Art in a Multipolar World: Problem Analysis and Horizons

See Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, The Making of Global International Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2019); Feng Zhang and Barry Buzan, “The Relevance of Deep Pluralism for China’s Foreign Policy,” Chinese Journal of International Politics 15, no. 3 (2022).

As demonstrated in numerous studies, the most recent “wave” of institutional critique has concentrated on the creation of alternative institutions, following the understanding of art as a process of building what Gerald Raunig terms “instituent practices.” Such practices have been variously theorized as “infrastructural critique,” “para-institutional,” “translocal organizations,” “alter-institutional,” and “para-institutional organizations.” See Gerald Raunig, “Flatness Rules: Instituent Practices and Institutions of the Common,” Institutional Attitudes: Instituting Art in a Flat World, ed. Pascal Gielen (Valiz, 2013); Marina Vishmidt, “Only as Self-Relating Negativity: Infrastructure and Critique,” Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts 13, no. 3 (March 2022); Tom Holert, Knowledge Beside Itself: Contemporary Art’s Epistemic Politics (Sternberg Press, 2020); Binna Choi and Marion von Osten, “Trans-Local, Post-Disciplinary Organizational Practice: A Conversation,” in Cluster: Dialectionary, ed. Binna Choi et al. (Sternberg Press, 2014); Sven Lütticken, “Social Media: Practices of (in)Visibility in Contemporary Art,” Afterall, no. 40 (Autumn–Winter 2015).

On how neoliberalism recasts the art world in its own image at the local level, whether in the proliferation of “immaterial labor” or the championing of entrepreneurialism, see Angela McRobbie, Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries (Polity Press, 2016); Ulrich Bröckling, The Entrepreneurial Self: Fabricating a New Type of Subject (SAGE Publications Ltd, 2016); and Lin Zhang, The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy (Columbia University Press, 2023).

Philip Mirowski has been the most successful in summarizing the myth of neoliberalism in his “Ten Commandments of Neoliberalism.” See Philip Mirowski and Edward Nik-Khah, The Knowledge We Have Lost in Information: The History of Information and Knowledge in Economics (Oxford University Press, 2017).

See John Gray, Post-Liberalism: Studies in Political Thought, 1st ed. (Routledge, 1996).

Such as Zach Blas’s work Contra-Internet →; Simon Denny’s exhibition “The Personal Effects of Kim Dotcom”; Mark Lombardi’s exhibition “Global Networks” →; and Femke Herregraven’s work Taxodus →.

Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Harvard University Press, 1984).

See Dave Beech, Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics (Brill, 2015); Sven Lütticken, “The Coming Exception: Art and the Crisis of Value,” New Left Review, no. 99 (May–June 2016).

Kerstin Stakemeier and Marina Vishmidt, Reproducing Autonomy: Work, Money, Crisis and Contemporary Art (Mute, 2016).

Dingxin Zhao, Politics of Legitimacy: The State-Society Relations in Contemporary China (National Taiwan University Press, 2017).

The most rigorous study is Marina Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production (Brill, 2018). Vishmidt’s project calls for speculation to be wrested back from financialized capital.

Various studies put the holding time of a work before resale in the range of twenty-five to forty years. See Olav Velthuis and Erica Coslor, “The Financialization of Art,” in Handbook of the Sociology of Finance, ed. Karin Knorr Cetina and Alex Preda (Oxford University Press, 2012); and Clare McAndrew, Suhail Malik, and Gerald Nestler. “Plotting the Art Market: An Interview with Clare McAndrew,” Finance and Society 2, no. 2 (2016). Research by Art Basel and UBS son resale period also notes a reluctance to sell works by the majority of collectors surveyed. See Clare McAndrew, The Art Market 2018: An Art Basel and UBS Report (Art Basel, 2018).

As Theodor W. Adorno writes: “Yet it is precisely as artifacts, as products of social labor, that they (artworks) also communicate with the empirical experience that they reject and from which they draw their content (Inhalt). Art negates the categorial determinations stamped on the empirical world and yet harbors what is empirically existing in its own substance.” Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedeman (Continuum, 2002).

Qin Hui, “Dilemmas of Twenty-First Century Globalization: Explanations and Solutions, with a Critique of Thomas Piketty’s Twenty-First Century Capitalism,” Reading the China Dream, November 15, 2018 →.

See for example Yao Lin, “Beaconism and the Trumpian Metamorphosis of Chinese Liberal Intellectuals,” Journal of Contemporary China 30, no. 127 (2020).

Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism (Princeton University Press, 1992).

Studies on the New Right are useful for analyzing this phenomenon, especially when they investigate how the New Right has adopted anti-capitalist, anti-state (mostly against liberal democratic states), but also anti-liberal rhetoric, much of which is just an alteration of traditionally leftist arguments. See Tamir Bar-On, Where Have All the Fascists Gone? (Routledge, 2007). For how the New Right has adopted Gramscian counter-hegemonic tools for anti-liberal struggle, see Karl Ekeman, “On Gramscianism of the Right,” Praxis 13, no. 13 (November 11, 2018) →. For how it focuses on metapolitical “culture war” strategies, see Daniel Rueda, “Alain De Benoist, Ethnopluralism and the Cultural Turn in Racism,” Patterns of Prejudice 55, no. 3 (May 27, 2021); and Tamir Bar‐On, “Understanding Political Conversion and Mimetic Rivalry,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 10, no. 3–4 (September 1, 2009): 241–264. For how museums can be seen as arenas of “soft combat,” see Jacob C. Miller and Sharon Wilson, “Museum as Geopolitical Entity: Toward Soft Combat,” Geography Compass 16, no. 6 (May 6, 2022).

Zhao, Politics of Legitimacy.

Lorenzo Marsili and Fabrizio Tassinari, “Are We Heading Towards a Far-Tight European Union?” Al Jazeera Opinions, July, 19 July 2023 →.

Real Social Science: Applied Phronesis, ed. Bent Flyvbjerg, Todd Landman, and Sanford Schram (Cambridge University Press, 2012); Nurbek Bekmurzaev, Philipp Lottholz, and Joshua Meyer, “Navigating the Safety Implications of Doing Research and Being Researched in Kyrgyzstan: Cooperation, Networks and Framing,” Central Asian Survey 37, no. 1 (2018); Philipp Lottholz, Post-liberal Statebuilding in Central Asia: Imaginaries, Discourses and Practices of Social Ordering (‎Bristol University Press, 2022).

Philipp Lottholz, “Political Change in Post-socialist Eurasia,” Open Democracy, February 28, 2019.

Rossen Djagalov, From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and the Third Worlds (Cambridge University Press, 2020); Masha Salazkina, World Socialist Cinema: Alliances, Affinities, and Solidarities in the Global Cold War (University of California Press, 2023).

Kasakhstan: Labirinty sovremennogo postcolonialnogo discursa (Kasakhstan: Labyrinths of contemporary postcolonial discourse), ed. Alima Bissenova (Tselinny Publishing, 2023), 35.

Shiming Gao, “The Dismantling and Re-Construction of Bentu (‘This Land’ or ‘Native Land’): Contemporary Chinese Art in the Post-Colonial Context,” in A New Thoughtfulness in Contemporary China: Critical Voices in Art and Aesthetics, ed. Jörg Huber and Chuan Zhao (Columbia University Press, 2011).

Take for example the Islamic Biennale in Saudi Arabia, or the exhibition “Ancient Sculptures: India Egypt Assyria Greece Rome” at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya Museum in Mumbai. See Neil MacGregor, “An Ambitious Mumbai Museum Project Sets Indian History in a World Context,” Financial Times, December 30, 2023.

Feng Zhang and Barry Buzan, “The Relevance of Deep Pluralism for China’s Foreign Policy,” Chinese Journal of International Politics 15, no. 3 (2022).

Leon Trotsky, John Dewey, and George Novack, Their Morals and Ours: Marxist Versus Liberal Views on Morality (Merit Publishers, 1966).

Alan S. Blinder, A Monetary and Fiscal History of the United States, 1961–2021 (Princeton University Press, 2022).

Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press, 2018).

Admittedly, I participated in the project From Bandung to Berlin in 2016 →.

See Nils Gilman, “The New International Economic Order: A Reintroduction,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 6, no. 1 (March 2015). Associated efforts include the 1967 Arusha Declaration by Julius Nyerere →, which proposed to re-politicize rather than depoliticize money. On this see Stefan Eich, “Crypto Won’t Solve Our Problems—We Need to Democratize Money,” interview by Daniel Denvir, Jacobin, November 2, 2022 →.

See Slobodian, Globalists, 219–56.

Jennifer Wenzel, Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond (University of Chicago Press, 2010).

See Gilman, “The New International Economic Order”; and Nils Gilman, “The NIEO as Usable Past,” Progressive International, January 4, 2023 →.

See Alec Russell, “The à la Carte World: Our New Geopolitical Order,” Financial Times, August 21, 2023; and Gao Bai, “Trade Wars, Hot Wars and the Rise of the Global South: The Future of the Dollar Standard,” Reading the China Dream, January 20, 2024 →.

Multi-alignment means that actors other than Washington and Beijing should seek to “develop more effective bilateral relationships with each of the big powers but also to develop deeper strategic relationships with each other.” Nader Mousavizadeh, an adviser to Kofi Annan when he was UN secretary-general, as cited in Russell, “The à la Carte World.”

Danilo Scholz, Koloniale Nahmen, and Koloniale Gaben, “Alexandre Kojève, Carl Schmitt Und Die Europäische Nachkriegsordnung,” Archiv DesVölkerrechts (AVR) 61, no. 2–3 (2023).

See the call made by Lorenzo Marsili in “From the Age of Empires to the Age of Humanity,” Noēma, July 27, 2023 →.

Compare for example Olafur Eliasson’s iceberg, which sent a brisk message to the public at the Conference of the Parties (COP) Paris, Mary Ellen Carol’s conceptual work at COP Glasgow, and Liam Gillick’s cryptic piece that left many nonart spectators perplexed. See “A Climate (Art) Disaster in Paris Gare Du Nord,” Independent Scientists, January 25, 2022 →.

See the ongoing project Antikythera led by Benjamin Bratton, in particular the hemispherical stacks track →.

Aslak Aamot Helm and Mandus Ridefelt, “The Black Hole Industry: Underdetermination in Contemporary Biomedicine and Possible Roles of Art/Science Collaboration,” Configurations Journal (forthcoming). See also, in this issue, Aslak Aamot Helm, “Living in the Valley of Underdetermination.”

Benjamin Bratton and Blaise Agüera y Arcas, “The Model Is the Message,” Noēma, July 12, 2022 →.

Delton B. Chen, Joel van der Beek, and Jonathan Cloud, “Hypothesis for a Risk Cost of Carbon: Revising the Externalities and Ethics of Climate Ehange,” in Understanding Risks and Uncertainties in Energy and Climate Policy, ed. Haris Doukas, Alexandros Flamos, and Jenny Lieu (Springer, 2018). Referenced in Chris Taylor, “Fight Carbon. With Coin,” Mashable, n.d. →.