Globalization and Contemporary Art

Globalization and Contemporary Art is an unprecedented collection of essays that charts the intersection of art and globalization since the 1980s. The volume provides an authoritative, accessible, comprehensive, and challenging account of the impact of globalization upon contemporary visual art and its socio-cultural spheres of production, circulation, and consumption. Richly illustrated, this anthology showcases 33 essays from all corners of the world by well-known authors such as W.J.T. Mitchell, Rasheed Araeen, and James Elkins, as well as emerging scholars in art history/theory, visual and museum studies. The collection is deliberately wide-ranging, embracing the subject in all its fullness, diversity and unruliness - from case-studies of artists and artworks to meditations on broader thematic, conceptual, and historiographical topics. Tackling the subject through a variety of useful analytics - forms and formations, institutions, the production of meaning, identifications, and reproduction - Globalization and Contemporary Art challenges the status of art history as the dominant discipline able to recognize and account for developments in visual art and art worlds since the 1980s. Collectively, this set of essays suggests how and why such a necessary re-conceptualization should take place and with what consequences. This is illuminating reading for all students and scholars of art history, visual culture, cultural studies, cultural policy and globalization studies.