge.
Hito Steyerl is one of the most prominent artists and media theorists in the world. Her essays draw unexpected and always stimulating connections between media technologies, surveillance, war, and political power. They are short, concise, and a pleasure to read, but they always engage with big ideas around the ethical and social challenges of a world made global through the framework of the Internet and digital communication more broadly.
In Duty Free Art, filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl wonders how we can appreciate, or even make art, in the present age. What can we do when arms manufacturers sponsor museums, and some of the world's most valuable artworks are used as a fictional currency in a global futures market that has nothing to do with the work itself? Can we distinguish between creativity and the digital white noise that bombards our everyday lives? Exploring artefacts as diverse as video games, Wikileaks files, the proliferation of spam, and political actions, she exposes the paradoxes within globalization, political economies, visual culture,…
From the moment I could pick up a pencil, I’ve loved to draw. Since then, my art career has developed alongside my writing, and I’m now a professional illustrator. Despite this background, I still feel alienated from the “art world”. Contemporary art seems like a scam. Its pieces leave me cold, there’s rarely any skill to be appreciated, and their “meaning” is often obscure or trivial – at the end of the day, a pickled sheep is a pickled sheep, right? Pale Kings is a satire of all this, where a group of chancers set out to scam the scammers at their own game. But would anyone really buy a hole?
Before you judge contemporary art, it’s only fair that you try to understand it.
As such, Susie Hodges’ book does a valuable service, collecting together one hundred of the most important, influential, and controversial artworks from the last century or so. This ranges from Picasso to Damien Hirst, from Andy Warhol’s silkscreen prints of tins of tomato soup to Tracy Emin’s unmade bed.
Each entry gives some background to the work, some critical analysis, and attempts to justify why, although your five-year-old might indeed leave their bed unmade, they could not have done so in a way that explores the poignancy of the human condition (or something like that…).
A partisan book, defending the importance of modern art, but an informative introduction.
Come on, you know you've thought it-while viewing a "masterpiece" of abstract art, you mutter, "A kid could do that." Here Susie Hodge, author of How to Survive Modern Art, explains why the best examples of modern art are actually the result of sophisticated thought and serious talent. From Marcel Duchamp's notorious Fountain and the scribbles of Cy Twombly to Mark Rothko's multiforms and Carl Andre's uncarved blocks, Hodge addresses critical outrage with a revealing insight into the technical skill, layering of ideas, and sheer inspiration behind each work. In cleverly organized chapters such as "Objects/ Toys," "Provocations/Tantrums," and "People/Monsters,"…
Having written several books on cultural history, I was puzzled in the late 1990s by the insistence of most American curators, art historians, and gallerists that there could not possibly be any spiritual content in modern artbecause the modernproject (beginning, they assert, with the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874) was all about the rejection of tradition, religion, etc. This overarching narrative has dominated the professional art world since World War II. I knew it was false because I was aware that many prominent modern artists had spiritual interests, which were expressed in their art. So began a 17-year-long research quest focused on what the artists themselves had said.
Lipsey, an art historian, was inspired by Coomaraswamy’s perception of spiritual interests in the work of early modernist artists who exhibited at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery in New York in the 1920s. Lipsey had a hunch that many more prominent 20th-century artists most likely had a similar engagement with the spiritual. In seeking to present “the hidden side” of modern art, he discusses some 20 renowned artists and relevant movements that attracted many of them in various decades, such as Theosophy, Orphism, and Cubism. The title is taken from a quotation by the sculptor Constantin Brancusi, who favored a nature-based spiritual sensibility that was distinct from church-based religious art: “It is time we had an art of our own.” Lipsey is an insightful and graceful guide in this area.
I make prints and visual books. I founded Bridge Press, now in Kennebunk, Maine, 1989 to publish limited edition artist's books and etchings. The name of the press underscores the collaborative nature of book making. Visual books offered possibilities for the continuity, connection, and unfolding of images—each image is complete yet linked to every other through the structure of the book. Books seemed an ideal vehicle to assemble and connect my prints, to order and unfold a sequence of images, with defined and recurrent shapes, motifs, and composition, and to create a setting in which each image is complete yet linked to every other through the structure of the binding or enclosure.
This book brilliantly revives the concept of cosmography, the visual depiction of the universe, from the beginnings of Romanticism to images from the Hubble telescope. By intermingling images from art and science, the book underscores the powerful visual parallels between the two disciplines, their discoveries equally strange, wondrous, and insightful.
From Galileo to Yves Klein the cosmos has been the inspiration for generations of artists, architects and designers. Their multifacetted cosmic visions are the subject of this original volume.
Having written several books on cultural history, I was puzzled in the late 1990s by the insistence of most American curators, art historians, and gallerists that there could not possibly be any spiritual content in modern artbecause the modernproject (beginning, they assert, with the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874) was all about the rejection of tradition, religion, etc. This overarching narrative has dominated the professional art world since World War II. I knew it was false because I was aware that many prominent modern artists had spiritual interests, which were expressed in their art. So began a 17-year-long research quest focused on what the artists themselves had said.
I noticed when I was interviewing prominent contemporary artists for my book that many of them had a Catholic childhood. Eleanor Heartney noticed the same thing when she began to research the art and artists who became a focus in the culture wars of the 1990s. This is a dimension of the art history of the modern era that has not been told. Heartney explores the influence of an “Incarnational consciousness” in works that transgress boundaries. Beyond that, she frames artistic manifestations of the “Catholic imagination,” tracing the influence of “the beauty of religious art, music, and literature and the slippage in sacramental rituals between the carnal and the spiritual.” Her final chapter is on “Knowledge Through the Body: The Female Perspective.”
NEWLY EXPANDED AND REDESIGNED 2ND EDITION. This redesigned, re-edited, illustrated new edition of the classic study "Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art" explores the Catholic roots of controversial artists and the impact of Catholicism on the 1990s Culture Wars. In the 1990s the United States was embroiled in a deeply divisive Culture War. "Postmodern Heretics" offers a radically original interpretation of the extraordinary cultural and political battles that took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Examining this period from the perspective of religion, Eleanor Heartney discovers that the most controversial artists of the time came, almost…
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