Global Art History

Early modern India was an economic core region producing manifold textiles for export. During the sixteenth century a new customer entered the stage and expanded its influence from the city of Goa – Portugal. From early times, the Portuguese had bought and commissioned textiles, among them large embroideries from Bengal and Gujarat, which are the focus of this study. By providing European prints as models for the professional local embroiderers they created a novel product that was successful in Portugal and beyond throughout the seventeenth century. The textiles were deemed valuable and rare enough to be included in different travel accounts, letters and inventories, enabling us to trace their place of production, their transportation to Europe and their reception. Their intricate iconographies reflect political problematics of the time and shed light onto the intercultural circumstances of Portuguese colonial life. Barbara Karl is Curator of Textiles and Carpets at the MAK – Museum für Angewandte Kunst/Gegenwartskunst in Vienna. WEITERE INFORMATIONEN UND DOWNLOADS FINDEN SIE UNTER WWW.BOEHLAU-VERLAG.COM. böhlau verlag ges.m.b.h. & co. kg, wiesingerstrasse 1, 1010 wien, österreich, t: + 43 1 330 24 27-0, f: + 43 1 330 24 32-77 info@boehlau-verlag.com, www.boehlau-verlag.com | wien köln weimar

Arte não Europeia: conexões historiográficas a partir do Brasil 

Claudia Mattos Avolese e Patricia D. Meneses (organizadoras)

Ao trazer a primeira coletânea de textos dedicados a temas de história da arte não europeia ao público brasileiro, este livro apresenta uma fascinante amostra de pesquisas realizadas em um contexto expandido, capaz de alcançar além das narrativas tradicionais da disciplina e observar seus objetos de estudo como parte integrante de uma rede móvel e complexa de interações espaçotemporais. Abordando as artes pré-colombiana e ameríndia, africana e japonesa, os textos trazem importantes debates teórico-metodológicos que acompanham o processo de expansão do campo de estudos na atualidade. Nesse sentido, este volume pretende ser uma introdução às possibilidades postas por uma nova história da arte, crítica e mais inclusiva e, acima de tudo, servir de inspiração para futuros pesquisadores interessados nessa área de conhecimento hoje.

The exhibition COMMON GROUND #3 brings together the works of six artists who call different places on the Indian subcontinent their home – or one of many homes: Yogesh Barve, Ragini Bhow, Nihaal Faizal, Oliver Husain, Poonam Jain and Tara Kelton. It explores the concept of “common ground” as a space of shared knowledge and basis for common understanding. The focus is on the familiar: in their works, the artists deal with the universal topic of “home” and play with memories of everyday situations and familiar objects from domestic life. The artists investigate constructions of privacy, home and how the medium of script may create a sense of community.

The question of „common ground“ means the discursive act and the negotiation of a common knowledge space. The knowledge space that comes into being inside Kleine Humboldt Galerie brings together Hum- boldt University’s institute of South Asian Studies and the institute of Art History and Visual Studies, to approach the phenomenon of the spatial turn. The advent of the digital era, with its worldwide networks, has called for a rethinking of the spatial context of artworks and their presentation. How can contemporary art be described outside the construction of national art histories, and the dichotomy of centre and periphery? How can new relationships between the local and the global be understood in times of migrating artworks and artists? How can one look at art from a translocal perspective? These questions were raised and examined in the exhibition and in the comprehensive accompanying programme.

Abstract:

    This text  denotes some  of the more relevant characteristics of what makes global art now days.  The roles of the institutions that are affected by this adjective of globalization taking on account other characteristics important in the art itself in order to make exhibitions, this also changes the identity and the relations established by the individuals and the institutions.

Ce texte vise à montrer la problématique des opérations politiques de la mobilité à l'intérieur du système international de l'art contemporain, soit à l'intérieur des réseaux économique, symbolique et transculturel proposés par les biennales internationales, la communauté translocale de galeries, la nouvelle géographie des institutions culturelles, les musées, las organisations et les cadres ainsi que les processus d'internationalisation de l'art contemporain des années quatre-vingt.

A Good Artist and a Bad Art Dealer, or Vice Versa. On Jan Lebenstein’s Relations with New York’s Galerie Chalette

The contacts that Jan Lebenstein had in 1959-74 with the Galerie Chalette run by Artur and Madeleine Lejwa are discussed. The reconstruction and interpretation of those turbulent relations between Jan Lebenstein and the gallery were conducted on the grounds of the documents from the Gallery’s archive that are currently at the American Art Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. The used sources had previously remained unknown to Polish researchers. 
Jan Lebenstein may have met Artur Lejwa in the spring and summer of 1959 during the trip of the latter to Poland. The middleman in the meeting was most likely Ryszard Stanisławski, who trough the Office of Foreign Trade organized export of Polish art to Western Europe and the United States. The artist started constant cooperation with the Galerie Chaletter only once he had migrated, namely when extremely successful following the Biennale of the Young in Paris, he settled down in France. In September 1961, the painter signed an exclusivity contract with Lejwa for trading his art in the US.  This was the time when works on the artist’s monographic exhibition in the United States had begun. The first problems in the cooperation arose already in February 1962. The artist wanted then to sell paintings bypassing the Gallery, this causing the dealer’s protest. The dispute also covered the range of the activities of the dealer representing Lebenstein in France, namely Jacquesa Lacloche. Despite these difficulties, the opening of the artist’s exhibition, planned for March 1962, was held at the Gallery as scheduled, while the painter graced it with his presence. Lebenstein’s visit to the USA, meant by Lejwa as help to the marketing activities he was involved in, proved to be a failure. Lebenstein apparently (as reported by Lejwa) showed up in some company and having drunk, he behaved inappropriately. Upon the artist’s return to Paris, the cooperation became even harder. The dealer did not inform the artist about the sales of his works, while Lebenstein did not fulfill the Contract commitment of supplying a definite number paintings. In July 1963, Lebenstein decided to breach his Contract with the Gallery. For several months Lejwa ignored the correspondence on the topic, that is why in 1965 the case ended up in court. For the next decade the court failed to rule, while Lebenstein’s career was in stalemate. The conflict was resolved by the agreement between the Parties only in 1974, already after Lejwa’s death. 
Although the figure of the ‘bad art dealer’ as well as the aversion to laws ruling in the art market were reiterated in Lebenstein’s statements, these have never before been confronted with the artist’s personal experience and the fact that the litigation with his former representative went on for over a decade. The purpose of the article, however, is not a black-and-white accounting for Lebenstein’s dislike of American art dealers. A critical analysis of the sources allow to find nuances in the dichotomy the artist was building: good artist – bad art dealer. In the course of the litigation Lejwa accused Lebenstein of cheating the French government over taxes, of not complying with the Contract as for the annual number of works he was to supply to the Gallery, and finally that any business cooperation with him was difficult due to his alcoholism. However, other Polish artists (e.g. Wojciech Fangor) cooperating with Artur Lejwa highly appreciated the dealer’s professionalism and logistics skills, Lebenstein being the only Pole in open conflict with the Galerie Chalette’s owner. The presentation of the course of the events and arguments of both parties inevitably questions  Lebenstein’s version of the story and makes one perceive it as an attempt at a quasi-romantic narrativzation of history.

En una cultura visual marcadamente colonialista y excluyente, la entrada del arte contemporáneo periférico en los circuitos canónicos nos arroja las siguientes preguntas sobre la mesa: ¿qué motivó que este arte 'otro' entrara en los circuitos de exposición occidentales? ¿por medio de qué vías  se ha vuelto accesible dicha forma de alteridad sensible? ¿la búsqueda de un verdadero equilibrio en la cartografía internacional del arte contemporáneo encuentra su correspondencia en el equilibrio de las políticas de representación de la diversidad cultural, o la integración de la periferia, paradójicamente, ha servido más bien para perpetuar y fortalecer el poder del centro? ¿qué queda del Otro, y en dónde, cuando es representado? ¿la incorporación de la periferia cultural (de los extremos de Occidente) al mainstream, es parte del proyecto de estetización de lo subordinado? ¿la inclusión de los Otros debe ser vista como una victoria del proyecto poscolonial, como la expresión cultural más eficaz de la descolonización, o bien como una nueva forma de domino intercultural mediada por el control de los mecanismos de exhibición de las identidades y por la gestión de las políticas de representación de la diversidad cultural? ¿en qué medida puede la estética implicarse en este juego de tensiones para mediar el desequilibrio entre las diferentes culturas? ¿será capaz la teoría estética (a través de una nueva delimitación geoepistemológica de sus fronteras) de utilizar la escenificación global de la pluralidad del arte contemporáneo como un verdadero motor epistemológico que disminuya la estandarización de las identidades y la absorción de las diferencias culturales? ¿tienen las prácticas artísticas y la visualidad crítica un papel ineludible en el proceso de consecución de una verdadera condición poscolonial de la cultura global?

En este libro se aborda el contexto de una situación cultural que describiremos como la condición poscolonial del proceso de internacionalización del arte contemporáneo, en la cual el campo de acción de la estética parece requerir unas nuevas delimitaciones y unas nuevas fronteras epistemológicas que desdibujen la separación que se instaló, impelida por una lectura posmodernista de la modernidad colonial, entre los sujetos, sus subjetividades y los procesos de estetización, apropiación y politización de la realidad.

In: Newall, D. (ed.) Art and its global histories: a reader, Manchester University Press, 2017, pp. 50-112.

This section of the reader, published in conjunction with the Open University module Art and its global histories, includes primary texts and four critical essays related to the global history of art in the period 1350-1550.

This book examines contemporary artistic practices since 1990 that engage with, depict, and conceptualize history. Examining artworks by Kader Attia, Yael Bartana, Zarina Bhimji, Michael Blum, Matthew Buckingham, Tacita Dean, Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica, Omer Fast, Andrea Geyer, Liam Gillick and Philippe Parreno, Hiwa K, Amar Kanwar, Bouchra Khalili, Deimantas Narkevičius, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Walid Raad, Dierk Schmidt, Erika Tan, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Art, History, and Anachronic Interventions since 1990 undertakes a thorough methodological reexamination of the contribution of art to history writing and to its theoretical foundations. The analytical instrument of anachrony comes to the fore as an experimental method, as will (para)fiction, counterfactual history, testimonies, ghosts and spectres of the past, utopia, and the "juridification" of history. Eva Kernbauer argues that contemporary art—developing its own conceptual approaches to temporality and to historical research—offers fruitful strategies for creating historical consciousness and perspectives for political agency. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, historiography, and contemporary art.

online here: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-mono/10.4324/9781003166412/art-history-anachronic-interventions-since-1990-eva-kernbauer and here: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/50518

In April 1968, ten months after the Arab defeat of the 1967 June War, Aref El-Rayess’s Dimaʾ wa Hurriyya (Blood and Freedom) opened to the public in the exhibition hall of the L’Orient newspaper headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon. The 5th of June, or, The Changing of Horses, a realist mural painting on canvas, was the exhibition’s centerpiece. With this artwork, El-Rayess declared his commitment to national liberation and socialist revolution. The Changing of Horses was presented and received as an allegory of political commitment, but the slips, silences, and repetitions in the public reception point to its excessive, disturbing, and fundamentally uncanny character. In Commitment in the Artistic Practice of Aref El-Rayess, the first comprehensive study of the work, Natasha Gasparian weaves together a social art history from the artist’s writings, exhibition reviews, guestbook comments, personal correspondence and testimonies, as well as social, political, and aesthetic shifts, particularly as they related to the debates on commitment (iltizam) in the aftermath of the June 1967 war. By attempting to reconstruct this history of the artwork and tracing the caesuras in the discourse around it, Gasparian exposes the social antagonism that is repressed and obfuscated in the idealized narrative sustained by El-Rayess and his audiences. She argues that the oversight in the reception—the critics’ and audiences’ inability to see—attests to the delay in grasping the work historically and signals its avant-gardism.

"The Contemporary Art Scene in Syria. Social Critique and an Artistic Movement" focuses on the expanding contemporary art scene in Syria, particularly Damascus, during the first decade of the twenty-first century and considers it within the history of committed and engaged art in the country. The 2000s were characterized by a high degree of experimentation as young artists began to work with artistic media that were new in Syria, such as video, installation and performance art. They were rethinking the role of artists in society and looking for ways to reach audiences in a more direct manner and address socio-cultural and socio-political issues.

Reading African art’s impact on modernism as an international phenomenon, The “Black Art” Renaissance tracks a series of twentieth-century engagements with canonical African sculpture by European, African American, and sub-Saharan African artists and theorists. Notwithstanding its occurrence during the benighted colonial period, the Paris avant-garde “discovery” of African sculpture—known then as art nègre, or “black art”—eventually came to affect nascent Afro-modernisms, whose artists and critics commandeered visual and rhetorical uses of the same sculptural canon and the same term. Within this trajectory, “black art” evolved as a framework for asserting control over appropriative practices introduced by Europeans, and it helped forge alliances by redefining concepts of humanism, race, and civilization. From the Fauves and Picasso to the Harlem Renaissance, and from the work of South African artist Ernest Mancoba to the imagery of Negritude and the École de Dakar, African sculpture’s influence proved transcontinental in scope and significance. Through this extensively researched study, Joshua I. Cohen argues that art history’s alleged centers and margins must be conceived as interconnected and mutually informing. The “Black Art” Renaissance reveals just how much modern art has owed to African art on a global scale.

Under the heading "Art History from a Global Perspective" the author adopts an internal perspective and appeals for an understanding of art history as a "constantly reforming discipline". If one highlights the transformations of art theories since Pliny the Elder, not only the notion of a single art 'history' with its roots in 19th century Europe is subject to decisive relativization, but these transformations bear witness to a repeatedly observable openness to new questions, changing perspectives, and therefore the discipline's vitality. This is also evident with regard to the debates surrounding a "World Art History" and/or a "Global Art History", which date back primarily to the 1990s and on occasion far earlier. The author refers to the 26nd CIHA Congress in 1986 as a landmark in these discussions, and from a methodological standpoint, she concurs with Thomas da Costa Kaufmann's concept of "circulations".

Une histoire globale des avant-gardes picturales se doit d’expliquer pourquoi celles-ci apparurent en certains endroits et pas en d’autres, comment elles circulaient entre les pays et les capitales, ce qui les portait et si elles rompaient réellement avec leur temps, sachant que la plupart finirent par connaître une véritable canonisation.
Les avant-gardes lièrent leur sort au développement des journaux et des revues, c’est-à-dire à celui des techniques d’impression et de reproduction en série. Elles profitèrent également d’un vaste mouvement de circulation des idées, des hommes et des objets avec le développement des réseaux ferrés et des transports maritimes.
Dans le même temps se forgeaient les identités nationales, férues de tradition et de préservation des cultures. L’approche géopolitique met au jour ce processus par lequel les plasticiens novateurs recoururent à la référence étrangère pour s’opposer aux institutions nationales, travaillèrent à internationaliser leurs réputations pour mieux s’imposer contre le refus de l’innovation porté par le nationalisme, ou, au contraire, se laisser récupérer par des partis nationalistes et révolutionnaires.
Mais à côté des stratégies, réseaux et marchés, place est faite à l’analyse du contexte culturel et moral, économique et politique, matériel et social, affectif et spirituel des artistes des avant-gardes à partir de 1848. Jusqu’à la rupture de 1920, quand ces avant-gardes deviennent politiques, plaçant l’avenir de l’art dans celui de la Révolution.

and Keywords Since the late 20th century, performance has played a vital role in environmental activism, and the practice is often related to concepts of eco-art, eco-feminist art, land art, theatricality, and "performing landscapes." With the advent of the Capitalocene discourse in the 21st century, performance has been useful for acknowledging indigenous forms of cultural knowledge and for focusing on the need to reintegrate nature and culture in addressing ecological crisis. The Capitalocene was distinguished from the Anthropocene by Donna Haraway who questions the figuration of the Anthropos as reflexive of a fossil-fuel-burning ethos that does not represent the whole of industrial humanity in the circuit of global capital. Jason W. Moore's analysis for the Capitalocene illustrates the division between nature and society that is affirmed by the tenets of the Anthropocene. Scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer had dated the Anthropocene age to the industrial acceleration of the late-18th/mid-19th century but Moore points to the rise of capitalism in the 15th century when European colonization reduced indigenous peoples to naturales in their modernist definition of nature that became distinct from the new society. As material property, women were also precluded from this segment of industrial humanity. By the 20th century, the Euro-American system for progressive modernism in the arts was supported by the inscription of cultures that represented un-modern "primitivist" nature. The tribal and the modern became a postcolonial debate in art historical discourse. In the context of the Capitalocene, a different historiography of eco-art, eco-feminist art, and environmental performances can be conceived by acknowledging the work of artists such as Ana Mendieta and Kara Walker who have illustrated the segregation of people according to the nature/society divide. Informed by Judith Butler's phenomenological analyses of performative acts, the aesthetic use of bodily-oriented expression (with its effects on the viewer's body) provides a vocabulary for artists engaging in the subjects of the Capitalocene. In the development of performances in the global context, artists such as Wu Mali, Yin Xiuzhen, and Ursula Biemann have emphasized the relationship between bodies of humans and bodies of water through interactive works for the public, sited at the rivers and the shores of streams. They show how humans are not separate from

In 1702, the second emperor of the Qing dynasty ordered construction of a new summer palace in Rehe (now Chengde, Hebei) to support his annual tours north among the court's Inner Mongolian allies. The Mountain Estate to Escape the Heat (Bishu Shanzhuang) was strategically located at the node of mountain "veins" through which the Qing empire's geomantic energy was said to flow. At this site, from late spring through early autumn, the Kangxi emperor presided over rituals of intimacy and exchange that celebrated his rule: garden tours, banquets, entertainments, and gift giving.

Stephen Whiteman draws on resources and methods from art and architectural history, garden and landscape history, early modern global history, and historical geography to reconstruct the Mountain Estate as it evolved under Kangxi, illustrating the importance of landscape as a medium for ideological expression during the early Qing and in the early modern world more broadly. Examination of paintings, prints, historical maps, newly created maps informed by GIS-based research, and personal accounts reveals the significance of geographic space and its representation in the negotiation of Qing imperial ideology. The first monograph in any language to focus solely on the art and architecture of the Kangxi court, Where Dragon Veins Meet illuminates the court's production and deployment of landscape as a reflection of contemporary concerns and offers new insight into the sources and forms of Qing power through material expressions.

Miyuki Aoki Girardelli, "The “Orient” in the West: The Japanese Architect Itō Chūta’s Travels in the Ottoman Empire and Its Challenge to the
Oriental Narrative", Marzia Faietti and Gerhard Wolf eds., Motion: Transformation, 35th Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art, Florence, 1-6 September 2019, Congress Proceedings, part 2, Bolonia University Press, Bologna, 2021, pp. 445-450 ISBN 978-88-6923-650-1 ISBN online 978-88-6923-792-8

Thoroughly oriented towards visual science and semiotics, Monika Leisch- Kiesl’s chapter takes us into the current debates of Global Art History and Postcolonial Studies. For a second time, this time virtually, she visits selected major international exhibitions of 2017, specifically the 57th Venice Biennale and documenta 14 in Kassel, to ask about the “Polish” artists available there. She analyses selected works along the lines of the notions “Signs - Images - Codes” developed in her 2016 monograph ZeichenSetzung | BildWahrnehmung and shows how these concepts allow us to encounter different societies and cultures, which gives justice to both the feeling of proximity and the experience of otherness.

Leon Bakst's 1910 Art Nouveau costume design entitled The Firebird, and Mikhail Larionov's oil on canvas Russian Neoprimitivism, Spring, painted in 1912 are examples of artists outside of traditional 'western' culture reconciling the narrow definition of artistic genius and subsequent value while celebrating their own culture.

In Pursuit of Universalism is the first comprehensive, English-language study of early twentieth-century Japanese modern art. In this groundbreaking work, which is also the inaugural recipient of the Phillips Book Prize (awarded by the Phillips Collection Center for the Study of Modern Art), Alicia Volk constructs a critical theory of artistic modernism in Japan between 1900 and 1930 by analyzing the work of Yorozu Tetsugorô, whose paintings she casts as a polemic response to Japan's late-nineteenth-century encounter with European art. Volk places Yorozu at the forefront of a movement that sought to define Japanese art's role in the world by interrogating and ultimately refusing the opposition between East and West. Instead, she vividly demonstrates how Yorozu reframed modern art's dualistic underpinnings and transposed them into an inclusive and synthetic relation between the local and the universal. By looking closely at questions of cultural exchange within modern art, In Pursuit of Universalism offers a new and vital account of both Japanese and Euroamerican modernism. Volk's pioneering study builds bridges between the fields of modern and Asian art and takes its place at the forefront of the emerging global history of modern art.

Reviews:
“Masterfully written. . . . Alicia Volk embarks upon a fascinating journey to develop an alternative perspective for narrating the complexities of the Japanese art scene. . . . Volk’s stimulating book definitively illuminates a new horizon for the field of modern Asian art. . . . It is precisely what the discipline needs.”— Journal Of Oriental Studies

“Forceful and eloquent. . . . Volk masterfully unravels the knotty strands that coalesced to shape one individual artist’s perception of self and his work within existing academic, institutional, and professional structures. . . . [The] book deserves praise for being a substantially rigorous and provocative probe into the search for universalism in a differentiated world.”—International Journal Of Asian Studies

“Deserves to be read by all historians of modern art and East Asian culture.”—Journal Of Asian Studies

“An impressive book, beautifully produced and sustaining intellectual rigour with its detailed, stimulating research.”— Japanese Studies

“Excellent. . . . Exquisitely written.”—The Art Bulletin

"Written beautifully and compellingly... Volk has made an important contribution to the growing literature on alternative artistic modernisms." --The Journal of Japanese Studies

"In presenting readers with this most cogent argument for the emergence of Japanese modernism through the artistic engagement of one of its central players Volk has made a genuinely original contribution to the field."--New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies

"This is an... intellectually nourishing read, in which Volk's voluminous knowledge of art movements and discourse creates a text of commanding erudition."--The Japan Times

“Volk's impressive study rethinks the East-West binary often reiterated in discussions of Japanese modernism by reinserting local aspects into the universalizing tendencies of modernism itself. The book makes an important contribution to the growing literature on modern Japanese art history by providing an alternative comparative framework for understanding the global development of modernism that decenters Euro-America. Rigorously historical in her critique, Volk destabilizes our understanding of the Japanese experience of modernity through the prism of Yorozu's singular vision of the self, leaving us questioning conventional wisdom and contented to wobble.”—Gennifer Weisenfeld, Duke University

“In Volk's affectingly stunning and deeply reflective study of the Japanese artist Yorozu Tetsugorō's work between 1910-1930, we have a profoundly historical reminder of how modernism everywhere struggled to meet the demands of the new with the readymades of received artistic practices. In this study of Yorozu's utopian universalist project, Volk has imaginatively broadened our understanding of the modernist moment and perceptively captured its global program to unify art and life, contemporary culture and history.”—Harry Harootunian, author of Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture and Community in Interwar Japan

What is the scope of 'global art' and who drives its framing within the current climate of corporate globalization? In what ways do the recent global turn and curatorial turn underwrite meaningful global inclusivity and visibility, and to what degree does this globally shared art constitute mutuality? Does 'global art', including the accompanying process of biennialisation, allow for local narratives in a way that seriously accounts for a geopolitical view of contemporary art in the twenty-first century? While the inclusion of 'new art worlds' in what Belting, Buddensieg and Weibel (2013) term 'global art' is framed as a democratisation of contemporary art and the demise of the western art canon, it is important to raise questions regarding the blind spots of this supposedly global, post-1989 expansion.

In this article I analyse the current discourse of 'global art' as articulated in The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds (Belting, Buddensieg & Weibel 2013), focusing on its origin, transcription, mapping, consumption and ultimately, I
suggest, its emergence as a function of privilege. Challenging the charting of supposedly new art regions (Belting et al. 2013:100), which 'writes-out' local narratives and counter-narratives, I argue for a logic of subtraction in place of a logic of addition. While the latter triumphantly implies that 'new' art worlds have been added to the dominant core, the former is useful to a geopolitical perspective that strips away normative vision and actively seeks that which people often fail to see.

In this paper I analyse the work of CAPE Africa Platform in South Africa, which, while briefly and erroneously used as "evidence” of biennialisation and global expansion in The Global Contemporary, was locally referred to as 'not-another-biennial'. Discussing what some see as the shortcomings of the Cape 07 and Cape 09 exhibitions, I propose a reconsideration of measures of 'success' and 'failure', suggesting that an embrace of 'failure' can enable new ways of seeing the privilege of the contemporary art world. It is only when blanks, failures and things presumed not to exist are carefully regarded, that the goal of achieving mutually shared art on a global scale might become possible. Only then does it become apparent that the global south can have a certain edge over what is viewed as the prevailing art world.