Since February 19th, 1996
in the 14th International Congress for Aesthetics, Slovenia
On Problems on World Art -- Arts and Cultural Engineering after Modern Art
Introduction
Microsoft Windows has now become to an operating system of the "global standard" in the world of personal computer. Other OS's like NEC98 of Japan and AMIGA have disappeared. Even the Apple Macintosh has also come to be put in the considerably severe position. Any software or computer program will not be able to survive without "compatibility" with Windows.
The relation between software and OS is interesting when we think about problems of Culture. Software does not work if there is no OS. If the more softwares works on the same mainstream OS, both the softwares and the OS become the more poweful.On the other hand, softwares that work only on Macintosh, for example, become weaker in its influence and quickly disappear.
When a program is transplanted for the sake of Windows, it will lose its real advantages which are not compatible with Windows. Therefore, these advantages never appear into the market. In this way, dominant OS becomes even more dominant and an unpopular OS becomes even more unpopular and so on. This is the reverse fact of so-called "global standard".
The same thing happens in culture in general. First of all, our world turns into more and more borderless and globalized situation. English (more precisely, American English) is becoming the standard "OS" there. Therefore, in an international conference for example, most papers are written in this OS called English, and only discourese compatible with English can circulate over the world.
The culture which has such global "compatiblility" has a great advantage. It can creates the open network and produces new culture. However, at the same time, we should remember that there remains different cultures which can never be reduced to the global standard culture.
It is closely related to the problem of translation. When a text written in a certain language is translated into a different language, something essential in it might be removed from there. In the domain of culture and art in recent years, we can observe the similar phenomenon.
However, I don't mean to defend the autonomy of each individual culture and criticize the unification of culture here. I don't believe that each partibular culture has such a discrete structure as multiculturalism asserts. I think culture resembles rather a phenomenon of meteorological or fluid dynamic field.
In the past, the eye of the West as the authority was necessary for any cultural activitiy in the Non-European area, if it is to be admitted as "art" . However,the West or English becomes only one standard now. And the member of that cultural area is not necessarily European and white man. In fact, the situation is much better than before in this regard. However, I think that it is still important to pay more regard to the various phenomena that have missed from that monopolizing "OS".
1. Disappearance of "the place" of Art
Today, the environment surrounding Art is getting more and more complex and chaotic. As the result of globalization and the development of media technologies, the western modernity has lost its hegemony and can no longer be the universal standard. In other words, the basis of Modern Art is now largely undermined.
After it enters in the 20th century, every art may be said that it has been in chaos for a long time. However, I am not referring to Art as a substancial cultural unit. It is "the place (topos) called Art" that is beginning to become more and more ambiguous and chaotic now. Each system of the various discourses , for example, aesthetics, art history, or art critique and also each institution that supports those disourses, for example the curriculum of university, art museum, art journalism, cultural administration is now being lost in this huge chaos.
I do not want to mouth the question that has been repeated too many times: "What is Art?" Rather, I want to indicate a point where such an essentialist question about the "real art" becomes totally ineffective, by presenting "the disappearance of the place called art" .
In other words, the former "crisis of art" has occurred only inside the framework of the dominant cultural system of the West in the modern age. It is needless to say that the whole network of the cultural systems like that can no longer be regarded as a fixed structure. Non-European people like us have acquired the specific cultural engineering of "the modern art" and its discursive constitution just as we have learned the Western-style technology of architecture or military system. To put it differently, "art" is just an invented idea of the western modernity.
However, it is also needless to say that we cannot speak of "art" itself. The art is a knot of plural ideas and systems, and it is a part of the modernity as a whole. That is, it is linked with the modern-european ideas such as "humanity", "subject", "nation", "liberty" and so on, and also playing an important role in all of the social system and various physical basis such as museums, schools, journalism and so on.
It is not meaningless to say that "art" is not possible withtout these ideas or physical basis. This simple fact that "Art is nothing but a part of the specific cultural type called European modernity" should be reminded and examined again and again. And the reason why it has spread even outside Europe is explained by a natural fact that the history of these several hundred years has been the process of the expansion of cultural hegemony of this European modernity.
The new chaos that we are faced at present is brought about when the European modernity is beginning to weaken its overwhelming power. However, it does not mean that the historic influence of modernity abated necessarily. Rather, on the contrary, it is the effect of the dispersion and self-dismantling emerging from the inside of the cultural modenity itself, while its economic, political,military, cultural and technical systems have too much succeeded.
First of all, the media technologies and the the extensive allocation of knowledge in the modern age brought forth the global sharing of information and knowledge and the so-called global society in which each area of the earth collaborated and linked closely has come to be produced.
On the other hand, the independence and the establishment of a new nation from the colonial controls in Asia, Africa, the Central and South America which has happened since the middle of this century have fortified the position of the cultural localism. Furthermore, the cultural difference in terms of race and religion has become a big problem once again in the world after the cold war. And, as soon as the multi-dimensional coexistence of different cultures comes to be requested, in order to avoid the collision and opposition between cultures, the position of cultural relativism that admits the relative nature of each cultural value has come to fortify its influence still more.
2. World Art
A big change is breaking out in the domain of Art in this situation. The biggest thing is that the various cultural activities that belong to various cultures and were not included in the category of Art so far have rushed into the "place" of Art like a snowslide.
In their book "The traffic in culture" (1995, University of California Press), George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers pointed out the situation in which the object of conventional art reserch and anthropological reserch has deeply intermingled each other and cannot be distinguished.
The non-Occidental art such as craftwork and decoration has long been put outside Art, and treated as objects of the ethnology instread. Those cultural products were to be exhibited not in art museums but in historical or ethnographical museums.
However, in recent years, such situation has been drastically changed. Ethnography or anthropology museum is no longer a place for classifying, arranging or representing other civilizations seen by their ruler. Art museum is becoming to illuminte non-European arts in recent years. The interest regarding the meaning and idea of the non-Occidental art have risen rapidly among critics,scholars, curators, and anthropologists.
Furthermore,such movement includes the hybridization of Art and pop culture. In the cultural area which is alienated from the education of the western high-culture, pop Culture has provided a new possibility to express the particular type of experience in the non-Western world. It transforms pop objects and presents new forms of works differed from the occidental style of "pop art".
I try to explain this situation with the term "world art" that was borrowed from the concept called "world music" in the domain of music. The concept of "world music" is not indicating so-called folk music or ethnic music. It is indicating the new phenomenon in the structure of music that became the resources which is separated from the original place and circulating in the global market by being mediated by the music industry and media. For instance, the reggae music is a global world music and it is the phenomenon depending on the trafic in culture that consist of the global music media. Furthermore world music might form the new music type which no one could expect or imagine, and be combined with other music forms and different cultural tradition like a virus.
Therefore, world music and world art cannot be explained by the two dominant attitudes that have been used when classifying the non-Occidental art so far. They are a romantic and a progressionistic attitude. The former is the one that tries to find out the characteristic mind and beauty of "native" that cannot be reduced to others (for example primitivism and Japonisme) , and the latter is one that treats them as unmaturity for they are merely in the process of modernization (for example, the eye of Europe toward American paintings and Japanese paintings in the late 19th century).
3. Art World
What kind of viewpoint can explain this phenomenon of world art then? For that, it is useful to borrow the well-known concept of "Art World", although it may be a little confusing.
The term called "art world" is used by American aestheticians like Arthur Danto or George Dicky at first, but came to be used in various meanings in various scenes today. However, it is common to be indicating the social system such as gallery, art museum, critic and journalism, and also the cultural and historical context with which things would be authorized as art works.
World music consists of the global expansion of music industry including record, radio and television, the existence of the mass who enthusiastically consumes music, musicians who are moving all over the world and music journalism, world art consists of the environment of various cultural devices and physical bases; that is, it requires the existence of the international art world as an operation system.
However, in the past, the conventional "international" art worldÄ@consisted of the dominant cultural modernity in which European people learned and acuired what is art and what is not. And, the regional art world in non-Occidental area exsited by imitating it and was subject to it. Speaking about music once again, a musician is able to get the reputation of "international" quality, for example, only when he or she gets a prize at the competition of the West. The same can be said in the case of international film festivals and literary awards.In short, "international" meant nothing but the "Western" in "universal" disguize.
However, the postcolonialism which has passed throuth postmodernism is criticizing this kind of unhistorical fiction of the "international" art world. And, it resists the viewpoint of "real art" or "the art of mainstream" that the Occidental art world has forced and is trying to make new possibilities. However, it does not mean that there will appear innumerable local arts which cannot be tanslated each other everywhere in the world. Because both art and art world are not able to exist in the place which was separated from globalization in the cultural modernity. In other words, they can never exist without the institution such as art schools, collection of literature, art museums, exhibitions, art journalism and so on, even if their scale is small.
Furthermore, the multiculturalist viewpoint concerned with such an alternative art world is the one that appeared from the inside of the huge art world of the West which has an excessive heterogenetity inside it. Therefore, we can say such a pluralistic view of art world is originally included in the development of the Western modern art.
The mainstream of the art in this century has consisted of the modernism and avantguardism. While the modernism has concentrated on pure visuality, avantguardism has tried to expose the institutional and fictious nature of Art, and tried to open the space of new imaganation by destroying it.
Needless to say, the concept of "art world" is showing the viewpoint that conceives Art as a cultural system and do not attribute it with the universal concept like "beauty". And, such a viewpoint that conceives art as an institutional system rose in history after "the fountain" of Marcel Duchamps and the subsequent avantguardism.
There are many foreign artists who gathered from various areas like Slav or South America in the movement of dadaism and surrealism. Also, in New York avantguardism of the 60's, there were immigrants from many foreign countries including African and Asian in the center of the activity. Here we can already find the sprouting of world art.
The large scale move of population like immigrants and refugees in the 20th century and the diversification of the race group in advanced countries seem to be an indispensable condition for world art. Those exiles who have lost their home countries and own languages have been the most radical artists in the contemporary art scene.
Since the 60's we cannot find the mainstream in the contemporary art. The art world became more mixed and complex, entering to the multidimensional situation like the delta area that the various vein of water were encircled like the net of a spider. While "the fountain" of Duchamps which is a urinal turned upside down still contains the shadow of the privileged subject of "Westerner and male" distinguished by the geographic position and the gender, art after Andy Worhol has lost such a hegemony of the Occidental tradition. Anything can be an art work and anyone can be an artist.
However, it is needless to say that "not everything can become an art" in fact. It always depends on the golobalized art world and the dominant operationg system in it. But, that "anything can be an art work" means that "everything can be an art work but only in part" at the same time. And, in this case, art itself is nothing but a vacant and temporal place in which the struggle of various interpretation transforms it rapidly. The flood of the world art produces the struggle and the mixed blood of culture into the [prescriptive] position of the space of the Western art. It is the hybrid art including the crossbred vector that is going beyond it to various direction.
Conclusion
The globalization in the world after the cold war is causing the collapse of the framework of the conventional art and culture, and a flood of the world art which contains various local condition. The situation resembles to the phenomenon of the quantitative increase and multipolarization of the knowledge associated with the development of media technologies and the diffusion of the Internet. In either case, the opportunity of the organization and the transmission of knowledge sensationally increased.
By the way, what will it bring about to the resident of the conventional art world such as a curator, artist, critic and scholar in this situation? Needless to say, this is very inconvenient situation for the experts who live in the world of Art. Because his knowledge and the framework on which he depends would become little useful and he will be forced to evaluate an unskillful painting or what they think is almost rubbish. And the artworks considered important for political reasons -- they are created by an ethnic minority, and so on -- are not few.
However, this seems to me not so bad, but more comfortable and healthier condition than before. If the global art is exploited by commercialism and politics, we can consider the situation positively.
Thereupon, the most important thing is always to pay attention to the outside of the dominant OS in our contemporary culture. In other words, I am suggesting the strategy to get different OS's mixed there. "Art" is not a cause to make a ceitain artifact, but just an "excuse" or a theater where different standards encounter. Art would be a playground of the fight of the different discourses.
If we think this way, as the diffusion of the internet, the pluralistic condition of art will not be necessarily seen as the deplorable situation. For the artists and intellectuals in the conventional art world, it may be a big challenge. Because we are living in an interesting era when the conventional framework and concepts stop functioning, both as aesthetics and as the theory of culture.