Forgetting the Art World

It may be time to forget the art world--or at least to recognize that a certainhistorical notion of the art world is in eclipse. Today, the art world spins on its axis so quicklythat its maps can no longer be read; its borders blur. In Forgetting the ArtWorld, Pamela Lee connects the current state of this world to globalization and itsattendant controversies. Contemporary art has responded to globalization with images of movement andmigration, borders and multitudes, but Lee looks beyond iconography to view globalization as a worldprocess. Rather than think about the "global art world" as a socioeconomic phenomenon, orin terms of the imagery it stages and sponsors, Lee considers "the work ofart's world" as a medium through which globalization takes place. She argues that the work ofart is itself both object and agent of globalization. Lee explores the ways that art actualizes,iterates, or enables the processes of globalization, offering close readings of works by artists whohave come to prominence in the last two decades. She examines the "just in time"managerial ethos of Takahashi Murakami; the production of ethereal spaces in Andreas Gursky's imagesof contemporary markets and manufacture; the logic of immanent cause dramatized in ThomasHirschhorn's mixed-media displays; and the "pseudo-collectivism" in the contemporarypractice of the Atlas Group, the Raqs Media Collective, and others. To speak of "thework of art's world," Lee says, is to point to both the work of art'smattering and its materialization, to understand the activity performed by the object as utterlycontinuous with the world it at once inhabits and creates.