Okwui Enwezor’s Triennale articulated the challenges that globalization—and the movements of denationalization, decentralization, and de-hierarchization that arose from it—posed to the writing of modern and contemporary art history. Paris and its “excess of cultural capital” constituted, in Enwezor’s eyes, a fertile ground for revisiting the ethnographic model of otherness and reviving certain lessons from cosmopolitanism in the context of a tense cultural landscape.
Launch of e-flux journal issue #150: “Experimental Publics”
Over the past three decades, the global art world has thrived thanks to the infrastructures of peak globalization; it has consequently internalized value systems that are embedded in the alignment between liberal democracy, the progressive state, and neoliberal metrics of economic stability. This alignment produces auxiliary notions in the art world that operate quite self-sufficiently—notions about certain artistic forms of production or distribution that embody liberal and progressive values in themselves, and about artistic “freedom” as a condition, rather than a product, of the system.
Kojève’s journey from philosophy to diplomacy was not a case of accidental wandering but the outgrowth of his Hegelian convictions. He held that critique without action is frivolous, dismissing the “fundamentally nihilist elements, known as ‘intellectuals,’ for whom non-conformity is in itself an absolute value”—those who, like Albert Camus, reveled in moral dissent yet sidestepped the arduous institutional work needed for durable change. A critique, Kojève said, that wants to be taken seriously cannot operate at a distance from the state.
African Film Institute Film Series: Sosena Solomon, Mpho Matsipa