Gatekeepers, Poachers and Pestsin the Globalized Contemporary

Art World System

Jonathan Harris

As the financial crash in 2008 demonstrated, globalization processesinvolve the creation of new conditions and systems that are inherentlyunstable and dangerous. That term system as usually understood implies an ordering process that overrides, or that at least is intended tooverride, the local significance or weakness of elements within it. Analysisof the globalized art world, however, indicates that this system (part ofthe globalized world order) is better understood as a kind of skewedpower network whose nodes that is, its key pressure points arecontrolled by a very limited number of key players in financial andinstitutional terms.1

These gatekeeper organizations have derived their historical andpresent power within the globalized art world system from a number ofsources that are socio-political, ideological and economic in nature. Buttheir control, effectively, of the art world system is itself limited and vul-nerable to many kinds of external pressures. These centrally includefinancial crises in the global capitalist economy as a whole; destabilizing or potentially disruptive local political and socio-economic con-ditions (contemporary art in China and India will be my examples);and actions by some of the worker ants comprising the art worldsystem itself. By this I refer to some artists, critics, gallery owners andothers who explicitly oppose, and in the name of art itself, the functionof art in the globalized art world system where they see it reducedto that of another commodity and a spectacular diversion within theglobalized capitalist world order.2

Over the past twenty years in particular the market for historical andcontemporary art has become a structurally significant, if relatively small,part of global corporate, state and private wealth investment manage-ment, alongside the buying of commodities; gold, for instance, or securi-ties such as US government bonds.3 The art markets key sites/sights ofactivity in economic terms (its auctions and dealing galleries) have

Third Text, 2013

Vol. 27, No. 4, 536548, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2013.810977

# 2013 Third Text

1. A critical anatomy of theglobal art world is offeredin Jonathan Harris, ed,Globalization andContemporary Art, Wiley-Blackwell, Malden,Massachusetts and Oxford,2011.

2. See, for example, sections I,II and III in Zoya Kocurand Simon Leung, eds,Theory in ContemporaryArt since 1985, Blackwell,Oxford, 2005.

3. See, for example, Part I inIain Robertson and DerrickChong, eds, The ArtBusiness, Routledge,Abingdon, 2008 and,specifically, JeremyEckstein, Investing in Art:Art as an Asset Class, pp6983.

expanded from New York, London, Paris and other North American andEuropean centres, to Asian venues, primarily Hong Kong, Singapore,Shanghai, Dubai, Beijing and Delhi. These have attached themselves insome cases to urban centres where regular commercial art fairs pump-prime the markets and generate related media and public interest.4

The art markets very rapid expansion globally was tied directly to thegrowth in the world economy in the early years of the last decade. Its size,in fact, doubled between 2003 and 2006.5 Its subsequent rapid declineequally closely mirrored the losses and bank failures that occurred inthe second half of 2008. Yet, since then, the art market has actually recov-ered, in terms of volumes of sales and record individual sale prices, farmore successfully than most other parts of the world economy. Thishas happened because art itself has come to be seen as a kind of gold, asecure place to park or store capital in times of continuing uncertainty with the assumption, or hope, that prices will not have fallen whenthe time comes to sell.6 In this countervailing sense, then, the buoyantart market might be understood as a kind of cracked mirror of thestalled world economy as a whole: the rich or corporate investors in itsee art as a sanctuary of sorts in uncertain times.7

Auctions remained illegal in China between 1956 and 1986 (MaoZedong died in 1976). Chen Yifeis 1992 painting The Four Graces note the Western art title containing a reference to European Renaissancepainting was sold by Guardian auctioneers in Beijing in 1997 for over

Chen Yifei, The Four Graces, 1992, oil on canvas, private collection, image courtesy Marl-borough Fine Art

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4. Art Basel (owned by MCHSwiss Exhibition [Basel]Ltd), for instance, hasrecently bought the HongKong International Art Fair(owned by Asian Art FairsLtd), where Christies andSothebys base their Asianactivities. See https://www.artbasel.com/-/. . ./ArtBasel/. . ./Art_Basel_Takes_Major_St, accessed 6March 2013.

5. See Iain Robertson, TheArt Market in Transition,the Global Economic Crisisand the Rise of Asia, inHarris, op cit, pp 449463,p 453.

6. There is every indicationthat in the future buyingwill be dominated by state-backed cultural funds, partof the sovereign wealthmanagement funds[especially] from East Asiaand the Middle East, whenthe many new museumsand cultural zones areopened. Ibid, p 451

7. See Michael J Silversteinand Neil Fiske, TradingUp: The New AmericanLuxury, Boston ConsultingGroup, Boston, 2004.

275,000 US dollars, then a remarkable price for a contemporary Chinesepainting.8 This was a watershed moment indicating significant incipientchange of several kinds. It was rumoured that the New York and London-based dealer Marlborough Fine Art had bought the work. But Christiesattempts to sell Chinese artworks in London the following year turnedout to be a failure only twenty-five per cent of the lots went underthe hammer.9 Nevertheless two key developments are exemplified bythese events: (1) the intervention of Western dealers in the just-openingChinese art world, economy and society as a whole and, (2) the marketingof living Chinese artists works with manifest Western characteristics andreferences. This second development also indicates the creation of apackaging process aiming these works at potential Western buyers.While these artworks offered an authentic Chinese theme, narrative ortechnique, they were simultaneously executed in a familiar enough, andunchallenging, Western manner.10

Yifei has been termed one of the Chinese Romantic Realist painters.These two key terms from nineteenth-century European painting evokeportraiture by the likes of J A D Ingres, Euge`ne Delacroix and GustaveCourbet. Other Chinese-born artists from the mid-twentieth century such as San Yu and Xu Beihong had done well at auctions overseasbut they had generally lived outside China and rarely had works soldanywhere on the countrys mainland.11 Their pictures instantiatedtraditional Chinese styles and subjects of painting in the history ofChinese art especially the significance of calligraphic works combiningimage and text.12

In the early twentieth century affinities developed or were perceivedto have developed between paintings done by these Chinese artistsliving abroad and the works of the European masters, such as PabloPicasso and Henri Matisse. As modernist art developed in Europe andthen in the USA after 1945, more affinities assumed visual similaritiesread as evidence of shared themes or values, whatever the actual inten-tions or knowledge of the Chinese artists were registered.13 Theseclaims were generally based on the presupposition of Western art criticsand historians that the development of abstract painting in the Westhad significant parallels in kinds of work that had been produced inChina and other Asian countries for hundreds of years.14

Of course, it is possible, at one level, to identify what appear to bevisual similarities in these works between, for example, drip paint-ings made by Wu Guanzhong and Jackson Pollock. But the deductionor speculation that these similarities proved actual thematic or authorialcontinuities in works produced many years and decades apart under verydifferent historical and social conditions was, and remains, highly conten-tious. The matter is even more contentious and complicated because, bythe mid-twentieth century, some Chinese and US artists were sometimesexploring each others cultures.15 The also typical Western criticalassumption, however, that Chinese (and Japanese artists) werecopying or had been influenced by the Western artists, ratherthan the other way round, underlines the dominance and relatedarrogance of European and US art history, criticism and its gatekeeperorganizations.16

Offshore centres based in Taipei, Macau and Hong Kong, out of thecontrol of the mainland Peoples Republic of China, became the

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8. Iain Robertson, Victoria LTseng and Sonal Singh,Chindia as Art MarketOpportunity, in Robertsonand Chong, eds, op cit, pp8296, p 83

9. Ibid

10. See Michael Hue Williams,The Auction Houses areDistorting ourUnderstanding of ChineseArt, The Art Newspaper,25 January 2008.

11. Robertson, Tseng andSingh, op cit, p 83

12. For an empirical critique ofthis notion, see John Clark,Modern Asian Art,University of HawaiiPress, Honolulu, 1998.

13. See James Elkins,Afterword, in JamesElkins,Zhivka Valiavicharska andAlice Kim, eds, Art andGlobalization, PennsylvaniaState University Press,University Park,Pennsylvania, 2011, pp251283 (pp 267269),and the essays that Elkinsdiscusses in the samevolume.

14. On general problems ofsimilarity, see the usefulrange of essays in CharlesHarrison and Fred Orton,eds, Modernism, Criticism,Realism: AlternativeContexts for Art, Harperand Row, London, 1985.

15. See, for example, WuGuanzhong, FormalistAesthetics in Painting(1979), reprinted in WuHung and PeggyWang, eds,Contemporary Chinese Art:Primary Documents,Museum of Modern Art,New York, 2008, pp 1417; and Gao Minglu, The85 Art Movement, 1986,in ibid, pp 5263.

16. See, for example, MingTiampo, CulturalMerchantilism:Modernisms Means ofProduction: The GutaiGroup as Case Study, pp212224 and Reiko Tomii,The Discourse of(L)imitation: A Case Studywith Hole-Digging in1960s Japan, pp 344356,both in Harris, op cit.

auction sites where two of these gatekeepers Christies and Sothebys began to sell Asian art. In May of 2007, ten years after Yifeis paintingsold for what was then a startlingly high price for a Chinese painting,Zao-Wou Kis 1959 picture 14.12.59 was sold by Christies HongKong for 3.32 million dollars much more than its estimated value.Zao-Wou Ki is termed a Second-generation modernist.17 This termreplicates an item in the terminology developed by US art critics in the1950s and 1960s to describe and sequence works by American AbstractExpressionist artists who also used dates and numbers rather thanconventional titles for their paintings.

Chinese art made in the mid-twentieth century onwards is here beingconnected explicitly toWestern modernist abstract art, and, by extension,to its critical and historical understanding through aesthetic philosophieswithin the European tradition derived from Immanuel Kant.18 Zao-WouKis painting fits neatly into this capacious terrain of understanding itmay be abstract or have abstract qualities, but it also evokes lesschallenging, more familiar, earlier European landscape paintings by, forinstance, J M W Turner and Caspar David Friedrich.

This question of formal resemblance exemplifies something of thecomplex processes of interaction that developed between Chineseartists (and some critics) and the world outside China. Through theseprocesses they have come to know Western artworks, to know these asWestern Art, and to associate their own activities and values with it, tovarying degrees. Alongside the dealers Christies and Sothebys,then, Western art museums became powerful gatekeeper players in the

Zao-Wou Ki, 14.12.59, 1959, oil on canvas, 130 x 162 cm, private collection, photo #Christies Images and the Bridgeman Art Library, # ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London2013

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17. Robertson, Tseng andSingh, op cit, p 83.

18. See my account of this art-historical lineage inJonathan Harris, WritingBack to Modern Art: AfterGreenberg, Fried andClark, Routledge,Abingdon, 2005.

globalizing art world. The greatest artworks of the European and Amer-ican modernist era are exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art, theMetropolitan Museum and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, atTate in London, at the Reina Sofa Museum in Madrid and in all theother great collections held in Europe and its satellite centres. Therelated authority and once wide influence of US critics such as the Amer-icans Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried both associated veryclosely with identifying what was thought of as the best painting andsculpture of the late 1940s, the 1950s and the early part of the 1960s underpinned the museum collection of these canonical works.19

The globalized art world is, then, this systemic power network ofinterlinked economic, institutional and ideological-cultural relationshipsand inter-dependencies, founded on the economic and discursive powerof Western art, its host societies, their legal systems, art discourses andinfrastructures for the buying, selling, authentication and critical vali-dation of artworks. China and Chinese artists have become assimilatedto this system within the processes of globalization over the past twentyyears.20 The Chinese government has also been invited to take part insome of the key events of the annual art world calendar for example,to exhibit Chinese artists works in a national pavilion at the Venice Bien-nale in 2003 (although their involvement was cancelled because of theoutbreaks of the disease SARS). In the same year, the first large-scale exhi-bition of contemporary Chinese Art was held in France at the PompidouCentre in Paris, also organized in association with the Chinese govern-ment. The notion of museum quality is key to the workings of the artmarket it is a phrase used in the sales rhetoric of auctioneers anddealers. In this respect the museums and auction houses inflect andentrench each others roles in the globalized art world.21

In 2000 most market activity for modern and contemporary Chineseart still remained offshore, conducted in Hong Kong and Taipei. Butas China began to develop its economic and social reforms, allowingprivate businesses to exist and grow, new markets for art on the mainlandbegan to emerge in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Guangzhou, andin about six other centres.22 Centres for art and artists emerged too,mostly famously at 798 in Beijing, a former factory district turnedmixture of galleries, cafes and bars but this has been more toleratedthan directly encouraged or supported by the government authorities.This situation is one of the sources of local system vulnerability in theglobal power network. Since the beginnings of the Open Door policy,Chinese government regimes have always blown hot and cold on theexistence and meaning of an indigenous art world, at 798 and else-where.23

Corruption scandals and political crises in the Communist Party, andin its rule in China as a whole, have had direct and indirect effects on theactivities and changing status of its artists and art discourses. A continuedattempted blanket censorship of sexually explicit material in art and thewider culture is one instance.24 The treatment and status of Chinas mostfamous contemporary artist, Ai Weiwei, is another though he has had along and complicated history of connection to and disconnection fromthe Communist Party, reaching back to his fathers activities as a verywell-known poet. Ai Qing had been a Cultural Revolution dissident butwas then officially rehabilitated and became a celebrated figure.25

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19. See, in particular, PureFormality: 1960s AbstractPainting, in ibid, pp6390.

20. See Chronicle 19762006, in Wu Hung, op cit,pp 408436.

21. The Alors, la Chine?exhibition opened at theCentre Georges Pompidouin June 2003.

22. Robertson, Tseng andSingh, op cit, pp 8386

23. See Huang Rui, ed, Beijing798: Reflections on Art,Architecture, and Society inChina, Timezone 8, HongKong, 2004/ThinkingHands, Beijing, 2004.

24. See, for example, LiXianting, Confessions of aChina/Avant GardeCurator (1989), reprintedin Wu Hung, op cit, pp116120. The exhibitionof 1980s new waveperformance art, China/Avant Garde, took place inBeijing in 1989 followingyears of difficulties withNational Art Galleryauthorities over its plannedcontents.

25. See Hans Ulrich Obrist, AiWeiwei Speaks, Penguin,London, 2011, pp 4850.

Weiwei was named the most influential artist in the world in 2011 byArt Review, a US-based Western journal and online media source. Thisdevelopment added a further complication to the potential crises thatthe Chinese component of the globalized art world system faces.Weiwei has become, for some powerful agents in the West, a late-ColdWar symbol of resistance to Communist power in China, and thismarks the perennial ambivalence of US and European political interestsgenerally to the place of China in the world economic and socio-politicalorder.26

China undoubtedly has become the key structural element to contin-ued global economic growth (as part of the BRICK zone of countries)within which the art market is a small part, but there is a potentiallycatastrophic asymmetry between Chinas economic and socio-politicalcharacter at least as far as the US and its NATO alliance membersare concerned.27 The term authoritarian state capitalism may aptlyname the Chinese socio-economic system: it characterizes a nation-stateruled by a single unmovable (though not unchanging) cadre of eliteswhich is trying to manage and dominate enormous economic forcesand related, unpredictable social change more typical of the developmentof the capitalist-democratic societies in Europe and North America sincethe late nineteenth century.28

In fact, however, this development is by no means historicallyanomalous. Versions of the attempted combination of a free enterprisecapitalist economy with an authoritarian state occurred many times inthe European West in the mid-twentieth century. The fascist regimesthat erupted throughout Western and Central Europe in the inter-warperiod, in parallel and then opposition to the Soviet Union, aspired tothis combination. Francos autocratic regime in Spain was by far themost successful of these in melding systematic repression of all kindswith private enterprise and big business interests through from 1939to the mid-1970s.29 This was possible because NATO, led by the USsince the mid-1950s, supported Francos regime as a bulwark againstthe Soviet Union and sometimes against China too.

Xiogangs 1994 painting Bloodlines: Three Comrades sold for 2.1million dollars at Sothebys in New York in 2007. It represents a formof political Pop Art that developed in China, made by Chinese artists,in the 1990s. The painting alludes to something of the internal upheavalsexperienced by the population as the image and significance of the Com-munist Party went through crises and transformation, especially as ittried (and tries) to legitimize itself while overseeing a limited internalcapitalist revolution and beginning to act as a key player on the worldstage.30 The Chinese Political Pop artists did learn from and partlyemulate aspects of Western and particularly US recent art and massculture. Warhol-type ambiguities and paraded banalities characterizemuch of Chinese Political Pops own content processing. As withWarhols products, it remains unclear how critical the work actuallyis of the thing it depicts, yet the faint/feint smell of satire and codedattack is there. It may well be that this ambiguity was a necessity inorder for its producers to avoid censorship, and worse, from theregime. (It was a necessity also to avoid use of the pictorial rhetoric oforthodox Chinese Communist Party Socialist Realist painting, exceptin parodic-satirical terms.)31

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26. See http://www.artreview100.com/people/778/, accessed 6 March2013.

27. See, for example, RobertTerrill, The New ChineseEmpire and What it Meansfor the United States, BasicBooks, New York, 2003;and, from a differentperspective, Leo Panitchand Sam Gindin, TheMaking of GlobalCapitalism: The PoliticalEconomy of AmericanEmpire, Verso, London,2012.

28. The idea was popularizedby Stuart Hall in the 1980sin his work on the nature ofcontemporary emergentBritish neoliberalism, TheHard Road to Renewal:Thatcherism and the Crisisof the Left, Verso, London,1988.

29. See Paul Preston, TheSpanish Holocaust:Inquisition andExtermination inTwentieth-Century Spain,Harper, London, 2012.

30. Robertson, Tseng andSingh, op cit, p 86

31. See Li Xianting, Apathyand Deconstruction in Post89 Art: Analysing theTrends of CynicalRealism and PoliticalPop (1992), reprinted inWu Hung, op cit,pp 157166.

But, again in market terms, it was also a necessity for Chinese artists tomeet the expectations and visual knowledge of buyers from within therecent Western era for, since the 1960s, cool ambiguities and theseductive banalities of mass-cultural imagery, sometimes dressed up ascomplexity and multi-accentuality, have been requisite elements ofmuch serious art in the neo-avant-garde tradition.32 This requirementdeveloped on the basis of a Cold War era rejection of both the politicalposturings of the Surrealists, half of whom had joined the Stalinist Com-munist parties of Western Europe in the 1930s, and of the reactive asocialindividualism of the American Abstract Expressionists whose works laterbecame tainted by this genres now well-known role as an insidious pro-paganda vehicle for US state department interests during the later 1950sand the 1960s.33

YueMinjunsGoldfish sold at the same New York auction in 2007 for1.38 million dollars in a sale of 300 lots that made twenty-five milliondollars in total. By that year, the market for Chinese contemporary art(branded less politically directly as East Asian painting) had becomemainstream, with important sales like this in London and Hong

Zhang Xiaogang, Bloodline Three Comrades, 1994, oil on canvas, private collection, image courtesy Sothebys New York

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32. See Robert Hughes, TheRise of Andy Warhol,New York Review ofBooks, 18 February 1982,reprinted in Brian Wallis,ed, Art afterRepresentation:RethinkingRepresentation, NewMuseum of ContemporaryArt, New York, 1988, pp4558.

33. See Francis Frascina, ed,Pollock and After: TheCritical Debate, Harperand Row, London, 1985.

Kong.34 Christies and Sothebys continue to dominate world sales ofAsian art, although the number of mainland Chinese auction houses con-tinues to grow. Taiwan-based firms developed a specialized role in sellingto mainland Chinese buyers works by Chinese artists that they acquiredon the international market ten years earlier.35

Despite this, the majority of the players buyers, dealers and auctionhouses are still Westerners. This reflects a continued comparative lackof interest by Chinese people themselves in buying works by Chineseartists. In 2006 and 2007, for instance, Sothebys recorded that respect-ively only thirteen per cent and sixteen per cent of sales in theirNew York auctions in those years went to Chinese mainland buyers.36

The massive growth in the rise of Chinese people recorded as middleclass (upwards of 500 million) masks the important question of howthey seek to express their wealthy status in cultural terms and whatsigns of cultural capital they seek out and why. Certainly, as a groupthey are responsible for huge worldwide purchase of luxury goods likedesigner clothes, bags and cars. A survey recently suggested, for instance,that Chinese buyers visiting Britain consume forty-four per cent of allluxury goods sold.37 Perhaps this explains theGoldfishmans ambiguousand rueful smile, avoiding eye contact. It is the smile of the artist whorecognizes that, whatever high-minded principles might motivate hiswork, when it reaches the market it too must meet the requirements ofsystemic luxury goods territory. And the smile indicates that the creativeartists supposed singularity and unrepeatability is finally another adver-tising gambit, as internally contradictory as the Citroen Picasso range ofmass-produced cars.38

Sothebys is also an industrial concern, setting aside the rhetoric of itsluxury art and antique sector interests. It has a global workforce of about1500 staff, two-thirds based in New York and London. It sells shares initself on the New York stock exchange, under the symbol BID, and inMay 2007 had a market capitalization of 3.3 billion dollars. In the UK,Christies, Sothebys, Bonhams and the Fine Art Auction Group werethe four biggest auction companies in 2010, while leading worlddealers and dealing galleries include New York and London-basedAnthony DOffay, Richard Green, Pace-Wildenstein, White Cube andGagosian the so-called powerhouse companies.39

But while there will continue to be a rise in the number of mainlandChina-based buyers, the arts infrastructure there remains weak andsmall-scale. Because this has always been the case, the intervention ofWestern companies expertise and resources was required in order toenable the internationalization and marketization of Chinese art tooccur at all. However, now, in 2013, it may be the case that effectiveWestern control of the Chinese art market could stifle and restrict thefurther emergence of autonomous private organizations on the mainland.The behaviour of the Chinese Communist Partys national and regionalgovernment, its status in China and changing sensitivities to the powerof Western economic and socio-cultural interests acting in or onChinese territory, will also have important effects. The global art worldsystem, then, is always bordering on precariousness as are globaliza-tion processes as a whole.

A parallel account of the development of the global art market forcontemporary Indian art would no doubt reveal important empirical

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34. Robertson, Tseng andSingh, op cit, p 86

35. Ibid, pp 8690; andRobertson, The ArtMarket in Transition, theGlobal Economic Crisisand the Rise of Asia, opcit, pp 457462

36. Robertson, Tseng andSingh, op cit

37. See Yuval Atsmon, et al,The McKinsey ChineseLuxury Consumer Survey,Luxury Without Borders:Chinas New Class ofShoppers Take on theWorld, McKinseyConsumer and ShopperInsights, Mckinsey andCompany, 2012.

38. See Robert Morris, Noteson Art as/and LandReclamation, October 12,Spring 1980, pp 97102.

39. Robertson and Chong,Introduction to Studies inArt Business, in Robertsonand Chong, eds, op cit, pp67; and see DerrickChong, The Emergence ofPowerhouse Dealers inContemporary Art, inHarris, ed, op cit,Globalization andContemporary Art,pp 431438.

differences some bound up with Indias long colonial/postcolonialrelationship with Britain but the same kinds of tensions and issuesthat exist in the case of China are identifiable. The recent Kochi-Muziris Biennale (December 2012March 2013) is an instructiveexample. Internecine political arguments in Kerala state fed by influen-tial local artists scepticism of the event, which they saw as a showcase forextraneous Indian national interests prevented regional governmentfunding.40 Nevertheless, by the opening on 12 December 2012 beliefin, or lip-service paid to, the claimed broad economic and culturalbenefits of the Biennale, Indias first, had won over city, regional andnational politicians, corporate sponsors including BMW (Global Cul-tural Engagement Fund), the Australian High Commission in Delhi,Lyon Biennial, the Goethe-Institut, Brazil, and the Farook Foundationin the United Arab Emirates as well as the Indian national press.41

The Kochi Biennale is a project funded and organized by the KochiBiennale Foundation, a public charitable trust created in 2012. Thestated aim of its artist organizers is to establish a sustainable platformfor contemporary art in India.42 They recognize that the lack of an indi-genous arts infrastructure in India inhibits the internationalization of itsartists works on their own terms, promoting the likelihood thatWestern gatekeepers will again offer their services and expertise in bring-ing these to market. But what might their own terms mean in a globaliz-ing world? Presumably, and at the least, that a fair proportion of theeconomic wealth generated stays in India and benefits Indians directly which surely cannot be said to have been the case with contemporaryChinese art, though because of a complex range of factors.43 Indias capi-talist social order certainly works differently from that of China, though

Logo for the Kochi Biennale, photo: Ed DSouza, Winchester School of Art

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40. Hormis Tharakan, Kochiand Venice: A Tale of TwoCities, in Biennale Leaf,vol 1, no 1, 21 November2012, p 6

41. See Indias First Biennale12/12/12, Kochi BiennaleFoundation, Kerala, 2012,no pagination

42. Ibid, no pagination

43. On the history of the Indiancontemporary art market,see Robertson, Tseng andSingh, op cit, pp 9095.

the consequent social problems developing at speed in both are familiar tothose of us in England or the USA. The Biennales in-house magazine issanguine and honest enough to note that biennales, including that ofKochi, are a kind of journey with no destination. The same might besaid for the global capitalist economy and the range of social orders itwill generate.

The event, with the involvement of ninety artists (half from India) iscompared by its organizers favourably and predictably to theVenice Biennale, due to the world crossroads parallels linking the twocities historical origins and trading significance. Like all biennales, theKochi Biennale will promote, so its organizers claim, cosmopolitanism,critical thinking and better contemporary art.44 Globalization, this indi-cates, is also a set of discursive claims, some amounting to an intellectualsystem. It is a construct and set of working hypotheses concerning howhuman activities across cities, countries, regions and continents havebecome mutually co-existent. The very ideas of the contemporaryand contemporary art are now closely tied to this question of howpeoples lives, activities, meanings, products, societies and beliefs haveacquired this globalized status and appearance of timely mutual co-exist-ence, and mutual co-existence in time ideas fraught with analyticcomplexities.45 But this mutual co-existence (both socially beneficialand potentially deadly), in the case of the global art world system, is fun-damentally a question of the asymmetries that condition the exercise of

Subodh Gupta,What Does the Vessel Contain, That the River Does Not, 2012, mixed media, approximately 21.35 m long,3.15 m wide, 1.10 m deep, Kochi Biennale, photo: Ed DSouza, Winchester School of Art

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44. Tharakan, op cit, p 1

45. See, for example, TerrySmith, What isContemporary Art?,University of ChicagoPress, Chicago, 2009;Terry Smith,Contemporary Art: WorldCurrents, Laurence King,London, 2011; DanielBirnbaum, et al, DefiningContemporary Art: 25Years in 200 PivotalArtworks, Phaidon,London, 2011; andMarshaMeskimmon,Contemporary Art and theCosmopolitanImagination, Routledge,London, 2010.

power and resources held by the gatekeepers, poachers and pests locateddifferentially in the power network. The power and resources are heldoverwhelmingly by Western art world interests, although they must tosome degree be prepared to share some of that power and wealth inorder to extend and develop markets for contemporary art in China,India and elsewhere.46

The notion of contemporary, did not, of course, come into exist-ence only in the last two decades when theories of globalizationbecame popularized and thought to be essential to an understandingof the nature of the world. The contrast between modern and con-temporary had become significant in earlier accounts of the historyof twentieth-century art. By the early 1950s a difference, and then anantagonism, between modern and contemporary art and culture hadalready started to emerge. Modern became associated with atradition in art traceable back to the mid-nineteenth century to aset of canonical paintings and critical ideas that had come to seemeither dated (possibly out of date) or that had actually ended, aconcluded past.47

This much bigger question bears directly and very importantly on theworld, and on the global art world, that emerged after the end of theSecond World War in 1945. The end of that war unleashed a surge ofdecolonization in the still Western-controlled or dominated societiesacross the globe a process that occurred in both relatively peacefuland very violent ways, especially in Asia. The creation of India and thePeoples Republic of China in the first few years after the end of theSecond World War exemplifies this global transformation.48 But thisprocess unfolded at the same time as the US and NATO, on one hand,and the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries, on the other, attemptedto create the totality of a single world system based on two Cold Warcamps. Chinas revolution, its social development and recurrent disastersand crises under Mao Zedong and the Communist Party was also con-ditioned by that systems power network as it extended across theworld, as well as by Chinas complex and changing relationship to theSoviet Union and to Soviet Communism.

The heralding of its Open Door policy in the 1980s had occurred whenMao famously met President Nixon in 1974 an entente designed tocreate a powerful ally, or potential ally, for China against the USSR.Since then, Chinas political and economic relations with the Westernpowers have been under permanent redefinition and reconfiguration,the consequences of which are hard to anticipate.49 Chinas internal pol-itical and legal structures, permanently managed by the Communist Partyattempting to dominate the capitalist forces it has unleashed, remains akey source of potential destabilization. In relation to the growth of theindigenous art market in particular, China suffers from a highlycomplex tax structure and severe restrictions on the export of artworks.50

This undermines the confidence and ability of Western companieswishing and trying to do business there. The ambivalence of theChinese government authorities on the question of the meaning andvalue of contemporary Chinese art its place in China, for the Chinesepeople, and in the world is mirrored by the ambivalence Chineseartists and critics themselves feel about the meaning of their ownlabours and products in a global context.

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46. The term the market is, ofcourse, already anabstracted andideologically highly partialrepresentation of socialactivities and relationships and a way of perceivingthe order of humanrelations and interests. Theclaims that health oreducation provision isessentially a matter ofmarkets indicate thisclearly. (And what, ifanything, is truly outsidethe market, once the fullrange of factors influencingbuyers and sellers is trulytaken into account?)

47. For an early register of thisdistinction, see HaroldRosenberg, The Traditionof the New, Horizon,New York, 1959 and, for abroader discussion,Raymond Williams, WhenWas Modernism?, inWilliams, The Politics ofModernism: Against theNew Conformists, Verso,London, 1989, pp 3135.

48. See, for example, DavidSmith, The Dragon and theElephant: China, India andthe New World Order,Profile, London, 2008.

49. See, for example, Ted CFischman, China Inc: Howthe Rise of the NextSuperpower ChallengesAmerica and the World,Scribner, New York, 2005.

50. Robertson, Tseng andSingh, op cit, p 87

Weiweis sculpture/installation Fountain of Light, exhibited in thedock by Tate Liverpool in 2007 as part of its exhibition The RealThing: Contemporary Art from China, reconstructed one of the greatutopian modern monuments of the early twentieth century VladimirTatlins Model for a Monument to the Third International (1919); theMonument was to have been a colossal sculpture and building housingand symbolizing the institutions fighting for global Communism basedin Russia, the centre of world revolution in 1917. A seven-metre chande-lier of light, Weiweis piece is also a kind of Political Pop from China asatire, a joke, even a celebration perhaps of a revolutionary and egali-tarian spirit that was supposed to have also infused the peasants uprisingin China.

The piece might itself be read as a fetish, or a critique of a fetish, ofrevolutionary art in our counter-revolutionary times. Its Pop credentialsmight be underlined in its own processing of an image Tatlinsmodel was lost in the 1920s and survives only in endlessly reproducedgrainy black-and-white photographs. But Weiweis Fountain of Lightwas itself rendered into an image: by placing the sculpture at some dis-tance on the water, metres from the quay and away from close contactor touch, the object lost most of its three-dimensionality and was experi-enced as an ethereal sign or beacon, the shining on of a light that rep-resents a Socialist transformation unaccomplished in Russia and China.

It might, then, be read to offer a sardonic critique of the lack of free-doms in China that are assumed to be normal in the West for artists, and

AiWeiwei, Fountain of Light, 2007, steel and glass crystals on a wooden base, 700 (h) x 529x 400 cm, photo courtesy Ai Weiwei

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everyone else, under capitalist-democratic systems. Chinese Political Popcrudely but clearly indicates that what are thought of as, or claimed to be,irreconcilable systems can and have in fact often been reconciled and nor-malized. The globalized art world, and the place within it for Asiancountries and artists, encapsulates these reconciled if permanentlyunstable combinations, but perhaps also represents the likely future forall of us, everywhere.

An earlier version of this article was delivered at IE University in Madrid, in February2013, with financial support from the British Council. I would like to thank all thosewho attended and helped to arrange the lecture.

Vladimir Tatlin, Model for a Monument to the Third International, 1919, photograph oforiginal with Tatlin standing next to it, image courtesy private collection and the Bridgeman

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