Contemporary Art

Reluctant Nomads: Biennial Culture and Its Discontents

“…1), a 1995 installation of one million passport replicas stacked like a minimalist sculpture and intended to recall the would-be immigrants who have been turned away at Finland's strictly guarded borders. 23 For Stallabrass, the work exemplifies biennial culture's privileging of mobility over national determination and "global capital" over "local concerns" 24 -an argument that constructs a misleading, but also unwittingly revealing binary opposition. For let us agree (as I do) that international art exhibitions tend to perpetuate (while paradoxically condemning) a myth of unfettered mobility that validates the more pernicious world-is-flat, end-of-history, free-trade freefor-all underpinnings of the neo-liberal globalization.…”

What is a Global Field? Theorizing Fields beyond the Nation-State

“…26Art biennials in this context can be defined as periodic group exhibitions that aspire to represent the state of international contemporary art (Boecker, 2002: 422). As several scholars have noted, since the 1980s, contemporary art biennials have proliferated all over the world, with new biennials in places in Asia, Latin America or Africa (eg Quemin, 2002; Stallabrass, 2004). Yet beyond diffusion, they have also come to form a partially integrated global institutional circuit that heightens transcontinental flows of intermediaries, artists and artefacts (Bydler, 2004: 85–169; Buchholz, 2013).…”

The Art of Civilization

“…Production targets state how the artist-on-retainer is to produce: too much stuff depresses the price, too little and the gallery can't stock the four big yearly art fairs. 119 The art trader negotiates with museums directors and state commissioners, works in tandem with professional speculators and auction houses, sometimes trades places with museum curators, all to insure an artist's sustained bankability. The result is that so-called blue-chip artists nowadays trade at values between sixty and a hundred times what a successful artist in the eighteenth century could expect.…”