This is the third volume in The Art Seminar, James Elkin's series of conversations on art and visual studies. Is Art History Global? stages an international conversation among art historians and critics on the subject of the practice and responsibility of global thinking within the discipline. Participants range from Keith Moxey of Columbia University to Cao Yiqiang, Ding Ning, Cuautemoc Medina, Oliver Debroise, Renato Gonzalez Mello, and other scholars.

The book responds to the challenge of the global turn in the humanities from the perspective of art history. A global art history, it argues, need not follow the logic of economic globalization nor seek to bring the entire world into its fold. Instead, it draws on a theory of transculturation to explore key moments of an art history that can no longer be approached through a facile globalism. How can art historical analysis theorize relationships of connectivity that have characterized cultures and regions across distances? How can it meaningfully handle issues of commensurability or its absence among cultures? By shifting the focus of enquiry to South Asia, the five meditations that make up this book seek to translate intellectual insights of experiences beyond Euro–America into globally intelligible analyses.

Addressing fundamental problems in modern Western approaches to art, this bold, brilliant, and important book proposes a new and flexible conceptual framework for the understanding of art by replacing the notion of the "visual arts" with that of the "spatial arts." 350 illustrations.

How global contemporary art reanimates the past as a resource for the present, combating modern art's legacy of Eurocentrism. If European modernism was premised on the new—on surpassing the past, often by assigning it to the “traditional” societies of the Global South—global contemporary art reanimates the past as a resource for the present. In this account of what globalization means for contemporary art, David Joselit argues that the creative use of tradition by artists from around the world serves as a means of combatting modern art's legacy of Eurocentrism. Modernism claimed to live in the future and relegated the rest of the world to the past. Global contemporary art shatters this myth by reactivating various forms of heritage—from literati ink painting in China to Aboriginal painting in Australia—in order to propose new and different futures. Joselit analyzes not only how heritage becomes contemporary through the practice of individual artists but also how a cultural infrastructure of museums, biennials, and art fairs worldwide has emerged as a means of generating economic value, attracting capital and tourist dollars. Joselit traces three distinct forms of modernism that developed outside the West, in opposition to Euro-American modernism: postcolonial, socialist realism, and the underground. He argues that these modern genealogies are synchronized with one another and with Western modernism to produce global contemporary art. Joselit discusses curation and what he terms “the curatorial episteme,” which, through its acts of framing or curating, can become a means of recalibrating hierarchies of knowledge—and can contribute to the dual projects of decolonization and deimperialization.

The project of global art history calls for balanced treatment of artifacts and a unified approach. This volume emphasizes questions of transcultural encounters and exchanges as circulations. It presents a strategy that highlights the processes and connections among cultures, and also responds to the dynamics at work in the current globalized art world. The editors’ introduction provides an account of the historical background to this approach to global art history, stresses the inseparable bond of theory and practice, and suggests a revaluation of materialist historicism as an underlying premise. Individual contributions to the book provide an overview of current reflection and research on issues of circulation in relation to global art history and the globalization of art past and present. They offer a variety of methods and approaches to the treatment of different periods, regions, and objects, surveying both questions of historiography and methodology and presenting individual case studies. An 'Afterword' by James Elkins gives a critique of the present project. The book thus deliberately leaves discussion open, inviting future responses to the large questions it poses.

A more global, flexible way to teach art history

The book responds to the challenge of the global turn in the humanities from the perspective of art history. A global art history, it argues, need not follow the logic of economic globalization nor seek to bring the entire world into its fold. Instead, it draws on a theory of transculturation to explore key moments of an art history that can no longer be approached through a facile globalism. How can art historical analysis theorize relationships of connectivity that have characterized cultures and regions across distances? How can it meaningfully handle issues of commensurability or its absence among cultures? By shifting the focus of enquiry to South Asia, the five meditations that make up this book seek to translate intellectual insights of experiences beyond Euro-America into globally intelligible analyses.

Wie lässt sich eine Kunstgeschichte denken, die prozessuale, performative und transkulturelle Wanderungsbewegungen ins Zentrum ihrer theoretischen und methodischen Analysen rückt? Mit Beiträgen international ausgewiesener Experten gibt das Handbuch erstmals Antworten darauf, welche Konsequenzen das Zusammenwirken von Migration und Globalisierung für die kunstwissenschaftliche Forschung, die kuratorische Praxis sowie die künstlerische Produktion und Theorie hat. Ziel der vielstimmigen Anthologie ist es, einen interdisziplinären Diskurs zum „migratory turn" in der Kunstgeschichte zu eröffnen.

Featuring some of the major voices in the world of art history, this volume explores the methodological aspects of comparison in the historiography of the discipline. The chapters assess the strengths and weaknesses of comparative practice in the history of art, and consider the larger issue of the place of comparative in how art history may develop in the future. The contributors represent a comprehensive range of period and geographic command from antiquity to modernity, from China and Islam to Europe, from various forms of art history to archaeology, anthropology and material culture studies. Art history is less a single discipline than a series of divergent scholarly fields ? in very different historical, geographic and cultural contexts ? but all with a visual emphasis on the close examination of objects. These fields focus on different, often incompatible temporal and cultural contexts, yet nonetheless they regard themselves as one coherent discipline ? namely the history of art. There are substantive problems in how the sub-fields within the broad-brush generalization called 'art history' can speak coherently to each other. These are more urgent since the shift from an art history centered on the western tradition to one that is consciously global.

This important and overdue book examines illuminated manuscripts and other book arts of the Global Middle Ages. Illuminated manuscripts and illustrated or decorated books—like today’s museums—preserve a rich array of information about how premodern peoples conceived of and perceived the world, its many cultures, and everyone’s place in it. Often a Eurocentric field of study, manuscripts are prisms through which we can glimpse the interconnected global history of humanity. Toward a Global Middle Ages is the first publication to examine decorated books produced across the globe during the period traditionally known as medieval. Through essays and case studies, the volume’s multidisciplinary contributors expand the historiography, chronology, and geography of manuscript studies to embrace a diversity of objects, individuals, narratives, and materials from Africa, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas—an approach that both engages with and contributes to the emerging field of scholarly inquiry known as the Global Middle Ages. Featuring more than 160 color illustrations, this wide-ranging and provocative collection is intended for all who are interested in engaging in a dialogue about how books and other textual objects contributed to world-making strategies from about 400 to 1600.