Anthony Giddens on Globalization

Excerpts from a Keynote Address at the UNRISD Conference on Globalization and Citizenship

The new wave after wave of technological innovation, particularly in the field of communications, has created an ambiguous situation for the art world as artists have begun to recuperate the technologies of the media for their experimentation, creating new works which do not fit any previous definition of an "object d'art". It is hard to market videotape or a computer screen image. The work of artists in these areas not only questions the media and what they are doing to us, but it questions the art world itself and the relation, as it exists today, between art and culture.

Part of the art world has begun retreating in the face of the proliferation of possibilities, calling for a return to the classics, which unfortunately often means a return to canvas or stone, a seige mentality in an ivory tower, turning a blind eye to what is really happening to culture today. Others are calling for a closer association with industry, particularly the media industry, in order to train practitioners and provide the necessary workers for a quick expansion into the new technological areas with an up-dated rerun of the same old media content, meaning, of course, commerce not culture.

Webster's Dictionary defines culture as;

1. The integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief and behavior that depends upon man's capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations,

 2. The customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group. Our social group seems to have divorced the second from the first and allowed a situation to develop where the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits have nothing to do with knowledge and learning, let alone art.

Contemporary culture emerges from a visual sea where very little of what is seen by the public is a product of the arts and it is probable that it will become even less so. It is no wonder that images from publicity have become part of everyman's wardrobe, or that even high fashion items are covered with corporate logos. Publicity has for so long been a part of our visual environment that its images have become part of the way people dress and think.

A good part of the cultural mobilization necessary to change the situation has to be in the field of art education, where supposedly the people who will create our culture are trained. The continent's art schools should be the most natural laboratory for experimentation in the new media, where at least part of Europe's new visual environment can be researched. Not "media schools" whose objective is to train people for the profession with little questioning of content and its social role, where training is technical and the acceptance of the quality and content of the industry total. This seems to be the model that the EU report is to propose for all art schools as a way of increasing their cost effectiveness and redefine their social role. The traditional role of art has been to renew the visual environment, to redefine it for each new age, and through doing so, provide society with models of action. What McLuhan and many others have called the education of perception by the artist. Simply put, art is a form of questioning and the interface between public and art is culture.

The new technologies of the emerging visual environment present a particular challenge to the artist; to adapt these tools to the process of artistic expression, to define their content, to develop the visual language, which will be their principle means of expression. These evolving technologies are offering us a new communications space that will be virtual, international and interactive. It is the role of the artist to help define that space, to make it livable and a part of contemporary culture. This is equally true of television, which has only marginally been tested by the artistic process. While video art exists, with its 30-year history, its recognized practitioners and its presence in a growing number of art schools and museums, its influence is minimal given the enormity of the medium and its impact on society today. Let us not make the same mistake with the network.

Too often art schools and institutions have continued to function in a reactionary manner ignoring those areas of social activity providing the cultural models that people accept. Television, in its early stages, was consciously ignored or even rejected by the art world as something for the masses, unworthy of art. What was happening in society was given other names like "popular" culture, the media, the entertainment industry, words that, in fact, have become walls barring the questioning of art, reserving those spaces for commerce. It is essential to recognize the new world being created around us and recuperate and redirect the tools of communication to make it a better expression of the best of our culture. That is what I would hope the study on the future of art schools in Europe would recognize as a proper goal. That it will not just push schools into the lap of industry with the short-term objective of making them more commercially viable and less of a state burden. If Europe is to ever improve the media environment it seems to deplore, encouraging the art schools to address the problem could be part of a very big step in that direction. It is the work of a generation, and we have already put it off for too long.

Some writers and artists pointed out, that though economic development is unable to control the growth of culture, the market plays an increasingly important role in literary and artistic creativity. Consequently, new ideas in both theoretical and systematic research are vital to a country's literary and artistic development.

The Globalization of Art

The disorder in the contemporary art world is actually a mirror of the larger upheavals being experienced by society at large. The end of the Cold War, the rise of global markets and the emergence of radically new forms of electronic communication have transformed contemporary life in the United States in ways that would have been unimaginable even 10 years ago. It should be no surprise that the art world reflects this state of radical transition.

In fact, one of the most striking developments in contemporary art can be tied directly to these larger social, political and economic currents. Just as the collapse of the Cold War has focused attention on parts of the globe that were overshadowed by the monumental battle between superpowers, so also, the art world has begun to widen its geographic focus. Art professionals can no longer limit their attention to developments in the United States and Europe. Now any serious study of contemporary art must embrace artists from all over the globe. Artists, curators, critics and collectors have begun to resemble cultural nomads, constantly on the move in search of new developments.

As one consequence of the widened field of view, museums today cast a much wider geographic net than they used to.

Art is believed to be a core ingredient in the identity of an individual or a culture, and again we refer to Castells who believes that "in a world of global flows of wealth, power, and images, the search for identity...becomes the fundamental source of social meaning." This artistic search for identity is not independent of the globalizing forces, especially international trade and the use of computer internetworking that has changed the creation, collection, and dissemination of art, specifically folk art.

The Impact of Electronic Media

The emergence of new electronic media reinforces these changes. The electronic highway negates national borders and connects people from opposite parts of the globe.

"Net culture locates itself in the public domain, where creativity is not hemmed in by proprietorial protocols - primarily because it walks new common pathways into existence on the World Wide Web. Net culture then becomes simply that arena, that very public domain, where signals meet and multiply. Any practice with images, sounds, signs, and texts that addresses the fact of networked transmission of symbols using media technologies (including minor media like radio, telephony, postage, signage, graffiti and public address systems) can then be seen as a work of net (worked) culture."

Raqs Media Collective

In a similar vein, artists have begun exploring the ways that new technology can radically alter our concept of self and art. Artist web pages help artists bypass the institutions of the art world in order to introduce their work to a new virtual audience. Many are putting their work on CD-ROMs in order to explore a new order of interactivity. Using newly available technology, they can design art works that allow viewers to follow their own paths and create their own connections and narratives. Meanwhile, museums and galleries are finding that personalized web sites allow them to make art exhibitions available to those who cannot come to them.

As might be expected, these new developments have inspired a spirited debate within the art world as to the value and function of new technology and new media art. Some argue that the virtual presentation of art devalues the viewer's direct contact with the object which has heretofore been the essential aspect of an art experience. Others say that it is a mistake to think of these new digital techniques as new art forms that they simply expand our means for conveying the kinds of ideas that art has always conveyed. Yet others are dubious about the promise of new audiences. They ask, what is the depth of the web art experience? Does art on the web encourage a greater sense of democracy and participation, or does it merely create a new class divide, separating those with access to technology from those without in a far more decisive way than the old, so-called elitist art museums? Does web art require a completely new understanding of aesthetics?

The Changing Nature of Public Art

Questions of audience also lie behind another development in contemporary art, namely the growing interest in public art. While the web promises to create a vast new virtual audience for art, public artists are interested in bringing art to real, localized communities. There has been a definitive change in thinking about public art from the days when it was seen primarily as a decoration or monument plopped in a public space. Contemporary public artists work in a variety of ways. Some create projects as part of "percent for art" programs, in which a percentage of the construction budget for a public or private building is set aside for art. Others are more engaged in temporary projects that take such diverse forms as billboards, artist-designed magazine sections and community projects in which artists work with members of particular communities. These neighborhood projects can range from the creation of a community garden to an art education program that gives disadvantaged children access to art and photography equipment to a joint exploration of local history.

Again there are questions and controversies. What is the nature of the public artist's responsibility to the community in which his or her work is placed? Is a garden or a set of signs really art? Is art beginning to converge too closely with social work?

As might be expected, such radical upheavals in the definition and distribution of art are having an effect on the institutions that present it to the public. One striking recent development is the emergence of the international biennale as a primary mechanism by which artists become known internationally. Biennales are international exhibitions organized every two years in art capitals around the world on some topical theme. For people in the art world, these exhibitions are important meeting grounds where ideas are exchanged, new work is discovered and reputations consolidated.

It is no exaggeration to state that art may be used to literally revamp a city's economy. Let us take as example the cities of Bilbao, the site of the new Guggenheim museum and Kassel, site for the Documenta.

The new Guggenheim Museum has, more through the design of the building by Frank Gehry than by the collection housed inside, elevated the city to international status. It is one of those buildings, in a class with the Sydney Opera House, the Space Needle, and the Eiffel Tower, which, through its distinctive and innovative design, is immediately recognized and represents the city internationally.

The museum is not simply an architectural oddity, however. It enriches the structure of the city by complementing the adjacent historic city center and revitalizing the section of the riverfront where it is located. It also serves as an entrance to the city center, located as it is next to a bridge leading into downtown. This is in fact strengthened by the fact that the bridge was integrated into the design of the building.

The extreme heterogeneity of contemporary aesthetic practices and mediums matched by the plurality of contemporary exhibition spaces (the wall, the page, the poster, the television screen, the Internet) and the very different, even irreconcilable experiences of space and time they imply -necessarily oversteps the limits of an exhibition held »entirely« in Kassel, just as art now oversteps the spatial and temporal but also ideological limits of the »white cube« which constituted the supposedly universal model of aesthetic experience, a model of which documenta, even in its »open« version, is a willing or unwilling offshoot. The universalist model is limited and limiting with respect to the (re)presentation of contemporary aesthetic forms and practices in all their diversity, and also with respect to the local fulfilments of a complex and now »globalized« modernity, which henceforth lacks the »exteriority« of the authentic, the traditional, and the pre- or antimodern despite a lingering nostalgia for exoticism, at best, and colonialism, at worst. The city of Kassel, now located in the center of reunified Germany and seriously affected by the current recession, can appear as the »exemplary« site of an entire range of rifts and displacements, and as the focus of a political and aesthetic inquiry that we have attempted to inscribe in the very structures of documenta X.

The Expanded Role of the Museum

The new focus on globalism is also having its effect on museum organization. The global model is most strikingly articulated by the Guggenheim Museum, which has expanded beyond its base in New York City with branches in Venice, Berlin and Bilbao, Spain. Conceiving of the museum less as a library or archive and more as a network, Guggenheim Museum director Thomas Krens moves art and exhibitions between these international branches. He argues that too many museums keep the bulk of their collections in storage, out of sight of both casual viewers and specialists. The branch system allows him to make a far greater percentage of the museum's vast holdings available to the public.

Krens' new conception of the global museum is a response to the heightened expectations for museums at the close of the 20th century. There is ever-greater pressure for museums to be responsive to their audiences. Financial pressures from donors and competition from other sources of entertainment have forced museums to be much more attentive to the cultivation of visitors. One result of this has been an elevation of the field of museum education. Once considered a peripheral activity, which centered on setting up school tours of museum shows, museum education has become one of the institution's primary purposes.

The Internationalization of Autonomous Art - A story about paranoia

Paranoia, technical optimism, or the desire to be the first onto what's new - the arrival of global art has been anticipated with enthusiasm and fear. Multicultural invasion or "standard" homogenized gallery art? What were we thinking? After a short period of euphoria and speculation we are overcome by ennui, and blas» journalists speak with nostalgic indulgence about the faith they place in the globalization of international contemporary art. The importance of postmodern theory for globalization and net art can hardly be overestimated: semiotics; elite culture sequestering mass culture, questions of originator and viewer; the study of modernism as a cultural expression for an historic configuration of material relationships. Many intellectuals maintain that modernism is highly specific for different cultures. modernism represents values like anglo-eurocentrism, androcentrism, purity of the arts, the claim to universaltruths, etc. - values that postmodernism transgresses. A word like glokal serves as an example for how postmodernistic storytelling on a local level and McLuhan's global community, interplay as attributes to new, media based art. The result is a kind of stenography visualizing how mediated markers like towns, names, visual traditions and the similar effects of migration, communication, and economy circulate in the western globalized institutional concept of art. The only non-local tendency in art is actually the concept of art itself that is seldom seriously questioned.

"...Critical Arts Ensemble are eminent representatives for that branch of the internet culture that lives on the cyberpunk idiom with underground connotations and resistance rhetoric fighting large corporations and the state. Free access for everyone, free access to information, and anti-commercialism. Where is there room for art? Free net art for everyone? The romantic artist is dead, but out of the ashes the equally romantic hacker is born."

In the late twentieth century, Aquille Bonito Oliva, Italian critic and international modern art curator, spoke of globalization as a dominant trend, stating that art as such was in danger and had to resist the concept of anorexia.

As boundaries continue to disintegrate, so too the divisions between the 'high' and 'popular arts', the 'fine arts' and the 'crafts'. Unfortunately there is still much ignorance and misunderstanding to overcome. The fiber arts and textiles for instance, have not been accorded their rightful place in the pantheon of the 'arts' and have been thus far relegated to the arena of the 'artisnal' or 'craft'.