7. World art and global art
The new geography of art institutions affects not only the domain of contemporary art but also exerts pressure on major museums in the West when faced with the controversy over world art that brings with it possible repatriation claims. In December 2002, eighteen metropolitan museums of the West signed a “Declaration on the importance and value of Universal Museums,” thereby reusing the modern Western conception of universalism but applying it to the responsible care of a world art heritage. The declaration makes the claim to serve the globe and not just the West. Neil MacGregor, in the name of the British Museum, spoke of “a museum of the world for the world.” He asked rhetorically: “Where else other than in these museums can the world see so clearly that it is one?” Mark O’Neill, director of the Glasgow Museums, however objected that museums with a world art collection, in order to act on behalf of the world, “must be open about the conflicted histories of some objects” and “reveal the Imperial as well as the Enlightenment history of collections.”(22)
While this activity centers on world art heritage, other mega institutions, mostly museums for modern art, such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York or the Centre Pompidou in Paris, react differently to the challenge of a globalized world by expanding their spheres of influence and by establishing neo-colonial branches of modernist art in other parts of the world. The global rhetoric hardly conceals the material and economic aspects underlying such plans. Recently, it has been reported that Hong Kong has been chosen as a location for a giant art center that will surpass anything in the West while continuing Western strategies. It seems that a clash of institutions and concepts represents a new global museum economy. Nearby, the so-called National Museum for Western Art in Tokyo was originally founded for identifying the West as a local culture and for distinguishing Western heritage and Western influence from the native patrimony. In continental China, the recently opened Beijing World Art Museum counters the Hong Kong plans by adopting Western claims for Chinese standards. The museum significantly mirrors and adapts the spirit of a newly emerging discipline of art criticism called “world art history” in China that claims to own competence to discuss “world art” from a Chinese point of view.
The concept of world art thus deserves a closer look since it differs from global art in both meaning and intention. The difference may seem like word play but it enables us to distinguish global art production, as a recent experience, from an old idea signifying world art as the climax of “world art heritage.” World art as a concept already shaped André Malraux’s “Museum without walls” that represented the heritage variant. Malraux’s dreams took shape during the dark years of World War II in occupied Paris. The famous book Le musée imaginaire, first published in 1947, introduces world art as the sum of what was visually created in different cultures and which he identifies as “art” beyond the Western art discourse.(23) His approach is entirely visual and aesthetic without allowing any boundaries of cultural and historical difference. He claimed to overcome the traditional dualism between (Western) art and (ethnic) artifacts, which he considered an outdated colonial attitude. Ironically, his project also expresses an early guilt complex. The young Malraux was sentenced by the French Indochina administration for a colonial crime in 1924. He was charged with the theft of old temple sculptures that he intended to sell on the international art market.(24)
Malraux, paradoxically, still worshiped the museum, even if he dreamed of an ideal and universal museum. Meanwhile, the Museum, as an idea (whether with or without walls), has become a problem for so-called global art, which is still a recent phenomenon. Non-Western artists entertain a double bias against art heritage, both against their own ethnic traditions, and against art history in the Western sense of modernism. In their post-ethnic and post-historical attitude, they question two main functions of the Western museum. In the West, in the meantime, museums appear divided by two contradictory roles that cannot be easily reconciled. Traditionally, museums served as a collection of past art that underwent canonization inside the doors of the museum: to mention only the old French law that modern artists were not admitted to the Louvre until ten years after their death. In late modernism, however, museums have unexpectedly turned into an ephemeral stage for living art, which is often created for, and even commissioned by museums. I only remind you of so-called site-specific works and installation art. It is obvious that these two views of exhibition galleries contradict the institution’s identity, although both are accepted as a legitimate use of the museum.
This leads us to the question of the institutionalization of so-called global art. It is, in this respect, necessary to make a distinction. In my opinion, the question concerns the role of the local art museum, especially outside the West, and its survival. In 2005, the senior curator of the Taipeh Museum of Contemporary Art, Kao Chien-hui, addressed such issues when she launched an exhibition whose topic was the institution as such. She named her show Trading Place, a “commentary exhibition” staged as a “conceptual and yet visual art exhibition but more so a discourse on issues that concern the art world today.”(25) The museum did not speak with its own voice, but instead, invited artists to deal with topics such as “stealing, exchanging, trading, re-presenting, and misappropriating.” The artist Zhang Hongtu mounted a “replica exhibition arena” where the genuine work was questioned as a universal notion. One piece with the title MoMAo Museum (Museum of my Art only) ridiculed the museum for being a stage for self-promotion rather than a representative of the art world as such. The show certainly revealed a desire to involve the local audience in collection and display policies. Thus, the audience was encouraged to look at the museum and also at the contemporary art world via the mediation of the artists’ views on these subjects and thus to develop their own attitude.
8. Epilogue
For three years, the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris organized a seminar that offered monthly interventions on exhibition models of contemporary art.(26) Focus was not on the museum collection, but on the exhibition space with its manifold games and forms of entertainment. The French speakers further limited the discussion by reducing it to contemporary art as a Western topic, as if the globalization of art production, as the most conspicuous manifestation of contemporary art, had not yet happened. The artist Alejandra Riera delivered a paper entitled “An unresolved problem.” But what is the problem? I consider the institutionalization of contemporary art, on a global scale, as the “unresolved problem.” It may turn out that art museums must find several solutions, and not just one, as their future depends on a local significance even in the global era.
The problem rests with the expectations of their audience. But what is their audience? On the one hand, museums need to attract global tourism, which means claiming their share in a new geography of world cultures. In this respect, global art conformism would be no solution. On the other hand, they need acceptance and support by a local audience. Culture, to begin with, is specific in a local sense, even if minorities demand their own visibility in art institutions. In the one case, the problem is an economic one, in the other it proves to be political in the sense of freedom of expression.
In the end, it does not resolve the issue to simply consider art museums as no more than economic projects and thus link them to the visions of an expanded world economy. Instead, their problem is rooted in the recognition of “art,” since this concept—in a double sense—feeds and undermines contemporary art production. Art was a Western idea that emerged in modernity against national resistance, and promoted the contested claim of an international modernism. Since universalism, in this sense, did not survive in the common sense, we may ask whether in the end art will become a local idea. Such a question reveals the complexity inherent in the museum topic. “Local art” cannot mean arbitrary definitions that change from one place to another. The local must and will acquire a new meaning in the face of a global world.
Museums play a critical role, especially in the realm of contemporary art, a role different than that of representing world heritage. It is presently not possible to predict what this role will be. In a positive case, it would lead to the orchestration of roles that are different but still compatible. Such roles are closely linked to the contested claim of personal creativity, including freedom of expression, which was guaranteed as an accepted ideal of aesthetic competence in the sense of a distinct quality of “art.” At the same time, such a concept of art was the condition for creating an off territory that we call museum, a zone protected from the grip of political power. In the latter case, such a zone remains a hope in those parts of the world where political freedom appears to be in danger. To conclude, art museums have to integrate the double role of remaining (or becoming) an independent institution and, at the same time, serving as a new political forum.
(1) Hans Belting, Likeness and presence (Chicago 1994)
(2) Derrick de Kerckhove, La civilisation vidéo-chrétienne (Paris 1990) with reference to McLuhan
(3) Hans Belting, “The exhibition of culture”? Cf.p. in this volume
(4) Bernard Dupaigne, Le scandale des arts premiers. La veritable histoire (Paris 2006)
(5) Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube (New York 1984)
(6) Hans Belting, Art History after Modernism (Chicago Univ. Press 2003)
(7) Arthur C. Danto, After the end of art.Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton 1997)
(8) Shelly Errington, The death of authentic primitive art and other tales of progress (Univ.of Calif.Press 1998).Cf. Sally Price, Primitive art in Civilized Places _(Chicago 989) and R. Corbey, _Tribal Art Traffic (Amsterdam 2000)
(9) John Elderfiel, ed., Imagining the Future of the Museum of Modern Art (New York 1998)
(10) Arthur C. Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box (New York 1992)
(11) Hans Belting, The Invisible Masterpiece (Chicago 2001)p.362ff.
(12) Edw.Steichen, The Family of Man (Catal. MoMa 1955)
(13) Robert Frank, The Americans (Paris 1958, N.York, Grove Press 1959, re-edited Zurich 1997)
(14) Video Art, ed. Ira Schneider and Beryl Korot (London 1976)
(15) William Rubin, “Picasso,” in Rubin, ed., “Primitivism” in 20th cent. Art. Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (New York 1984), vol..I., p.241–340.
(16) Thomas McEvilley, “Ouverture du piège, and Homi Baba, Hybridité, heterogeneité et culture contemporaine,” in ed. Hubert Martin, Les magiciens de la terre (Centre G.Pompidou, Paris 1989), pp.20 and 24. (17) Hubert, ibid., p.8f.
(18) Rasheed Araeen, ed., The Third Text Reader on Art, Culture and Theory (London 2002), p.3ff. (Prologue by Sean Cubitt)
(19) Peter Weibel, ed., Inklusion:Exklusion (Graz: Steirischer Herbst 1996)
(20) Colin Richards, “The wounds of discovery,” in A. Pinto Ribeiro, ed., The state of the world (Lisbon: Gulbenkian Foundation, 2006), p.18f.
(21) Marc Augé, An Anthropology for Contemporaneous Worlds (Stanford 1999), p.89ff. Cf. Francis Affergan, La pluralité des mondes. Vers une autre anthropologie (Paris 1997).
(22) Moira Simpson, “A world of Museums: New Concepts, New Models,” in Pinto Ribeiro (see note 20), p.101f.
(23) My description in Belting, Art History after Modernism (Chicago 2003) p.153ff.
(24) André Malraux, Anti-Memoirs (New York 1968)
(25) www.mocataiei.org.tw/english (2006)
(26) L’Art Contemporain et son exposition(1) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002) with the text by A.Riera on p.139ff.
