The Interplay of Art and Globalization – Consequences for Museums
2007-01-25 – 2007-01-27
IFK, Vienna
Summary:
The Vienna conference followed another one, which took place under the title “Global Future of local Art Museums. The cultural practice of global art.” This time, the conference discussed several areas of the world where the globalization of contemporary art is most controversial in the respective geography. Our call for papers resulted in more than 40 applications from many parts of the world, especially from the younger generation. It was a special intention of the conference to review the present museum practice rather than discussing current museums themes. It became apparent how different contemporary art is dealt with in the countries, as represented by the speakers. The main obstacle in discussing the conferences topic was, as everybody agreed, the use of a (post) colonial terminology, which obscures the respective reality rather than elucidating it. Most of the papers consented in their description of what was more different than the language would reveal. Two anthropologists, “Thomas Fillitz” from Vienna University and Morgan Perkins, from the Weaver Museum of Anthropology, were the first to speak. They addressed the new situation, after their fieldwork no longer is exposed to traditional arts and crafts, but faces an artproduction, which is, in most different ways, an expression of the “contemporary art world”. Fillitz emphasized the African artists call for the right of “coevalness”, while Perkins analyzed the phantom of an “indigenous avantgarde.” Most of the papers were conceived as case studies and as such were dedicated to a local or national situation. Masaki Morishita spoke about old and new models for art’s internationalization in Japan museums, but insisted on the fact that such projects inevitably produced conflicts with resident artists. Savas Arslan introduced the audience to four museums in Istanbul (among them “Istanbul Modern” and the “Pera Museum”) which all are controlled by private or family foundations and therefore resist the opening of exhibition practice to contemporary international standards. Elena Trubina who took as her first example an art biennial in the Lenin Museum, described the growing distance of the most recent art scene to museum art. Sabine Grosser’s example was the situation of artists in Sri Lanka who struggle to create an art scene, which still is not yet existent.
Another paper, by Edin Hajdarpasic, analyzed the controversial art initiative in Sarajevo which presently is no longer welcome for practical reasons T.J. Demos caused a long debate among the speakers when he asked whether the “Tate effect”, the overwhelming success of London’s “Tate Modern”, was more due the sensational site then to the art exhibited. Malcolm John Ferris’ topic were the “Hug- Performances” in Chinese art, with their antithesis of “difference” and “diversity”. Louisa Argita criticized the exhibitions with the Balkan topic as a doubtful branding to conquer the art market. Ksenija Berk, using the Slovenian Biennial U3 from 1997, analysed the unseemly power of a single curator to change a whole art scene from one day to another. The conference confirmed the impression that the museum scene properly speaking has not arrived at solutions for handling a globalized art production. It appears that only a new dialogue of Clusters institutions with those beyond “Euramerica” (John Clark) can result in models for providing art museums with a new profile. The museum, as institution, always depends on a local audience. Even in a time with a rousing percentage of minorities in each kind of society, cultures must be defined in local terms. It seems that museums, as centers for cultural production, deserve new attention with respect to the changing relation between institutional art, popular art and event culture with a performance character.
