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Walter Grasskamp Professor of Art History at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich started his lecture by mentioning that this was his first trip south of the Equator, a sort of initiation ritual for Europeans. In order to bring into context the theme of his lecture The museum and other success stories in cultural globalisation - the Professor stated that even though globalisation has a dominant presence in current discussions, not enough is said about its cultural aspects, which are usually regarded as collateral effects.
Art looked at as a consumer culture limited to being consumed by a small elite - is at the margin of globalisation; even though this is a recurrent theme in the work of several contemporary artists.
By shifting the emphasis from the future of globalisation to its pre-history, Grasskamp talked about a global Europeanisation, which stemmed from colonialism and imperialism and was based on the slave trade and the consumption of goods. In order to highlight the gap between the rights of those involved, he made use of the concept of interaction instead of that of interchange.
He moved on to describe the seven stations according to his art history of globalisation:
1. Museums, shops and bars;
2. Cabinets of Curiosities;
3. The dissolution of the Cabinets of Curiosities;
4. The universality of art;
5. Documenta II;
6. Westkunst (Western Art);
7. Global actors.
According to the lecturer, music is the best example of cultural interaction. Jazz and blues are the result of African immigration to North America; and gospel music is the result of the christianisation of North-American slaves. From 1950 onwards cultural interaction is no longer strictly European and American. However, the introduction to different cultures gave way to cultural exploitation and the unilateral commercialisation of music, under the label of world music.
Walter Grasskamp gave his reasons for talking about music in a conference about museums. One of the reasons was the fact the influence of other cultures on European Avant-garde - African masks on Cubism, South Pacific wood carving on Expressionism and Japanese illustrations on Van Gogh was not as intense in comparison to the impact of other cultures in the music milieu. In spite of the changes brought by the cultural industry, the propagation of jazz and blues still continues through the direct contact between the artist and the audience. On the other hand, the Avant-garde artists did not take into account the original contexts of art works brought from other cultures. Artists were interested in the visual information provided by foreign cultures; however, they were not interested in understanding them.
In this colonial context, museums, shops and the bars near the city ports were the main points of contacts with paintings, sculptures and illustrations from other cultures. At this point, the German Professor questioned if contemporary artists, differently from avant-garde artists, are really interested in the original cultural context of exotic pieces. According to this perspective, the avant-garde exoticism was the culmination of Euro-centrism. This formalist approach was only contested in 1984 with the exhibition Primitivism in Twentieth-Century Art in New York.
At this point, Grasskamp shifted his focus to the fifteenth century, when the aesthetical interest in non-European cultures was reflected on the Renaissance and Baroque Cabinets of Curiosities. The kings gaze represented the curiosity and legitimated - through perception the presence of foreign objects brought home. As well as the political network of colonialism, there was also a religious network based on the Jesuit missions. The lecturer pointed out that there is a common history shared by colonialism and the cabinets of curiosities, which hasnt been researched enough. The Europeans not only collected objects at this time; they also created botanical gardens and zoos. These colonial goods were not consumed directly nor daily, but through perception a different form of consumerism.
The Cabinet of Curiosities the father of museums was, therefore, an early form of globalisation. Museums, as structural and institutional models of collection and exhibition were also one of the most successful European exports. The dissolution of the Cabinets resulted in the specialisation of collections and the creation of independent art museums, which were then propagated worldwide. The way museums were easily adapted to other cultures was the result of a constant but flexible structure. For example, the national museum worked as model in several countries. The same happened to art museums, which propagated more rapidly.
However, a process of re-contextualisation of art was observed in the Documenta I in 1955. The exhibitions entrance corridor showed pictures of archaic and exotic sculptures as a means to justify modern art. Primitivism was no longer exotic. It was part of a universal notion of art, an effort to provide a notion of continuity between the archaic and the modern. However, the inclusion of the archaic still followed a prevalent euro-centric point of view.
The 1959 Documenta II introduced the concept of abstraction as the global language. Instead of including other cultures, the goal was to offer foreign countries a new recipe for success. Given the attempts to make it a global exhibition, it is important to point out the lack of non-European artists. Europe was exporting art museums but was excluding foreign artists. The exhibition "Westkunst" (Western Art), which took place in Cologne in 1981, also reiterated this tendency.
In the process of describing his last station, Walter Grasskamp talked about two attempts in the 1970s and 1980s to form imperialist art museums. The first attempt was carried out by the art collector Peter Ludwig, who embarked on a mission of buying huge amounts of art from the countries with which he wanted to establish commercial relations. He also exported entire collections to communist countries and became the biggest international distributor of contemporary art.
Another important global actor in the artistic milieu is the Guggenheim Museum and its chain of franchises.
After talking through his seven stations, Grasskamp posed some questions:
1. Can post-modern art become a global language?
2. Is it a discussion forum about political and economic globalisation?
3. Is the artistic production context in Africa or Asia different from that in Europe?
4. Is there only an apparent global art where only works from a number of artists from Europe and USA are been collected and exhibited worldwide?
Finally, Grasskamp stated that modern art is not universal, but international; and that popular music, supposedly authentic, is intercultural.
(by Vinícius Spricigo)
Translation: hí-fen translation solutions
Proofreading: David Everett
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