Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the desire for difference and distinctiveness within the global art world. I argue that the significant attention contemporary art from Africa is receiving these years shows that even in a supposedly globalised art world, a crave for the specific and place-bound prevails.

Paper long abstract:

Since 1992, when the first Dak'Art Biennial opened in Dakar and the first African artists were included at the Kassel-based Documenta, the Johannesburg Biennale was introduced in 1995, the first 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair was opened in London in 2013, and the first Also Known As Africa art fair was opened in Paris in 2016. Significant for this attention is that although the art world has extended its reach to all corners of the globe, and that the identity of artists is considered less significant than the art they produce (Harris 2012: 152), a continuous desire for difference and distinctiveness remains. The attention directed towards contemporary art from Africa sometimes inflict ambivalence among artists from Africa, who experience situations in which their art profits from the international attention that contemporary art from Africa receive, but which simultaneously keep them from being recognised as individual artists in their own right. By being exhibited as representatives of their continent, as is the case at the recently opened Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, their artworks become the objectives of an international desire for difference and distinctiveness. Despite conceiving of itself as egalitarian, the artists I spoke with during my recent fieldwork in South Africa thus experienced the increased attention from the art market and museums as an international craving for their individual or (imagined) collective cultural style, treating them as representatives of their region.

Paper short abstract:

Inhotim holds one of the leading collections of contemporary art in Brazil and is exemplary of the proliferation of institutions outside the euro-american axis with global relevance. However, even if the core of the collection is Brazilian, it reproduces a global hierarchy of value.

Paper long abstract:

Inhotim holds one of the leading collections of contemporary art in Brazil and is considered the largest open-air museum in Latin America. It exhibits large-scale sculptures and installations that were purchased or commissioned from renowned national and international artists, many of them in individual pavilions built specifically to house them. Located in the mining town of Brumadinho, it is far from the other main art centres of the country.

In this presentation, I'd like to examine the contemporary art collection on permanent display in Inhotim in order to explore how the museum acquired pertinence to the global art world (Belting, 2009). I argue that Inhotim is exemplary of the proliferation of institutions outside the euro-american axis with global relevance, however, reproducing a global hierarchy of value (Herzfeld, 2004), in the sense that the Brazilians highlights of the collections are artists that made their way into the museum by their international validation. By putting Brazilian and international acclaimed artists side by side, Inhotim's collection contributes to revising some aspects of the global modernist canon of art history predicated on European models. Nonetheless, it continues to reinforce the importance of validation of euro-american institutions to make such revisionist claims

Paper short abstract:

The global circulation of contemporary art largely depends on the use and mastery of English and on the transculturalist idea of universal relevance of contemporary art forms. This paper explores the consequences of the ongoing mainstreaming of language and form in the globalising Indian art world.

Paper long abstract:

The global circulation of contemporary art largely depends on the use and mastery of English and on the transculturalist idea of universal relevance of contemporary art forms. While cultural difference and distinctiveness are central subjects of much contemporary art, expressions and representations of difference for the most part conform to the same repertoire of aesthetic norms and standards regardless of their place of production. In India, the contemporary art world is decidedly Anglophone. Though most curators and art professionals are bilingual, curatorial texts and art criticism are almost exclusively written in English. This practice renders many artists unable to write, talk and explain about the art they produce and since contemporary conceptual art generally needs to be contextualised and explained large potential audiences are excluded, even in national museums. Nonetheless, notions of transculturalism and translation are not much debated in the Indian art world.

This paper explores the consequences of the ongoing mainstreaming of language and form in the fast globalising Indian art world and argues the nearly consequent use of English in exhibitions, art writing and art talks creates cultural distinctions that marginalizes certain artists and art forms.

The paper is based on totally 10 months ethnographic fieldwork among artists and art professionals in India between 2016 and 2018.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the construction of Lima's art scene through the articulation of and simultaneous practices at local, regional and global levels, focusing on art collectors and curators and raising attention on indigenous art. It questions the concept of 'global art.'

Paper long abstract:

This paper questions the concept of 'global art' from an analysis of the construction of the Lima contemporary art scene and its art agents' simultaneous multiscale participation. I will focus on the work and strategies of art collectors and curators in specific platforms to show how Peruvian and Latin American art is defined, positioned and fostered locally, regionally and in the mainstream art museums and fairs, and how networks of art and power operate. I will include analysis of the ways in which Amazonian indigenous art circulates today as Peruvian contemporary art and shows how this responds to 'global art' agendas and national processes. This paper argues that the notion of 'global art', which promotes the idea of multiple art worlds beyond hegemonies, obscures elite power and the prevailing dominant Euro/American perspective and formats in the arts, enabling their expansion. This presentation is based on my forthcoming book Configuring the New Lima Art Scene: An Anthropological Analysis of Contemporary Art in Latin America (Bloomsbury 2020) and my current research on Amazonian indigenous art.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the category of Iranian art as applied in various market settings in the United Arab Emirates. The focus is not only on the use of the category across artistic styles and genres, but also on how Iranian art objects are marked in sites of transit, in press and marketing materials.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the category of Iranian art as applied in various market settings in the United Arab Emirates. Through analysis of what is considered Iranian art at auction, exhibition and in transit I unpack this broad category. Looking at Iranian art in the context of the UAE I consider the salience of this category in a particular local context to show how a national category operates outside of its own borders. I focus not only on the wide application of the category across artistic styles and genres, but also on how Iranian art objects are marked in sites of transit, in press and marketing materials. In this way I demonstrate how the category is accentuated and also played down dependent on political factors as well as the demands of the market. Through ethnographic examples of the strategies adopted by both galleries and artists to emphasize Iranian art, and thus the Iranian artist, as a distinct category, I demonstrate how artistic categories expand and contract. In highlighting the slippage of this category I suggest a way of thinking about how artistic categories are animated rather than there coherence with art historical factors.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how the global, national, and local articulate in the valuation of artworks. It unpacks the "global" by tracking how registers of local, national, and global are mobilized discursively and practically in the exhibition and sale of a group of artworks in a Mumbai gallery.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines how the global, national, and local interact and articulate in the valuation of artworks in Mumbai, India. Following the call of this panel, I argue that one way to clarify and specify what is meant by the "global" in art worlds, is to track how different registers of local, national, and global are mobilized discursively and practically in the production, display, and circulation of artworks. Specifically, this paper takes the case of the local exhibition and sale of a group of artworks by modernist artist Maqbool Fida Husain, drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2017-2019. It considers how the exhibition and sale in a Mumbai gallery of artworks by a globally branded and sold Indian artist happens via multiple scales and registers. These range from the mobilization of local (city-based) relationship networks, knowledge, resources, and histories; to national art histories and networks of collectors; to the global circulation and valuation of Husain's work over the last four decades via auction houses, exhibitions, media, scholarly writing, and Husain's own global mobility during his lifetime. The materiality of the artworks notwithstanding, what we find is that the "global"—histories, circulation, and promotion—of artworks and artists both enables extremely local mobility, circulation, and valuation in certain situations, while it hinders these processes in others.