Cosmopolitan Aesthetics

Art in a Global World

Daniel Herwitz

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350075269
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

New arts created in the context of new social realities are impacting our traditional ideas about aesthetics. Art, art markets and aesthetics now interact in ways that demand new forms of thought and revision of old. Cosmopolitan Aesthetics presents the first thorough account of the challenges facing aesthetics today in the light of globalization, introducing the history that underpins them. This is an ideal starting point for anyone looking to better understand 21st century art and aesthetics. Beginning with globalization and the nature of global art markets today, Daniel Herwitz offers new insight into postcolonial aesthetics, colonial legacies, cultural property, the problems of global communication and aesthetic diversity, and the uneasy connection between aesthetics and politics, before providing a crucial grounding in 18th and 19th century aesthetics, with discussion of the three great modern aestheticians David Hume, Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel.

1

Introduction to Globalization

Globalization and Aesthetic Ideas

It has been a central idea guiding the aesthetics of the twentieth century that new art demands new aesthetic ideas. One finds this idea in the writing of the American aestheticians John Dewey, Stanley Cavell, and Arthur Danto; the British thinkers Robin Collingwood and Richard Wollheim; and the French philosophers Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, all of whom produced major aesthetic innovation in the light of modernist, avant-garde, and contemporary art and its boundary-shattering creativity. I myself wrote a book called Making Theory/Constructing Art: On the Authority of the Avant-Gardes some time ago (1993), which endeavored to fit that mold.

But there is also the idea central to the German nineteenth-century philosophers of history G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx that it is the wider domain of new historical, social, political, and economic realities that catalyzes change in both art and aesthetic ideas.

New aesthetic ideas are the result both of new art and of the shifting Hegelian world in which new art arises. Aesthetics arises in conversation with new art, not simply trailing behind it, and in conversation with the culture and society through which that art arises. Indeed, since new aesthetic ideas are part of what drives the making of new art, aesthetic innovation does not merely follow art and reflect on it; new aesthetic ideas are part of what empower the making of art for new times.

This book is not only about the way the profound changes in society, economy, politics, and life that have occurred over the past thirty years thanks to globalization have made their mark on art and on art markets—in ways that demand new aesthetic ideas and revision of older ones—but also about the importance of older ideas, suitably refined, for the understanding of contemporary life and art.

The globalization of the past thirty years has happened at a velocity perhaps unparalleled in history, affecting every aspect of life.

Fordist capitalism—the form of manufacturing and industrial production that was in place during the first half of the twentieth century, the capitalism of the assembly line, and the film studio—has given way to globally extended modes of production in which an automobile or computer’s parts are fabricated in Bangladesh, Brazil, and Arizona; assembled in Texas; and designed in Silicon Valley by a company whose corporate headquarters may be located (for tax purposes!) in Ireland, Luxembourg, or the Channel Islands.¹

Families that two generations ago would have only had to drive twenty miles at most to congregate at church, for weddings, funerals, Thanksgiving meals, Boxing Day, or other occasions now have children living in Vancouver, Seattle, Denver, London, Singapore, Shanghai, and São Paulo. They communicate thanks to Skype, WhatsApp, and Twitter.

When people wish to find romantic companions, they tend to go online to various dating websites and take it from there. When they divorce, they do so thanks to law firms with branches in New York, Los Angeles, Beijing, and Doha. When they wish to shop, they go online and purchase goods whose origins are as complicated as their own lives. When they wish to visit their parents, they get on planes and change time zones. My wife, child, and Pomeranian dog live and work in Cape Town, South Africa, while I teach in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This book has partly been written on planes.

This is not merely true of the middle classes but the poor and disenfranchised, whose families may be split between Syria and Norway, Guatemala and the United States thanks to ancient immigrant desire to improve one’s life elsewhere, or the pressures that turn citizens into refugees.

Globalization has also significantly shifted the mode of production from manufacturing to service industries, health care, and investment banking, generating new kinds of wealth that are as profound as those of the gilded age when the mega-rich emerged in America thanks to railroads (Vanderbilt, Crocker), oil (Getty, Rockefeller), steel (Carnegie), real estate (Astor), and banking (Mellon). The emergence of wealth has been of the greatest importance for the history of the arts since it is these persons, and before them the Third Estate of Europe, the Medici of Florence, and Doges of Venice not to mention the Roman Popes, who were the ones who commissioned art for their villas, built the churches and palaces. In our time, new wealth is as liable to emerge in Russia, China, India, and Singapore as it is in Europe or America, leading to decentered art markets and a global system of art production.

The world has become more homogeneous thanks to globalization, with everyone wanting the same Nike sneakers and iPhones. But ours is also a world of conversation and politics around the recognition of diversity. This double condition of enhanced conformity and enhanced recognition of diversity should be pressed. As the world grows smaller thanks to new technologies, including relatively affordable jet travel, social media, and the like, two things happen. First, a kind of flattened English-speak takes over—call it the prose of neoliberalism. People across the world are forced to learn English—an English of declarative sentences, blogs, and tweets—draining the English language of vocabulary and grammatical complexity. Would that it were not so! But sadly, the subjunctive mood is much attenuated in use—and with it the daily recognition (since the subjunctive is the mood of uncertainty or possibility) of Socratic skepticism that is the better part of humane intelligence. Do not doubt, we declare. We declare in blogs, tweets, text messages, e-mails, on social media sites. Global English serves this aggressive politics of assertion. It is the language of making deals, asserting facts, or, equally, alternative facts (meaning propaganda). Such communication leaves little space for the recognition of the diversity of persons who are communicating across the globe nor, for the uncertainty, is it the better part of wisdom to bring to the understanding of diverse peoples: open ears rather than dominating bombast. The chapters on Cosmopolitanism (Chapters 6 and 7) are about this.

And yet, there is probably greater knowledge and interest in human diversity today than ever before in history. And greater recognition of its importance as a source of knowledge, a human reality requiring negotiation, a conundrum for politics. Persons across the globe experience the realities of globalization in profoundly different ways.² A worker in Bangladesh earning subsistence wages from a US or Chinese corporation or a factory associated with mega-production has a quite different view of globalization than the person who buys a shirt in a mall, happily at a discount. With inequality spiraling, virulent nationalism raising its ugly face, and automation rusting the manufacturing sectors of the United States, leaving people out of jobs and stranded, many people find globalization disastrous. In its search for cheap labor, globalization picks up new people then discards them when conditions become unstable or a cheaper yet efficient workforce is found. A consequence of the disenfranchisement of the working class is the politics of resentment, and, with it, the return of nationalism, sometimes racist, anti-immigrant, seeking national pride through closure of the global, something about as easy to do as to stop breathing.

And so, the mixed sword of globalization leads to economic growth in parts of the world that have never seen it while abandoning others in search of cheap labor elsewhere or for political reasons, disenfranchising those who have only just emerged from centuries of impoverishment. It leads to not only enhanced human recognition but also greater exploitation and nationalist contempt of those in distant parts of the world.

Globalization has in certain respects vitalized art markets, which are on the rise in many parts of the world. With their rise, access and opportunity for formerly marginalized parts of the globe are expanded. Art markets (and this will be explored in Chapter 2) continually seek new products and search the globe for them. This leads to enhanced inclusivity, which is a good thing. It also leads to problems of branding, homogeneity, and voice, which we will turn to in that chapter. As the super-rich seek liquid capital, flipping it for quick profit in a rising market, or hanging on to it as investment, often in some tax-free region of the world, prices soar, galleries open, entire markets arise in places in the world where they would have been unimaginable forty years ago. These markets are linked in an endless system of biennales and art fairs through global auction houses and museum acquisitions.

And yet a great deal of the world suffers what I would like to call market insufficiency in their cultural markets (again the topic of the next chapter). Insufficiency means an excess of supply (artists) over infrastructure (galleries, museums, print media), human capital (critics, art dealers), and consumers (museums, collectors). This is the condition of supply trumping not only demand but also the capacity of local markets to acquire and circulate “goods” (artwork). It forces art in the direction of disembodied, global markets and consumers, in a way that can mitigate the power of art to bespeak local place and people who disappear from its radar screen thanks to the global buyer. This continues a cycle of inequality framed in the days of colonialism, about which this book will have a great deal to say. These conditions were extraction of goods and claiming of cultural objects from the colonies to the nations of the colonizers, thus enriching European and American resources at the expense of native resources. This colonial fault line has been retained in globalization where resource-poor places end up contributing to first-world markets in a way that continues to drain culture as well as raw materials from former colonies to well-resourced nations. Added to the mix is often a lack of state funding for art and culture in resource-middling or poor nations. (This will be taken up in Chapter 2.)

A Very Brief History of Globalization

European globalization predates the late twentieth century by nearly a millennium. In 1260, Marco Polo, the first to write about his travels (although not the first Venetian to reach Asia by ship), set sail for the Orient from Venice, that sea-fearing colloquy of tiny islands connected by bridges that was for a thousand years an empire whose ships ruled the Mediterranean. Marco Polo reached China and remained for twenty-four years, writing (while imprisoned thereafter in Genoa) of a wealth of spices, silks, and treasures that Europe has never seen before, nor even dreamed. His father and uncle had already established trading relations with Asia. Without these initial gestures of globalization, Europe would have had no corn, potato, or tomato, and practically no spices. Salt was so rare in Europe that it was said a man was “worth his salt,” meaning worthy of it. Marco Polo visited the Silk Road, already a long-standing form of Chinese globalization, for China invented globalization, along with firecrackers and social philosophy well before Europe. This vast trading route stretched from China through the deserts of the Indian subcontinent into what is now Afghanistan and Iran, and then into the Middle East, and along it goods were bartered, traded, and transported.

Venice was the first explorer of the seas, but in the fifteenth century the ships of Spain, Portugal, and Genoa began their transatlantic voyages with the goal of reaching China by sea. Columbus famously thought he’d arrived there when his three ships bumped into what is now Santo Domingo, and so accidentally discovered the Americas. Later, in 1612, the English landed at what would become Jamestown, Virginia, with the hope of navigating a land route across the continent of North America to China. They had, of course, no idea of the size of the landmass onto which they’d secured their toehold.

A few years before Columbus, the Portuguese sailor Bartolomeu Diaz steered his ship down the West Coast of Africa with the intention of finding a route around that continent toward the East. He was the first European to discover the tip of Africa, or what would be called the Cape of Good Hope, although he named it Cape of Storms because of the fierce tides that would over time wreck many a sailing ship. His discovery (which was likely predated in ancient times by the Phoenicians and others) proved that there could be a way to get to Asia around Africa, something soon thereafter accomplished by Vasco da Gama who in 1497–9 managed to reach India by sailing around the African continent.

Thus, the great game of mercantile capitalism arose in early modern Europe, the seeking of trade routes by sailing ship. Over time, this led to the settling of foreign lands, the domination of native populations, and the extraction of goods to be sent back to Europe. Colonialism took hold in the ensuing centuries: the expansion of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Also Available from Bloomsbury
• Title Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• How to Use This Book
• 1 Introduction to Globalization
• 2 The Global Art World Today: Prospects and Problems
• 3 Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism
• 4 Cultural Property and Aesthetic Synergy
• 5 Meaning, Medium, and History in Art
• 6 Taste in Its Eighteenth-Century Context
• 7 Aesthetic Judgment from a Cosmopolitan Perspective
• Notes
• Bibliography and Suggestions for Further Reading
• Index
• Copyright Page