Introduction : measuring the economy of the arts -- Museums in flux -- The exhibitionary complex -- Art and the global marketplace -- Conclusion : non-profits and artist collectives as market alternatives

The first major history of the glamorous art biennial. Biennials have proliferated across the globe since the end of the Cold War and have now stabilized at about 200 a year. While this quintessentially contemporary form has significant roots in the world expositions of the 19th century, Jones argues that the biennial is also the platform for an important new aesthetic shift. Moving away from a focus on visual looking in the mid 20th century, the art world today embraces experience: art fairs give the feel of closeness and spaciousness, crowds, and they engage all our senses, even taste. Jones argues that the dominance of installation art and the simultaneous rise of biennialsor recurring art fairsneed to be examined as joint phenomenamutually reinforcing and linked to specific geo-political and aesthetic conditions. From the rise of tourism to the flows of art commerce, Jones hatches a new way to track the development of international art fairs in nearly every corner of the globe: from the early world fairs of London, Paris, Chicago, and New York to art fairs proper in Venice, Sao Paulo, Havana, Berlin, Lyon, and Beijing, as well as Kassel s Documenta, Whitney Biennial, and moreall explained through a rapidly evolving aesthetics of experience that has never, until now, been addressed in such a substantial way."

Artwork and popular cultures are crucial sites of contesting and transforming power relationships in world politics. The contributors to this edited collection draw on their experiences across arts, activist, and academic communities to analyze how the global politics of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy are expressed and may be transformed through popular cultures and artistic labour. Through their methodological treatment of artwork and popular cultures as material sites of generating aesthetic knowledge and embodying global power, the authors foreground an analysis of global hierarchies and transformative empowerment through critically engaged political imagination and cultural projects. By centralizing an intersectional analysis of the racialized, gendered, economic dimensions of the praxis of culture, The Art of Global Power demonstrates how artwork and popular culture projects, events, and institutions are vital sites of transgressing the material conditions that produce and sustain unjust global power hierarchies. This book intervenes in the international relations popular culture literature by problematizing the idea of a single homogenizing global popular culture and engaging with multiple popular cultures articulated from diverse global locations and worldviews. To the international relations aesthetics literature this book contributes an intersectional analysis of aesthetics as an embodied process of knowledge production and action that takes place within global conditions of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy. This book will be of interest to students, researchers and practitioners of international relations, and gender, cultural and media studies.

Re-envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon: Perspectives in a Global World seeks to dissect and interrogate the nature of the present-day art field, which has experienced dramatic shifts in the past 50 years. In discussions of the canon of art history, the notion of ‘inclusiveness’, both at the level of rhetoric and as a desired practice is on the rise and gradually replacing talk of ‘exclusion’, which dominated critiques of the canon up until two decades ago. The art field has dramatically, if insufficiently, changed in the half-century since the first protests and critiques of the exclusion of ‘others’ from the art canon. With increased globalization and shifting geopolitics, the art field is expanding beyond its Euro-American focus, as is particularly evident in the large-scale international biennales now held all over the globe. Are canons and counter-canons still relevant? Can they be re-envisioned rather than merely revised? Following an introduction that discusses these issues, thirteen newly commissioned essays present case studies of consecration in the contemporary art field, and three commissioned discussions present diverse positions on issues of the canon and consecration processes today. This volume will be of interest to instructors and students of contemporary art, art history, and museum and curatorial studies.

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.

Global Milton and Visual Art showcases the aesthetic appropriation and reinterpretation of the works and legend of the early modern English poet and politician John Milton in diverse eras, regions, and media: book illustrations, cinema, digital reworkings, monuments, painting, sculpture, shieldry, and stained glass. It innovates an inclusive approach to Milton’s literary art, especially his masterpiece Paradise Lost, in global contemporary aesthetics via intertextual and interdisciplinary relations. The fifteen purposefully-brief chapters, 103 illustrations, and 64 supplemental web-images reflect the great richness of the topics and the diverse experiences and expertise of the contributors. Part I: Panoramas, provides overviews and key contexts; Part II: Cameos offers different perspectives of the varied afterlives of the most widely-circulating illustrations of Paradise Lost, those by Gustave Doré; Part III: Textual Close-ups focuses on a rich variety of book illustrations, from centuries-old elite engravings to a twenty-first century graphic novel; and Part IV: A Prospect beyond Books, explores visual media outside of books that manifest powerful connections, direct and indirect, with Milton’s works and legend.

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 Ardouin, Keeper of the African Section of London's British Museum, Koeki Claessens, Director of Central Africa's Royal Museum and Eugene Tan, Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore--who presented at the 2007 conference.

In this critical darling Vermeer's captivating and enigmatic paintings become windows that reveal how daily life and thought-from Delft to Beijing--were transformed in the 17th century, when the world first became global. A Vermeer painting shows a military officer in a Dutch sitting room, talking to a laughing girl. In another canvas, fruit spills from a blue-and-white porcelain bowl. Familiar images that captivate us with their beauty--but as Timothy Brook shows us, these intimate pictures actually give us a remarkable view of an expanding world. The officer's dashing hat is made of beaver fur from North America, and it was beaver pelts from America that financed the voyages of explorers seeking routes to China-prized for the porcelains so often shown in Dutch paintings of this time, including Vermeer's. In this dazzling history, Timothy Brook uses Vermeer's works, and other contemporary images from Europe, Asia, and the Americas to trace the rapidly growing web of global trade, and the explosive, transforming, and sometimes destructive changes it wrought in the age when globalization really began.

Dating back to at least 50,000 years ago, rock art is one of the oldest forms of human symbolic expression. Geographically, it spans all the continents on Earth. Scenes are common in some rock art, and recent work suggests that there are some hints of expression that looks like some of the conventions of western scenic art. In this unique volume examining the nature of scenes in rock art, researchers examine what defines a scene, what are the necessary elements of a scene, and what can the evolutionary history tell us about storytelling, sequential memory, and cognitive evolution among ancient and living cultures?