Christine Macel - A History by Haus der Kunst

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A History Christine Macel Another World

Over the past 30 years, the various art worlds – and consequently the nature of art – have witnessed such substantial changes that this essay can hardly constitute a comprehensive analysis. Yet, this essay is a start, as it provides a sketch of the historical framework of these upheavals, many of which originated in 1989.1 Such events include the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, followed by the reunification of Germany; the events at Tiananmen Square in Beijing as well the government crackdown on 4 June; China’s development toward a society with a quasi-capitalist economy; the book-burning of Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” in January that same year and the ensuing debates about religion and freedom of expression. These are just a few examples of the storms that seemed to threaten the balance of the world to an ever-increasing degree. From the Gulf War in 1991 to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 to the financial crisis in autumn 2008 – to name just a few examples of major collective trauma – history took on an increasingly ominous stance. Artists were faced with a world that was threatening to degenerate into chaos and one toward which many could no longer assume an indifferent attitude. The dissolution of the cultural hegemony of Europe and the United States can be regarded as one of the most important consequences of such historical shifts, and this had an enormous impact on art, which has since become global and “world art,” albeit no longer universal in the sense of the Enlightenment. Yet subjectivity itself has also undergone a profound transformation in today’s consumer and media society. Changes in the field of aesthetic experience and artistic production thus could be understood as a result of this change. The first signs of the current “cultural revolution” of art included the boom in mass culture and cultural tourism, new forms of art consumption and the advance of marketing in the field of art. At the same time, the appreciation of contemporary art has never been as great as since the 1990s. This was preceded in France by a new edition of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes (Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns), in which the present was generally agreed (or at least settled) upon. Meanwhile, there was an explosion in the number of artists, galleries, and alliances between galleries and curators/ exhibition organizers. Today even ski resorts offer tourists art exhibitions, for example in Gstaad with an exhibition of installations at Schnee2 or in Valloire – primarily known as the home of the ski racer Jean-Baptiste Grange and less for its promotion of art – with a Sophie Calle exhibition in the village’s Baroque church. One could infer that, since the 1980s, a true “democratization” has taken place in contemporary art, whether through concerted political action or concentrated efforts at art education. Nevertheless, the high number of museum visitors still comes from the educated classes.

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The most significant consequence has been the development of the contemporary art market since the 1980s, and especially since the late 1990s, whereby its emergence in the auction houses in particular has played a significant role. Or as Benjamin Buchloh stated in 2011 in a realistic, if not pessimistic, description of the more radical and exclusionary artist positions: Warhol’s statement from the 1970s about “art business,” which he had then interpreted as a parody, now seems more like a prophecy, because culture has become a commodity and an object of speculation.3 After the record prices of 1988 and the recession of 1990, a renewed surge in the art market has been obvious since the late 1990s – despite another recession in 2008 – demanding constant or even higher prices for contemporary art. After Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, and Richard Prince count as the biggest winners of such recent transactions. Painters Peter Doig, Martin Kippenberger, Gerhard Richter, and Christopher Wool are also in the higher leagues. This phenomenon, however, also leads to excesses, as Thomas McEvilley clearly recognized in the early 1990s when he stated that artworks were already created as commodities and no longer evolved into them. This has resulted in their legitimation by the market rather than by art institutions or art critics. Despite the move toward a “world art,” in terms of value and volume, American and Chinese artists dominate the market. In 2012/13 the United States led with 56 percent of this volume, followed by China,4 Great Britain, and France. Reaching beyond the English-speaking world, unprecedented media coverage demonstrates that contemporary art has become a luxury product and a globally recognized investment object. But this fact should not obscure the reality that the majority of exhibited art has no place in this market and that this dominance of the economic mindset only holds true for the top of the “art pyramid” as it is described by Artprice or Artfacts.5 The majority of contemporary art is excluded from this system, in which the artists attempt either to position themselves or to which they consciously design alternatives in an increasingly intense contrasting milieu. A Global Art? The globalization of the various art worlds represents the other great revolution of the past 30 years. After 1989, a deconstruction of the Western doxa of art occurred in part because of the dissolution of the cultural hegemony of Europe and the United States, and in part because of the new artistic approaches and how these were pursued, especially by African, African-American, and Latin American artists. The exhibition Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern curated by William Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1984 had already drawn attention to the fact that modern Western art was inconceivable without a dialogue with other cultures, although the concept of “primitivism” was widely criticized and has since been shelved.6 In the exhibition, African artworks – completely removed from their context – were juxtaposed with masterpieces of modern Western art, which led to lively discussions. For example, in a piece in Artforum, Thomas McEvilley accused the curators of having treated the artworks from Africa and other parts of the world as mere sources of inspiration for famous works of modern art (such as Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon), without granting them an independent value within their respective cultural contexts. In this respect the

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exhibition Les Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Pompidou in 1989, curated by Jean-Hubert Martin, marked a certain turning point7 by making way for numerous debates and controversies. That same year in the London exhibition The Other Story, the Pakistan-born British artist Rasheed Araeen presented for the first time exclusively non-Western artists, mainly from African countries and from India8 – which finally introduced the postcolonial era to art. It is, above all, the newly established biennials of contemporary art, as well as then newly established relationship between countries in the Global South, that since the late 1980s have contributed to changes in the distribution of roles in the art worlds, thereby gradually helping to lift the West’s hegemony. The Havana Biennial in 1986 is now regarded as the first truly global biennial. Its founder Gerardo Mosquera felt inspired by the spirit of “concrete utopia.” After its premiere in 1984, which featured artists from the Caribbean and Latin America and artists from Africa and Asia were invited to participate in its second edition, thereby ushering in the first biennial without Western participation.9 The second edition of the Johannesburg Biennale in 1997, entitled Trade Routes and curated by Okwui Enwezor, was devoted to precisely these questions of history, geography, and globalization and called for a postcolonial critique of the dominant paradigms, in which terms of cultural conjunction and disjunction played a central role. The biennial’s six exhibition sections were supervised by curators from different regions of the world, including Cuba (Gerardo Mosquera), Latin America (Octavio Zaya), China (Hou Hanru), and Korea (Yu Yeon Kim). As curator of documenta 11 (2002) and in collaboration with curators from around the world, especially Sarat Maharaj10 from South Africa, Enwezor continued to pursue this global approach on an even larger scale. Today, with more than 200 biennials taking place in venues on every continent, we can legitimately speak of a global art scene. In addition to the “founding biennials” – the Venice Biennale (1895), the Whitney Biennial (1932) and the São Paulo Biennial (1951) – so many other biennial exhibitions have since found a permanent place in the international art calendar that there has even been a symposium dedicated to the “biennial effect.”11 Can one deduce from all this that art has become truly global in the age of multiculturalism, coupled with an easing of ethnic identities and the attempt to establish a new dialogue with “the Other,” despite the risk of translation problems between different cultural spheres? According to Joaquín Barriendos Rodríguez, an expert in the “decolonial turn,” the recognition of other modernisms and other art scenes did not prevent simultaneous rewesternization,12 which Gerardo Mosquera also refers to as the “Manhattan-centric” phenomenon.13 “The institutionalization of the concept of a global art as a new world model of a western museography”, according to Joaquín Barriendos Rodríguez, “is one of the fads in which such colonialism of power is expressed today.”14 Yet what terminology would be appropriate to describe the state of contemporary art, since the concept of universalism it no longer suitable?15 The terms “Global Art” or “New Internationalism” appears to be more fitting than “globalized art,”16 especially since – in response to globalization – many artists emphasize local or regional aspects. There are also too many cultural hybrids and the differences between individual countries are too evident for such a conceptual leveling of

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the situation to be appropriate. Just think of the evolving art scene in Saudi Arabia, a consequence of the recent thrust toward modernization; or of Brazil, where contemporary art can build on an impressive tradition of twentieth-century modernism. Contemporary art museums saw themselves in the context of this development – and after the crisis of the “national museum” in the 1990s17 – faced with the task of taking an active role in the design of global art and transnationalism, and this despite the paradoxical resurgence of nationalism. It was necessary to overcome “centrisms” of all kinds. In addition, museums were faced with the establishment of numerous private foundations as well as a new type of collector, which greatly altered their situation.18 The strategy of the Musée d’Art Moderne National du Centre Pompidou, which has always been internationally oriented, consisted of paying particular attention to budding or newly revived art scenes throughout the world, whereby a greater focus was placed on certain countries and art scenes, be it in the continued pursuit of existing collection focal points, either within the framework of exhibition projects, or generous donations from supporters and donors. Such intense collecting activity was extended to the countries of the former European Soviet bloc, to China, Lebanon, and other countries of the Middle East, to India, South Africa, as well as to Mexico and Brazil. Because it has become nearly impossible to keep track of the entire worldwide development of art, a targeted selection was made, rather than the goal of totality pursued. The MoMA, the Tate Modern, and the Guggenheim Museum have also started, each in its own way, to rewrite the history of modern and contemporary art. The Tate Modern, for example, expanded its groups of sponsors and supporters to include India, Africa, and the Middle East. Backed by UBS, the Guggenheim Museum has launched a new program to acquire world art. However, thus far museums have failed to solve one fundamental problem, namely the recontextualization of the works in their local contexts of origin. Not only does each historical narration inevitably prove to be homogenizing it, because – and this I have not always considered – such a recontextualization requires additional human and financial resources. However, in recent years such necessary partnerships between researchers and museums have increased. With new purchases, efforts are made to ensure that a documentation of the local environment is also created, thus allowing a future comprehensive analysis of heterogeneities. How and by what criteria is the history of art told today? The presentation of art and its critical review within the framework of public and private institutions has undergone a significant change during the same period. This primarily has to do with the unprecedented supremacy of curators who, as stars of the art world and the media, often drive artists into the background, but who have also replaced the art critic in his role as the norm. As for art-critical discourse, it has been replaced, with few exceptions – one need only to think in France of Christophe Kihm’s article in the magazine art press, in which he tried to uphold this position19 – by descriptive texts devoid of opinions and judgments. Art magazines willingly followed this development when their precarious economic situation left them dependent on advertising revenue. The situation seems, on the one hand, to have been be the result of the enormous increase in theme-oriented group exhibitions, where the leading

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role was assigned to the curator – much to the chagrin of many artists. For example, nearly 40 years after his first critique on the curator’s role, Daniel Buren revisited his considerations from 1972 once again in 2000 with his essay “Where Are the Artists?”20 He called for the curator at art events like the documenta to be replaced by the artist in an effort to reject the role of the artist as an interpreter of thematic guidelines dictated by a curator. This development was accompanied by the explosive proliferation of texts about curators and curating.21 The magazine The Exhibitionist – edited by curator Jens Hoffmann – focuses exclusively on curatorial practice. The Journal of Curatorial Studies should also be mentioned here, as should curating studies, which have assumed a sometimes disproportionately important position, compared with the study of art history as a basis for this. On the other, the abolition of traditional aesthetic criteria and the gradual disappearance of a critical discourse, which has been replaced by hagiographic texts, are the direct result of the described changes in the art world. Benjamin Buchloh talks about the capitulation of art criticism with respect to the museum and the trustees, i.e., with respect to the power and institutionalization of the art market.22 Devoid of any nostalgia, he articulates a perception shared by many: the necessity of a new reflection on the evaluation criteria of artistic works and practices, which – if they exist at all – are often superseded by ethical judgments. A shift toward political correctness and a social commitment in art led many critics to replace the earlier criteria of art critical assessment with ethical standards, in which “insistence” in one’s commitment is of paramount importance. Just as ethical issues have always been part of artistic work, formal, aesthetic, conceptual, and intellectual aspects are also important when considering an art experiment, regardless of how it is constructed and what message it conveys, to which it is also not to be reduced. In recent years, several major changes have taken place in art. Foremost among these are the changes resulting from media and technological developments. Digitization, the Internet, and virtual realities have rendered the definition of photography as “photo” obsolete, as well as the autonomy of media such as film or video. Rosalind Krauss uses the concept of a “post-media”23 era to describe the new situation of art, which has not only lost its autonomy, but which has also abandoned the earlier impermeability of media categories that are now often combined by artists. This technological revolution also led to a complete transformation of artistic networks, an unprecedented compression of time and space and to a greater mobility for artists. New artistic practices have emerged. More than ever before, sound24 is now used as an independent material for installations. Artists benefit from new technologies that allow them to program tone sequences on the computer, often in conjunction with imagery. Entire exhibitions – considered by some as a separate medium – can be developed as a loop; one only needs to think of works by Philippe Parreno and Anri Sala. In the past 30 years, art and the nature of the artist have changed fundamentally. It is this change that the exhibition A History explores. It does not, however, pursue a chronological or thematic concept in the narrow sense. It rather essentially aims at a deeper analysis of what now constitutes artistic activities, beyond national art scenes or specific cultural areas. In the global art of today there are, despite all particularisms, certain “lines of force” that are related to the

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way and manner of how one places oneself in relation to the world, to reality, to different fields of knowledge and to the fields that are closely linked to art, and which have less to do with a specific artistic practice in the studio, a place that has been reduced for many to a desk or a computer or even been turned into a company. The term “practice” – or investigation – which has replaced the concept of the work in numerous texts on contemporary art, reflects a means of dismantling the relationship of the artist to his “work” – another commonly used term – signifying that contemporary art has left behind the hierarchical logic of work and masterpiece, which was characteristic of modernity. The concept of practice, as Franck Leibovici observed in his insightful research,25 starts from the premise that every artist reinvents his attitude based on a life form, either by collecting and archiving, conducting workshops or exploration through traditional means such as drawing, painting, photography, or sculpture. The spectrum of such practices has never been as broad as it is now, when the “competition of the media” seems, thankfully, to have ended and artists stake out their fields of activity anew. The history of art has also been the subject of much debate. In the 1980s, for example, Francis Fukuyama and Arthur Danto proclaimed the end of history and the emergence of the Postmodernist era. In the 1990s this was followed by a move toward a nonlinear, more horizontal than vertical history, which also involved local micronarratives and that opened up a vast new field of research. Questions of ethnic identity were also placed center stage, whereby this discussion was decisively influenced by mainly African-American artists, some of whom had already been assigned to the era of “post-black art” – to use the terminology of curator Thelma Golden and artist Glenn Ligon. Not least, the art history of the past 30 years has had to resist the standards of postcolonial studies and do justice to the specific contexts of the respective cultural areas. New art scenes continuously emerge, whether in Vietnam26 or in the countries of the Caucasus.27 Large countries, such as India and China, have been firmly established in the art world since the 1990s. Finally, the feminist movement has also drawn attention to numerous works by female artists, thanks to legendary exhibitions and catalogs, including Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007–8) in New York and Los Angeles, Elles at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2009–11)28 and Modern Women at the MoMA in New York (2010). Moreover, issues of gender and post-genderism as focal points of a debate – thanks mainly to Judith Butler and her book Gender Trouble (1990), have had substantial influence on a younger generation of artists and critics.29 Artists reacted to the new realities with an often critical stance and developed new practices of confronting a world subject to abrupt changes. To summarize the situation to a few main lines of development, in the 1990s artists first took to the stage as historians and archivists. This was in response to the general social and political upheavals, but also sometimes because of their own painful and fragile life stories. A new culture of remembrance, which was partly characterized by backward-looking nostalgia, proliferated in art, almost as if the still insufficient research and intellectual acknowledgement of the recent past weighed heavily on artists’ minds; or as if the fixation with the contemporary, which sometimes accompanied the inability to live in the moment, challenged them to self-assurance in the past.

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Many artists, especially in Western culture, also looked back to modernity and practiced a “re-enactment” in their work, while, at the same time, continuing the popular 1980s trend of quoting art, as Jan Verwoert30 and Claire Bishop have pointed out. Historical documents could thus be relevant both as source material and as motifs, just as archeology, ethnology, and anthropology for many artists of the 1990s and 2000s – including Mark Dion and Camille Henrot – were important sources of inspiration and, at the same time, models for their work. A documentary requirement paved a new path toward a new kind of “realism,” as evident in the profusion of photographs, videos, and films that tried to depict reality as honestly as possible, especially in its social and political dimension (one only needs to think here of Allan Sekula and Bruno Serralongue, as well as Renée Green, Ferhat Özgür, and Marie Voignier). The true self and everyday objects became the starting point for countless sculptures and installations, which poetically transfigured banality and rearticulated the boundary between public and private spheres – both of which were also subjected to profound sociological upheavals. Gabriel Orozco is an outstanding representative of such sensitive explorations. The new “precarious” sculpture – to use a formulation of the art critic Hal Foster31 – had political motivations and was devoted to the modified and renewed relationship with form, and is best represented by the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn. Others, such as Philippe Parreno, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and Pierre Huyghe, explored virtual worlds and developed entirely novel models of participation and collaboration. In the 1990s, it was typical for artists to feel connected less through a common aesthetic – or esthétique relationnelle (Relational Aesthetics), in the words of Nicolas Bourriaud – than through strong personal ties, artistic exchange, and repeated cooperation. The artist became a producer, an approach previously postulated by Walter Benjamin and later revisited by Dan Graham,32 which expressed a reality in the 1990s because artists often orient themselves on film and its production methods (including post-production). The concept of subjectivity, sometimes neglected in contemporary discussion, led to numerous reflections – revolving around the self – both in narrative and in a performative way, whereby the body, sometimes obsessively handled, played a particularly important role. Many artists now saw themselves as narrators or autobiographers and devoted themselves, according to the example of Christian Boltanski, to a fictional representation of intimate areas of life. Some practices, such as performance art, experienced a remarkable revival, often borrowing from other art forms such as dance, theater, or literary readings. Exhibitions in hotel rooms,33 exhibitions on stage,34 discursive exhibitions or exhibitions as platforms – such as Utopia Station at the Venice Biennale in 200335 – not visual or choreographed exhibitions36 ... the exhibition, which for many artists has become an independent medium, has defined itself ever since in new and different ways. Despite all these issues, many artists, who continue to pursue painting, explore a reinvention of their medium, to which the rooms in the Musée National d’Art Moderne have borne eloquent witness in recent years. In succession to Daniel Buren or Olivier Mosset, to name particularly radical examples, Steven Parrino and the like have opened up new paths

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in painting, while the generation of artists such as Wade Guyton and Cheyney Thompson continue to create new painting techniques using computers and printers. In the 2000s one could observe a tendency – evident in the works of artists from Reena Spaulings to Claire Fontaine – toward neoconceptual arts, about which Michel Gauthier wrote an incisive analysis. Some contemporary and fashionable phenomena will be evaluated differently in the future, yet, with a focused and ironic gaze one can already recognize too much ephemerality. In the style of fashion magazines, an anonymous critic made a joke about what was considered particularly “hot” and what not – with the result that, at the time of his resume it was obvious “hip” to work transversally, post-fictionally, superperformatively and with nonhuman species. These “lines of force,” which the individual chapters of this catalogue explore, shape portions of an art history that are yet to be be written and whose task it would be to connect microstories and art on the fringes with the “grand narratives.” A History – albeit a partial history, since it only concerns works from a limited selection of the Centre Pompidou collection – thus understands itself as an approach to a new art history, without hierarchical assessment and in a dialectical manner – in the terminology of the art historian Zdenka Badovinac – that can link particularism and parallel histories with the vociferously presented dominant narratives and, thus, is able to do justice to the phenomenon of global art of our time.

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1 See the complete volume, 1989, ed. Paul Ardenne (Paris, 1995). See also Dieter Roelstraete’s essay in the included supplement, pp.16–21. 2 Elevation 1049. Between Heaven and Hell, and on-site exhibition with works by various artists in Gstaad, Switzerland. 27 January – 8 March 2014. 3 Benjamin Buchloh. “Was tun?” Texte zur Kunst. No. 81 (March 2011), pp. 76–82. Buchloh refers to Andy Warhol’s The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) from 1975 and the chapter on “Art Business Versus Business Art.” 4 “China after 1989 is an example of the price of a compromise between government policies and the art market,” Hans Belting. “Contemporary Art as Global Art, a Critical Estimate,” The Global Art World, ed. Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg. Ostfildern, 2009, p. 39. 5 Malcolm Bull. “The Two Economies of World Art”, Globalization and Contemporary Art, edited by Jonathan Harris (New York, 2011), pp. 179–190. Bull deals here with Boris Groys, who continued to proclaim the freedom of art in Art Power (Cambridge, MA, 2008). 6 Primitivism Revisited: After the End of an Idea. Sean Gallery, New York, December 2006–January 2007. The exhibition was curated by students of Susan Vogel. Columbia University, New York. 7 See Lucy Steeds, et al. Making Art Global: Magiciens de la terre 1989. Vol. 2 (London, 2013). See also Annie Cohen-Solal. Magiciens de la Terre, retour sur une exposition légendaire (Paris, 2014). 8 See Christine Macel, “L’artiste comme historien” in Une histoire. Art, architecture, design des années 1980 à nos jours. exh.cat. edited by Christine Macel, Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou (Paris 2014/15, Paris, 2014), pp. 169–176. See also writings by Rasheed Araeen, The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain. exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1989/90 (London, 1989); Susan Hiller, “From Primitivism to Ethnic Arts” in The Myth of Primitivism, Perspectives on Art (London/New York, 1991). pp. 159–182; “A New Beginning, Beyond Postcolonial Cultural Theory and Identity Politics” in The Third Text Reader: on Art, Culture and Theory, ed. Rasheed Araeen. (London/New York, 2002). pp. 333–345. In the last essay, Araeen criticized multiculturism and postcolonial cultural theory. “The celebration of exotic Others is not new. What is new is it that the Other is no longer just culturally exotic. We now have the political exotic Other, who is expected to be either living in the exile or someone who has critical view of his country of origin. This category includes, for example, Palestinians, Iranians, Chinese, and South Africans.” p. 341. 9 See Rachel Weiss, et. al., Making Art Global: The Third Havana Biennial 1989. Vol. 1 (London, 2011).

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10 Maharaj’s thoughts about the concept of the untranslatability of the Other are particularly enlightening. See Sarat Maharaj. “Perfidious Fidelity: The Untranslatability of the Other,” in Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts, ed. Jean Fisher (London, 1994). pp. 28–35. 11 The Biennial Reader, ed. Elena Filipovic, et. al. (Ostfildern, 2010). 12 “Within a very short time, the mainstream has left its own territory and embarked on a search for the periphery. As in the old days of colonial expansion, otherness, exoticism, diversity – or in a word, the Other – has awoken the desires of museums, galleries, megaexhibitions and fairs for contemporary art [...] The fetishization of alterity and the aestheticization of the lowly and marginal is probably one of the most misleading and contradictory phenomena of multiculturalism”, Joaquín Barriendos Rodríguez, “Global Art and the Politics of Mobility: (Trans)Cultural Shifts in the International Contemporary Art-System” in Art and Visibility in Migratory Culture. Conflict, Resistance, and Agency, edited by Mieke Bal and Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro (Amsterdam, 2011). pp. 313–334. 13 Gerardo Mosquera, “The Marco Polo Syndrome, Some Problems Around Art and Eurocentrism,” Third Text. 6, 21 (Winter 1992), pp. 35–41. 14 Joaquín Barriendos Rodríguez, “Geopolitics of Global Art: The Reinvention of Latin America as a Geo-Aesthetic Region,” edited by Belting/Buddensieg. 2009. (See fn. 4), pp. 98–115. 15 See Christine Macel, “Universalisme et art contemporain dans un monde globalisé” in Louvre Abou Dabi. Enjeux du musée universel, eds. Dominique de Font-Réaulx and Charlotte Chastel-Rousseau. Since the 1990s, the concept of universalism – as understood in the context of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment – has been linked to the criticism of the national state, subjecting it to a deconstruction that makes its use today problematic. Especially those working in the spirit of cultural studies pursued by American, British, and Indian intellectuals – such as Arjun Appadurai, Homi Bhabha, Sarat Maharaj, or its founder Stuart Hall – have contributed to this, not least because their academic socialization took place far from universal and encyclopedic culture of the French Enlightenment, which is still formative for curators in France, and why the concept of universalism remains common for them.” 16 . Hans Belting defends the concept of a global art with reference to the economic globalization, which does not appear to me sufficient as as a criterion, especially since he expresses no criticism of the multiculturalism model, almost as if the different identities had been equally freed, and as if the exoticism of the Other belonged to the past. See Belting. 2009 (op. cit.). He regards the concept of a world art as an legacy of universalism and modernity, although, in my opinion, he only describes historically specific global situation of art. It also seems to me that art has not entered a posthistorical or in a postethnic era, even if African-American artists reclaim the “post-black” era for themselves. It is to be hoped, however, that Belting is right, at least with respect to the last point.

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17 Instead of the term “national art,” the term of art of a cultural realm or cultural sphere, as proposed by Sarat Maharaj, to be more apt. 18 Mentioned as one of the most striking examples of this was the ruling family of Qatar’s $250 million purchase of The Card Players by Cezanne in 2011. 19 Christophe Kihm, “L’art doit-il être pertinent?” art press. Nr. 404 (October, 2014), pp. 57–66. 20 Daniel Buren, “Where are the Artists?” ed. Elena Filipovic, 2010 (op. cit.), pp. 212– 221. 21 See Okwui Enwezor, “Curating Beyond the Canon”, in Paul O’Neill. Curating Subjects (London, 2007), pp. 109–122; Michael Brenson. “The Curator’s Moment: Trends in the Fields of International Contemporary Art Exhibitions” in Art Journal. 57, 4 (Winter 1998), pp.16–27; Paul O’Neill, “The Curatorial Turn: From Practice to Discourse,” in Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance, edited by Judith Rugg (Bristol/ Chicago 2007) pp. 13–28; Boris Groys, “On the Curatorship”, in Art Power (Cambridge (MA) 2008), p. 43; Élie During et. al., Qu’est-ce que le curating? (Paris, 2011), pp. 26–64; Paul O’Neill. The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s), (Cambridge, MA, 2012). 22 Buchloh, 2011 (op. cit.), p. 149. 23 Rosalind E. Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London, 2000), note by Joanna Slotkin. 24 The exhibition A History includes a sound lounge, which is intended as a possible solution to the much-neglected question of the presentation of sound works in museums. The Centre Pompidou has a collection of such works, which is virtually ignored by the public. The display in the exhibition consists of a seating arrangement designed by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec with directional loudspeakers. For more on the discussion about exhibition sound works in museums, see Paul Schütze, “Audio Visual. The Problems of Defining and Exhibiting Sound Art,” Frieze, Nr. 158. October 2013, http://www. frieze.com/issue/article/audio-visual/ (accessed 22 January 2016). 25 “It is important to understand that, first and foremost, a work of art is not limited to being a pretty object that one places on the mantelpiece or with which one can decorate a living room or a museum, but that it represents a process, becoming aware of a process, a stage within such a process, a way to capture things at a certain moment, whereby this state is the result of a bricolage itself; it is important to be aware that a work, also and above all, says something about the way of life that its author seeks for himself by rejecting prefabricated forms of life.” Franck Leibovici, Des formes de vie. Une écologie des pratiques artistiques (Paris, 2012). 26 See Chorégraphies suspendues. ed. Jean Marc Prévost et. al., exh. cat., Musée d’art contemporain Nîmes, 2014. (Nîmes/Paris, 2014).

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27 Compare the focus on galleries from the Caucuses of Azerbaijan at the eighth edition of Art Dubai 2014. 28 See also Élisabeth Lebovici and Catherine Gonnard. Femmes artistes/Artistes femmes. Paris, de 1880 à nos jours. (Paris, 2007). 29 As an example of this, see Beatriz Preciado. Kontrasexuelles Manifest (Berlin, 2003). See also other texts by Preciado. Preciado was in charge of the independent studies program at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona from 2012 to 2015. 30 Jan Verwoert. “Living with Ghosts, from Appropriation to Invocation in Contemporary Art,” Art and Research. 1, 2. Summer 2007. http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/ verwoert.html (accessed 22 January 2016). 31 Hal Foster. “Precarious. On the Art of the Decade,” Artforum (December 2009). pp. 97–99. 32 Walter Benjamin. “Der Autor als Produzent,” lecture (Paris, 27 April 1934). The work was rediscovered in the mid-1960s and republished. As an homage to Benjamin, Dan Graham wrote the text “The Artist as Producer” in Dan Graham, Rock My Religion: Writings and Projects 1965–1990, edited by Brian Wallis (Cambridge, MA, 1994). 33 Hans Ulrich Obrist. Hotel Carlton Palace: Chambre 763 (Paris, 1993). 34 Hans Ulrich Obrist and Philippe Parreno. Il Tempo del Postino. Manchester Opera House, 2007, Theater Basel, 2009. See http://iltempodelpostino.com (accessed 22 January 2016). 35 Compare www.e-flux.com/projects/utopia (accessed 22 January 2016). Idea and concept by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Molly Nesbit, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. 36 Mathieu Copeland. Une exposition chorégraphiée, La Ferme du Buisson (Noisiel, 2008). See also Une exposition parlée. Jeu de Paume (Paris, 2013).