The work of art's mattering and materialization in a globalized world,
with close readings of works by Takahashi Murakami, Andreas Gursky,
Thomas Hirschhorn, and others.
It may be time to forget the art world--or at least to recognize that a
certain historical notion of the art world is in eclipse. Today, the art
world spins on its axis so quickly that its maps can no longer be read;
its borders blur. In Forgetting the Art World, Pamela Lee connects the
current state of this world to globalization and its attendant
controversies. Contemporary art has responded to globalization with
images of movement and migration, borders and multitudes, but Lee looks
beyond iconography to view globalization as a world process. Rather than
think about the "global art world" as a socioeconomic phenomenon, or in
terms of the imagery it stages and sponsors, Lee considers "the work
of art's world" as a medium through which globalization takes place. She
argues that the work of art is itself both object and agent of
globalization.
Lee explores the ways that art actualizes, iterates, or enables the
processes of globalization, offering close readings of works by artists
who have come to prominence in the last two decades. She examines the
"just in time" managerial ethos of Takahashi Murakami; the production of
ethereal spaces in Andreas Gursky's images of contemporary markets and
manufacture; the logic of immanent cause dramatized in Thomas
Hirschhorn's mixed-media displays; and the "pseudo-collectivism" in the
contemporary practice of the Atlas Group, the Raqs Media Collective, and
others.
To speak of "the work of art's world," Lee says, is to point to both
the work of art's mattering and its materialization, to understand the
activity performed by the object as utterly continuous with the world it
at once inhabits and creates.
