Keynote Lecture, Friday, October 19th, 2007, 10:45 a.m.
Hans Belting: Why the Museum? New Markets, Colonial Memories, and Local Politics
The market
The other reason for art’s globalization is the market which has expanded in an unprecedented scale. Chinese artists no longer go to New York in order to attend American art schools, but live there in order to invade the market. Contemporary art , like never before, has become a recommended investment in the art trade whose markets are spreading over the globe. A German News Paper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in its weekly section on the Kunstmarkt, recently confirmed that contemporary art continues to boom at the fall auctions of 2007 in London3. “Chinese avantgarde is firmly established but German art is also very strong”, as I was amused to read in this sequence. “Phillips goes its own ways by throwing Russian art on the market”. At Sotheby’s, a Chinese work from 1995, representing the Tiananmen massacre, was assessed at two million pounds. At Phillips de Bury, two private collections with Chinese Art that were offered for sale, were expected to win record prizes.. While Sotheby’s estimated a red Mao from Warhol’s series of 1973 for 650 000 pounds, this estimation is beaten by the expected prize of a Chinese triptych with Mao portraits, painted by Wang Guangyis in 1988 (Mao from A to O, or Mao behind prison bars) which was assessed for 700 000 pounds. At the same time, Sotheby offered old Chinese Art, mostly pillaged in colonial times, at its Hongkong branch, for Chinese clients. Museums, in general, are no longer bidding on such art sales. They even are not welcome on the market as their acquisitions would stop the free flow of the art trade by entering in permanent collections. Museums, we must add, also differ from personal collections in that they cannot be sold and resold. They only can be closed.Art collectors and art audiences
Museums lag behind the globalization of the market, and in this they also represent an audience which continues to be local in taste and art experience. We still remember the disillusion of the Russian artists when they conquered a professional audience at New York but lost their devoted audience at home. Museum audiences are mostly unaware of the economic conditions of the exhibitions they admire. A museum which hosts an exhibition, may not even own the works shown, but may depend on a collector’s taste that in turn mirrors the market. The ownership history does not leave any visible trace on the works themselves which keep a false innocence. Which audience, we may ask ourselves, does art actually address? To be understood and appreciated is its principal aim rather than to be sold and resold. But can understanding, reflecting a general audience, ever be global? Is it not an illusion that the notion of art is everywhere the same? It is a market illusion which only is shared by art collectors and guest curators who with their exhibitions serve the market. It only makes sense to speak of global art if we accept its diversity and its inborn conditions and limits.The creation of museums that are supported by art foundations, either in the hands of families or of big companies, is a new phenomenon in the collector’s world. They make a personal taste public and guide the art experience of a local or national audience. Sometimes, they are for a larger public the only occasion to encounter new art, whether national or international. Pertinent examples are three museums in Istanbul which show modern art and occasional new art, not necessarily international art. Istanbul Modern, beautifully situated at the Bosporus and a neighbour of an elegant mosque, thus representing the dualism in modern Turkey, is in the hands of the Eczacibasi family which, not only with its own collection, strictly controls the exhibition policy of the museum. The Pera Museum, opened in June 2005 in an old private town house, is owned by the Suna and Inan Kirac Foundation and also houses two private collections. Contemporary art is only seen in temporary exhibitions such as one in a third museum, the Santral Istanbul which in fact is an “energy museum” and does not have an art collection of its own. Thus, after 20 years of the existence of the Istanbul Biennial4, even Turkish contemporary art is not seen in a permanent collection in any of the existing museums.
But also the opposite case creates problems when private collectors alone exhibit contemporary art and alone decide on its selection. We here encounter a global situation in such countries where new museums, often the first of its kind, are created by private collectors. A museum of whatever kind recommends itself as the only choice to install a public collection which often is justified as a national choice to make contemporary art visible in its own country. Thus, the Poddar collection of contemporary Indian art, to give just one example, “remains essentially a family collection” and owns “over 2000 works that include commissions and folk art. It will become accessible to the public with the opening of the Devi Art Foundation” late in 2007 (www.aaa.org.hk, Asian Art Archive). We do not give enough attention to this worldwide development, if we are still thinking in the traditional Western category of the public museum (whether state or city). In such museums (National or City Museums) a jury, or in the US the trustees, served as a link between private and public taste. The lack of any such control in countries with no professional audience invests a private collector, with a museum of its own, with an unprecedented power. He or she indeed has the power to chanel contemporary art in his or her country by inclusion or exclusion and thus to create an official canon.
Chronology of global art. We may now ask ourselves what global art actually is and whether it exists at all? Or whether it is a mere fashion and, worse, a phantom? Global art, to pin it down, does not have a history (how could that be otherwise?), but it has a chronology , as a term and as a concept. If we look at London and Paris, two places with a colonial history, it becomes apparent that there has been a turning point, a global turn , in the same year 1989 when also world history changed. 1987, two years before, the Pakistan born artist Rashed Araeen founded the periodical Third Text which, as the editorial has it, is dedicated to “Third World perspectives on contemporary art and culture”. In 1988, a London gallery placed an exhibition on The essential black art, a term then generally used for distinguishing “the other” in art. 1989, the Chinese View Arts Center was opened in Manchester, and Jean Hubert Martin curated the legendary exhibition Les magiciens de la terre at Paris which was the first event of global art, though the term was not used then. The exhibition was global in that it placed accepted Western artists side by side with Non-Western artists , even with ethnic artists who were one of the reasons to replace the term artist by the innocent and conciliatory term magician, meaning what magicians were in tribal cultures, artists are in a modern culture.
Later in 1989, Araeen, the editor of Third Text, presented the exhibition “The other story. Afro-Asian artists in postwar Britain” in a London gallery. Its purpose was altogether different, because the curator, as he writes in the Catalogue, wanted to disclose ” the absence of non-European artists from the history of modern art”. The absence was not an absence as such, but an absence in art writing and art exhibition. He thus wanted to fill this lacuna after the fact and to restore a lost presence in retrospect. But the quest for an incomplete art history is not the aim of global art whose message is to leave art history altogether, as it was a Western project. Martin therefore was criticized from two opposite sides, in the one case for abandoning art history and in the other case for not filling up Western art history with neglected names.
But the term “global art” still meets with a certain reluctance. The West defends its privileged status, and other parts of the world do not per se gain a national art scene except by participation and competition on the market. It is less controversial to use terms such as recent or young art. Hybrid is a label for the mixture of the progressive with the exotic. Postmodern, one generation ago, was a redefinition of the vanishing modern, postcolonial an attempt to overcome colonial thinking and language. The prefix “post” always reveals a tendency to save what it designs, by change and adaptation.Others discover Mestizo phenomena in Hong Kong Movies whose global imagery has a wider audience than global art5. And yet, the globalization of art is the single most important event in the art scene, even eclipsing the appearance of new media in art a generation ago. It has, as we have seen, already taken place on the art market.
But global art needs, as we will see, a new type of art museum to provide it with meaning and acceptance. The proliferation of new art museums in Asia , to take one example, is a symptom for a tendency which still needs a definition. Let me say so much. The question of the local is the basic issue in every discussion on the global, as the neologism glocal reveals. The local assumes an increased and different importance in the face of the global, and the place is invested with a new urgency within the overall flow of the space of media and markets, as Marc Auge has defined it in his seminal study on Non-Lieux[6]. Now the importance of museums in the future is becoming visible. They are not only local sites for a local audience, whatever they may show . They also represent the double face of the contempory, meaning global traffic and migration, and the familiar, whether you called it identity or tradition. The global always has a local significance. In this respect, museums ,with their permanence, beat the market, with its ubiquity and its instability. Global art certainly needs a global market but it also needs places where it is mediated to a local audience and where a general audience , as against the clients of the market, is formed and shaped with some coherence. This may happen via a permanent museum collection which always will be site-specific, or by an exhibition program which has more consistency than art fairs and short lived biennial events. The problem is to balance the sharing with the owning. The sharing is global, the owning local.
3 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 6,2007
4 David Elliott,ed, Time present, time past. Highlights from 20 years of the International Istanbul Biennial ( Istanbul , Exhibition Catal. 2007)
5 Serge Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind. The intelellectual dynamics of colonization and globalization (London 2002) p.202ff.
6 Marc Augé, Non-Lieux´. Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité (Paris 1992)
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