Art in the Age of Globalization:
Directions in Contemporary Art since 1989

University of Florida, March 2-4, 2006

The way we understand culture changed fundamentally following the collapse of what from 1945-1989 had been known as the Second World. With no geopolitical counterweight, global capitalism has expanded in an unprecedented way and the leverage communism once provided to the decolonizing Third World nations seeking to develop their national cultures has dissolved. Suddenly, culture both consolidated and expanded at the same time. No longer the property of nations or smaller identity-political forms and now long removed from the domain of art and artists, culture has been thoroughly industrialized and everything has become culture. With the success of the culture industries, the oppositions and hierarchies that formerly defined high art and mass culture have been rendered obsolete, as have any remaining distinctions between modernism and contemporary art.

"Art in the Age of Globalization: Directions in Contemporary Art Since 1989" will bring together a select group of art historians, cultural critics, artists and theorists to explore the changing meaning of art in an era of globalization. How do these dramatically new conditions affect the production, exhibition and distribution of art? Can art in the age of globalization still be discussed within the context of art history, or should it be incorporated into the larger domain of cultural (or visual) studies? What roles have the new technologies of mass information and communication played in the ongoing loss of the special status once presumed for art? If culture has come to the foreground throughout the globe, have new possibilities emerged for transnational cross-fertilization of art movements? What are the historical origins of the present transformation? And how have artists responded to this new condition of the leveling of culture?