Hans Belting @ GLOBAL ART SYMPOSIUM 2011

Hans Belting - "World art and global art. A new challenge to art history";
Lecture at the 29 July 2011 @ GLOBAL ART SYMPOSIUM 2011; ©2011 Laura Kokoshka, Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts, Hans Belting

Hans Belting, art historian, professor emeritus at the State University of Arts and Design, Karlsruhe.



GLOBAL ARTS SYMPOSIUM:
Globalisation is generally taken to refer to an economic process. But what does this worldwide development signify for art? Are we at the beginning of a new development, which we might call global art -- and what do we understand by this? How far do the new living conditions of globality influence contemporary art? Since art has been internationally linked for centuries, is there now some new quality that distinguishes global art? How does what we might call global art relate to the debate on post-colonialism?

Globalisation -- Globalism
"It is time to re-stage the world", writes the Indian cultural theorist Nancy Adajania. Her aim is to achieve a state able "to release the cultural self towards others in a manner that bypasses dependency and embraces collaboration, making for a productive cosmopolitanism" (Springerin 1/2010). Thus the objective is a society based on exchange and mutuality.

The basis of this "re-staging" is a critical engagement with globalisation, through a mode that Adajania terms "globalism". It is a deliberate gesture of recovering the potentialities of the lattices of globalisation from neoliberal doctrine. To the neo-liberal, globalism refers to a nation-state's policy of treating the entire world as a market and source of goods and services. To Adajania, on the other hand, globalism is a transcultural, collaborative, multi-participatory mode of performing ideas and conducting projects, with the emphasis on ethical responsibility and a transformative aesthetics. While neo-liberal globalism is a extension of old first world geo-politics, Adajania's perspective on globalism shifts the locus to the global South.

Global art -- wish or reality?
For art, globalisation means first of all the end of western hegemony and the beginning of a world trade market. With globalisation, more and more artists enter the global art market, followed by galleries and collectors from a variety of cultures and regions. The influence of globalisation is beginning to emerge clearly in the themes of the artworks.

When can we speak about global art? Does global art refer generally to art created no longer from the standpoint of western cultural superiority, but from the experience of globality and under the conditions of globalisation?

Is global art a collective term for works that trace the history of images and their worldwide dissemination -- or does it refer to those works, which manage to overcome the long outdated geo-political division of the world into western/non-western?

Is the mark of global art a worldwide intelligible visual language, or is it the use of themes concerning globalisation?

Or is global art the wish for and the promise of a multicentric perception of the world, in which local and global are expressly linked, traditions and current developments juxtaposed, and boundaries of cultural hegemony open to discussion?

These issues will be debated by theorists and artists to clarify the term and the concepts involved in global art.


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