In an earlier post, I penned a few thoughts on the subject of worldart -- a sort of rough taxonomy of contemporary artistic practice, in which I distinguish worldart from vernacular art and from what I call extraterritorial reciprocity. Here's the link: http://northeastwestsouth.net/site/node/66
In one way, worldart - like its nieces and nephews world music and world fiction - is that increasingly homogenised result of globalisation in the artworld. But it is not just a byproduct; it is more profoundly a self-reflexive outlook, stemming from the modernist insistence on autonomy, that breaks with the idea that art is rooted in a strong tradition -- with the idea that art is determined by one's community belonging; with the idea that it is context specific. So while worldartists invariably use one context or another in what they fashionably call their "research projects," this context is not intrinsic to the meaning of their art per se (merely of the project). Ironically though - and this is my real point - their art actually is context specific, but the context is the artworld, upon which it depends ontologically. For outside of the performative framework of the artworld, worldart is not art at all, and certainly not "research" in any substantive sense of that term.
Of course it is very difficult to define this fuzzy notion without also defining the alternatives -- what it is not. It is not vernacular art (which worldart perceives as snuggly ensconced in tradition); but it is as I say bogged down in the artworld environment because it can't imagine being able to breathe outside that art-sustaining system. I make this point to emphasise that my usage of the term has less to do with the "world" in the geographical sense than in the ontological sense -- in the sense of overlapping ontological landscapes.
Worldart has produced some great work, no doubt about that, but it may have exhausted its potential -- which may explain why hundreds of worldartists are quitting the artworld every day, or devising exit strategies to do so, in a gesture of extraterritorial reciprocity.
the world worldart worlds in
In an earlier post, I penned a few thoughts on the subject of worldart -- a sort of rough taxonomy of contemporary artistic practice, in which I distinguish worldart from vernacular art and from what I call extraterritorial reciprocity. Here's the link:
http://northeastwestsouth.net/site/node/66
In one way, worldart - like its nieces and nephews world music and world fiction - is that increasingly homogenised result of globalisation in the artworld. But it is not just a byproduct; it is more profoundly a self-reflexive outlook, stemming from the modernist insistence on autonomy, that breaks with the idea that art is rooted in a strong tradition -- with the idea that art is determined by one's community belonging; with the idea that it is context specific. So while worldartists invariably use one context or another in what they fashionably call their "research projects," this context is not intrinsic to the meaning of their art per se (merely of the project). Ironically though - and this is my real point - their art actually is context specific, but the context is the artworld, upon which it depends ontologically. For outside of the performative framework of the artworld, worldart is not art at all, and certainly not "research" in any substantive sense of that term.
Of course it is very difficult to define this fuzzy notion without also defining the alternatives -- what it is not. It is not vernacular art (which worldart perceives as snuggly ensconced in tradition); but it is as I say bogged down in the artworld environment because it can't imagine being able to breathe outside that art-sustaining system. I make this point to emphasise that my usage of the term has less to do with the "world" in the geographical sense than in the ontological sense -- in the sense of overlapping ontological landscapes.
Worldart has produced some great work, no doubt about that, but it may have exhausted its potential -- which may explain why hundreds of worldartists are quitting the artworld every day, or devising exit strategies to do so, in a gesture of extraterritorial reciprocity.