Hans Belting
is participant at
Fragrance of Difference. Spaces for Art and Cultural Diversity
Abstract
When, in summer 2008, Hans Belting published his study Florenz und Bagdad – eine westöstliche Geschichte des Blicks (Florence and Baghdad: a West-Eastern History of Seeing), the reviewers and columnists saw a new genre emerging: comparative image analysis, presented in elegant scholarly prose. Hans Belting showed how the development of the central perspective in Western art was influenced by Arabian mathematics and philosophy. He linked art history to a theory of seeing, and his book provided new insight and analysis on a highly contemporary issue in cultural politics. With the Global Art Museum, a platform at the ZKM Karlsruhe, Belting investigates the interrelations inherent to global art trends. What is the difference between modernist art and global art, and will the idea of world art herald the end of Western interpretative hegemony?
