How global contemporary art reanimates the past as a resource for the
present, combating modern art's legacy of Eurocentrism.
If European modernism was premised on the new--on surpassing the past,
often by assigning it to the "traditional" societies of the Global
South--global contemporary art reanimates the past as a resource for the
present. In this account of what globalization means for contemporary
art, David Joselit argues that the creative use of tradition by artists
from around the world serves as a means of combatting modern art's
legacy of Eurocentrism. Modernism claimed to live in the future and
relegated the rest of the world to the past. Global contemporary art
shatters this myth by reactivating various forms of heritage--from
literati ink painting in China to Aboriginal painting in Australia--in
order to propose new and different futures. Joselit analyzes not only
how heritage becomes contemporary through the practice of individual
artists but also how a cultural infrastructure of museums, biennials,
and art fairs worldwide has emerged as a means of generating economic
value, attracting capital and tourist dollars.
Joselit traces three distinct forms of modernism that developed outside
the West, in opposition to Euro-American modernism: postcolonial,
socialist realism, and the underground. He argues that these modern
genealogies are synchronized with one another and with Western modernism
to produce global contemporary art. Joselit discusses curation and what
he terms "the curatorial episteme," which, through its acts of framing
or curating, can become a means of recalibrating hierarchies of
knowledge--and can contribute to the dual projects of decolonization and
deimperialization.
