Keynote Lecture, Friday, October 19th, 2007, 10:45 a.m.
Hans Belting: Why the Museum? New Markets, Colonial Memories, Local Politics
In March of this year, the Dubai Art Fair, a subsidiary of Dubai’s International Financial Centre (DIFC) organized a three day “Global Art Forum” which was curated by Maria Finders, from Brunswick Arts. Suprisingly, one of the section was introduced as “The next ten years of contemporary art in the middle East”, as if they could be planned in advance. A commentary clarified that the title implied two questions. How will Contemporary Art affect the Middle East in the next ten years? Or how will the Middle East affect Contemporary Art? Contemporary Art, as we may conclude, has become synonymous with Global Art which the forum meant to promote in the Middle East. Culture, we read, “is becoming an economic driver”. Since everything in the desert state is created ex nihilo, also Global Art is on their agenda for inventing a global city.
Museums are rarely mentionend in the the papers of the Forum except the so-called Museum of Contemporary Art at Tehran, a contested place in Iran’s cultural politics. Museums anyway often play a minor role in Global Art and remain in the shadow of the market. Thus, their situation markedly differs from museums of so-called “World Art”, understood as World Art Heritage in Metropolitan Museums of the West. While World Art usually does not exist outside museums, Global Art has not even reached them, even if museums occasionally host exhibitions of new art of non-western origin. While Global Art is the reason for new art fairs and biennials, it needs an explanation why museums should be the topic of a conference on contemporary art.
The conference title serves as a guide to the intended meaning. It does not ask “What is Contemporary Art?” but instead asks “Where is Contemporary Art?” and thus asks a geographical question which a priori is a museum question too. New Art Museums are created with almost the same speed as the biennials in other parts of the world, but they do not have the same purpose. The question, thus, is whether also Contemporary Art has a geography, much as museums are defined by their geography. We even may ask whether art, after its former universalism and contrary to the global market, also lives from local meanings which counteract the pressure of globalization and favour national or cultural idioms rather than falling victim to global conformism. Museums are site specific (a term from exhibition art) and differ by their geographical location.
The strive for modernization may everywhere favour an art scene in the Western sense, but the need of self expression and identity may cause the opposite effect. Museum theory which has become a favorate academic play, does little to answer such questions, as it is mostly in Western hands and usually neglects current museum practice. Contemporary art, in its diversity and cultural geography, neatly contrasts with the global mass media and does not circulate in the way the latter do, if only because of its personal claim and private look on the world. Though also dependent on the market , artists do not want to serve the ideology and conformism of mass media. In some suppressed societies , new art even is expected to be the last cry of freedom and self expression, in that it strives for a personal voice which, on the other hand, may reach the outside world and thus make internal problems visible on an international level.
History
Let me proceed in the guise of loose comments which touch some basic issues of my subject . My first point is history. Art Museums , even new ones, are displaying history. But in what sense? Western museums habe celebrated history in terms of art history. This even applies to museums with modern art which its experts, from Julius Meier Graefe to Herbert Read, have always propagated as the continuing course of art history, sometimes as its very apogee where everything in past art already had pointed to. The military term of the avant-garde makes the continuity of history abundantly clear. While modern art, sometime in a polemic mood, represented its own history, ethnic art, its other self, was believed to live in a timeless tradition.But this approved concept of art history no longer is valid even in Western art which changed direction after modernism. When I gave 1983 my inaugural lecture on the “End of Art History?” in Munich, I only had Western art in mind, while arts globalization only could become an issue in my recent book “Art history after modernism”1.It is more than doubtful that Western type art history is a candidate for globalization, even though there is everywhere a frantic attempt to recover a local art history, including neglected modernisms in excluded nations. On the contrary , we observe a new energy among artists to get rid of this double heritage of modernity. Artists in the West insist on a post-historical liberation from a limiting past, while former ethnic artists , no longer confined to traditional arts and craft, prefer to be identified as post-ethnic in order to act as artists in a global sense. Thus, contemporary art, as against modern art, contradicts art history in the accepted sense. Contemporaneity, or globalism, is fludding history, thus also leading to a dangerous loss or artificial invention of history. History divides the global world, while contemporeneity, as a common experience with different viewing points, seems to become our common destiny. The same is valid for geography. It used to separate art from ethnicity, the West from the rest. Now, new frontiers , still largely clouded, are building up.
Modernism
Modern Art, as we know,enjoyed the privilege of defining art on a universal level. Artists who were unwilling or unable to adopt it,did not fall under the categories of art at all. As a result, non-western artists were for a long time desperately appropriating the latest modern styles in order to be part of the game. For making art, it has been mandatory to be modern in the Western sense. An exhibition shown at the Maison de la Culture de Japon, in Paris, demonstrated this law most clearly. “Cubism in Asia”, as it was named, retraced the history of Cubism, as the principal label of modernism, in different Asian countries where its introduction took place over a period of several decades, sometimes coinciding with national independence2. Cubism, or modern art at large, was a priviliged model for doing art everywhere. Modern art was modern form in art.This has significantly changed, since even Western art , for some while, lacks any binding model including a common idiom which we have called style or a leading art current. As a result, participation of the art world does not involve western or modern style any longer. Art markets function differently from an art school. Globalization now means providing global occasions for doing art. In the era of modernism, western art schools had been indespensable for outsiders to be accepted even at home. Today, however, art practice has been decentralized in aim and appearance. And art has undergone a structural change which opens a new game. It no longer is its own subject or reason, as it used to be in modernism, but lives on external subject matter. Instead of representing itself, it respresents everything else in its own time, and everything else again has a geography. New media have made art narrative. But any narrative involves a place where it makes sense, and thus a local audience. Global Art is not global in that it is everywhere the same. On the contrary, it feeds the expectation that also art is as multiform as the global universe. There are at least two main reasons why art has become global. The one is the use of new media and art technologies such as film, video and net-art which are available everywhere on the globe. Such media recommend themselves, because they have no Western genealogy in terms of exhibition art in the “White Cube”. For the same reasons, they also create problems for art museums to collect and to exhibit them.
1 Hans Belting, Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte? (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1983); now in another version: Art History after Modernism (Chicago 2003)
2 Cubisme: l’autre rive. Resonances en Asie (Catalogue Japan Foundation, Tokyo 2007); Cubism in Asia: Unbounded Dialogues (Tokyo, Singapore, Paris 2005-2007)
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