Globalization and Contemporary Art

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This analysis will examine the impact of the global economic crisis on the art world, the role of emerging markets in the art industry, and some cultural challenges facing the art world. The art industry is no doubt taking a hit.

Flows and Counterflows: Globalisation in Contemporary Art | News | Sotheby's Institute of Art

The global economic crisis though has not impacted the buying and selling of the most famous artists and their works, which do not go on sale very often. Once-in-a-lifetime deals are still highly valued! The first reason is that there are more art buyers; some estimate that there are now 20 times more buyers than in the s.

The buyers who have retreated from the current market are mainly speculators; the industry views this withdrawal as a positive step. The second reason is that the bust of the early s was mainly due to withdrawal of Japanese buyers, who used art in their business dealings, as a way to avoid paying taxes.

Flows and Counterflows: Globalisation in Contemporary Art

Once these efforts were uncovered, the art industry suffered immensely since this group was connected to the previous art boom. Just as emerging markets are a hot spot for investors and speculators, the art industry has also grown tremendously in emerging markets, such as India, China, Russia, and the UAE. Europe and the United States are no longer the only hubs of the art industry. China is viewed as one of the fastest growing art markets. In , five of the ten best-selling living artists worldwide were Chinese up from only 1 in Well-known Chinese artists, such as Zeng Fanzhi, have managed to do well because his work has gained international acclaim, allowing him to exhibit his works in New York.

India has seen a growth in online art auctions, as the population is used to the technology.

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There have been more bidders in number and quality and more auctions as well. Much of this growth is due to Indian expats in the U. All of the major art auction houses have website and online sales.

The Internet allows for more access to buyers and more transparency: I think we are witnessing the first steps of a paradigm shift in the Art World market place. Of course the Internet does not only host art auctions for real works, one can also visit a virtual auction in an online world, such as Second Life, for virtual artwork.

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With life imitating art, imitating life, virtual worlds offer a new medium for promoting both real and virtual art. In some cases globalization trends, such as online auctions reinforce cultural stereotypes. An interesting study comparing French and American online art auctions in 11 revealed that the patterns of buying and selling art online were consistent with cultural stereotypes.

The French avoided reserve auctions in which the item is not sold unless reaching a certain minimum bid and preferred to buy lithographs online instead of oil paintings — which were preferred by Americans.

Globalization and Contemporary Art

The author concluded that these results meant that Americans view the online world as an extension of the real world and their behavior buying bigger purchases and using reserve auctions reflects this point. So it comes as little surprise that artists have alluded to the cultural underpinnings, infrastructural arrangements, and paraphernalia of tourism while elaborating on their own movements.

Maurizio Cattelan acted as a tour operator when he built a replica of the iconic Hollywood sign above a landfill site in Sicily and then flew a group of collectors, curators, and critics over from the Venice Biennale to see it, his work highlighting the rise in art tourism while at the same time casting the tourist as a wide-eyed consumer of globally distributed fantasies Hollywood , Simon Starling crossed the Tabernas Desert, in Spain, on a fuel cell—powered bicycle and then used the water produced by the engine to paint an image of a cactus that is native to the region Tabernas Desert Run , Hans-Peter Feldmann has displayed his collection of postcards of the Eiffel Tower, drawing out the conventions of postcard photography while commenting on the transformation of the structure into a cultural fetish Untitled Eiffel Tower , To underline the affinity of the travelling artist with the tourist, as Feldman, Bonami, and others have done, is to recognise that the artist often follows in the footsteps of the tourist as he or she moves between nodes in a now-global art network.

But it would be wrong to understand efforts to couple the travels of the artist and tourist as uninflected affirmations of commonality—they are, on the contrary, charged gestures. Most of us are tourists at one point or another and yet our attitudes to tourism are often uncertain or dismissive. So what is to be gained from an association with the tourist?

More specifically, what can artworks tell us about the processes of globalisation when they picture those processes from the perspective of the tourist? This literary critique of tourism has received academic sanction in the work of the conservative historian Daniel J. Boorstin, who describes the experiences of the modern tourist as superficial and inauthentic, contrasting him or her with the adventurous traveller of earlier times.

1. Globalization and Contemporary Art

And this critique has a certain currency in the art world. Real Travellers and Native Venetians Only. Contemporary artists have also disparaged the tourist.

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