I entirely share your misgivings about "artistic" "research" "projects". Cao Fei's "project" is just one more caricatural instance of everything that's bankrupt about worldart. It is entirely at odds with what I have described as extraterritorial reciprocity, because the territory I have in mind in using that notion is the territory of art itself. Not geographic territory. Cao Fei may travel to and fro, "researching," but my guess is that she never quits the artworld.
Worldart and its champions have an astonishing capacity for self-congratulatory rhetoric and taking their own fictions for fact -- and this nonsense about doing "research" really takes the cake -- and if ever one dares call them on it, one is invariably met with a salvo of holier-than-Thou rhetoric about art's alleged world-transformatory function.
If art is to have that function, it will have to get away from itself; expatriate itself from its territory. My feeling is that world artists simply lack the knowledge to do serious research and have every interest in collaborating with people from other fields and disciplines (which is what I call extradisciplinary collaboration -- outside the confines of any discipline). Unfortunately, their unacknowledged but very palpable Romantic penchant allows them to think they can do it all on their own.
"worldart" "research" "projects"
I entirely share your misgivings about "artistic" "research" "projects". Cao Fei's "project" is just one more caricatural instance of everything that's bankrupt about worldart. It is entirely at odds with what I have described as extraterritorial reciprocity, because the territory I have in mind in using that notion is the territory of art itself. Not geographic territory. Cao Fei may travel to and fro, "researching," but my guess is that she never quits the artworld.
Worldart and its champions have an astonishing capacity for self-congratulatory rhetoric and taking their own fictions for fact -- and this nonsense about doing "research" really takes the cake -- and if ever one dares call them on it, one is invariably met with a salvo of holier-than-Thou rhetoric about art's alleged world-transformatory function.
If art is to have that function, it will have to get away from itself; expatriate itself from its territory. My feeling is that world artists simply lack the knowledge to do serious research and have every interest in collaborating with people from other fields and disciplines (which is what I call extradisciplinary collaboration -- outside the confines of any discipline). Unfortunately, their unacknowledged but very palpable Romantic penchant allows them to think they can do it all on their own.