The question of where to begin
One final question is worth dwelling on further, by way of a conclusion to this introduction: the chronological starting point of the present book. The three existing volumes of Art in Theory did not extend back into the Renaissance period. They opened with early attempts to establish the place of art in the wider realm of the humanities at the moment of the inception of the modern Academic system in the mid‐seventeenth century. However, by the time work on the present collection began, it had become abundantly clear that no comprehensive account of cross‐cultural interaction in the sphere of art and material culture could ignore the earlier period. The understanding of the European Renaissance has been transformed over the last several decades by its opening out, away from Italy. The conception has now been extended, not only to northern and central Europe but also – and inescapably from the point of view of the present project – to geographical locations beyond Europe. The so‐called Age of Exploration, and in particular the ‘discovery’ of the Americas, urged itself as a point whose exclusion could not have done other than render the present project largely groundless.
Yet just as, albeit on a smaller and more local scale, the emergence of the Academic system in the European arts depended on the renewed encounter with classical antiquity presupposed in the very notion of a ‘re‐birth’/‘re‐naissance’, so the Renaissance ‘Age of Exploration’ itself was predicated on important earlier cross‐cultural encounters. In looking for a starting point in this context, one arrives inexorably both at those earlier contacts between the geographical extremes of the Eurasian landmass and on their subsequent interruption as a result of geopolitical developments in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Notwithstanding the dangers of infinite regress, it was as a result of these considerations that the decision was taken to begin the present anthology with a short selection of texts dating from before the Italian Renaissance and the contemporaneous late‐fifteenth‐century inception of the ‘Age of Exploration’. Hence our beginnings with a glimpse of the mythical riches of Constantinople at the moment of the Crusades, the accounts of the very first European travellers to the Far East in the age of the Pax Mongolica, and the abiding myth of Prester John, the Christian king in the heart of Asia. These four texts all date from the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, immediately before the Black Death and the temporary collapse of what Janet Abu‐Lughod has called the pre‐modern world system. From that point onwards, after the first four texts of Part I, our selections fall within the parameters of the emergence, the maturity, and perhaps now also the decline of the European‐dominated capitalist world‐system.
The contemporary situation
With gathering force since the watershed years around 1990, the uneven and combined development characteristic of the fully fledged capitalist world system forms the political, cultural and economic horizon of our present circumstances. Increasing economic globalization has been a powerful force since at least the end of the Second World War (and arguably, for at least a century before that), but the self‐conscious theorization of living in a globalized condition is a feature of more recent years. Pioneering attempts to think through the end of the years of the post‐war settlement, and the inception of a newly ‘neo‐liberal’ world order began in the 1980s and became impossible to ignore after the end of the period of the so‐called Three Worlds around 1990. That is another way of saying that the belief that we inhabit a new kind of condition is a product of the spread of capitalist relations of production over the whole world. There is no longer any ‘Second World’ of even notionally ‘socialist’ states, and there is no ‘Third World’ either, remaining beyond the reach of the global market.
It is now widely, if not universally, accepted that cultural practices and relations – including those that we call ‘art’ – are powerfully influenced by the economic and political horizons within which they take place. This is not a statement of monocausal ‘economic determinism’; it acknowledges a complex, reciprocal process in which ideas, activities, subjective responses and physical things (in a word, the sphere of ‘representations’) are both framed by the invisible social frameworks within which they happen and, in their turn, have a bearing on the colour and temperature of those frameworks, on the shaping of what it means to live in them. There is no one‐way traffic from ‘base’ to ‘superstructure’, and there is no pristine, insulated ‘autonomy’ either; not of ‘art’ from ‘society’, and not of the ‘West’ from the ‘rest’. Neither, we believe, is anything to be gained by insistence on temporal caesuras. We live in a period in which a form of historical amnesia seems almost to be the order of the day; neophilia is structured into the system, often underwritten by an innocent‐sounding rhetoric of ‘embracing change’ and a concomitant relegation of the past as rife with ‘legacy thinking’ inappropriate to a dynamic ‘contemporaneity’. The present anthology proceeds from a different assumption, captured in the epigraph placed at the front of the book. At this historical juncture at least, it seems important to insist on the value of historical connection and continuity, even as we attend to difference and particularity.
Finally, a word on ‘globalization’ itself. The term is something of a politico‐philosophical football. In the early phase of the transition from the Cold War period of ‘Three Worlds’ to the present overtly ‘globalized’ situation, it frequently came to be used by its advocates as a synonym for the triumph of capitalism. Conversely, its use has been criticized by many who seek to challenge the sway of neoliberal capitalism for camouflaging the systemic disparities out of which the global system is constructed. Justin Rosenberg has made a useful distinction between ‘globalization theory’ on the one hand, and a ‘theory of globalization’ on the other, respectively pertaining to the first and the second of those positions. Where ‘globalization’ is employed in this book, it is the second usage we have in mind.
The facts of globalization, whether we applaud them or deplore them, whether we see them as paths to prosperity and freedom or the alibis of discrimination and inequality, cannot be wished away. Art in Theory: The West in the World sets out to address three considerations which are distinct, but which permeate the whole enterprise. First, it sets out to represent a richer sense than is normal in the literature of art of the impact of those diverse ‘facts’ of economic, political and social globalization on ‘contemporary’ art. Second, it seeks to trace the changes resulting from globalization (understood in this sense as a long‐term historical and not merely contemporary factor) across a much longer time‐span than is usual in discussions of artistic globalization, impacting significantly on much earlier art. Third, it tries to throw light – an oblique light – on a time (not so very long ago), when most of those who thought about, wrote about and indeed made ‘modern’ art, paid little or no attention to what we have now learned to call ‘the majority world’; or