The Global, cui bono?

This year, the multinational investment firm UBS partnered with the for-profit fair Art Basel to detail the state of the “global art market.”1 The report explains that the sector’s “global growth” now lies outside once-dominant markets. While the U.S. continues to be the art world’s primary “global hub,” China is rapidly rising in the “global ranks,” surging to first place in “global public auction sales.” This diversification carries new risks, including Asian lockdowns during the “global pandemic,” volatility in “global energy markets,” and the “general de-globalization” attested by Brexit and growing American protectionism. Nevertheless, the future looks strong. For despite U.S.-Chinese tensions, new wars in Europe, and the rise of nativist sentiment in key markets, “global billionaires” continue to thrive, their wealth peaking at the historically massive value of $13.6 trillion.

In this report, the adjectival “global” occurs 129 times. It functions just like it does in sales pitches for emerging markets ETFs. When the competition has investments in Zambian copper mines, Turkish micro-mobility, and Sumatran coffee, no savvy investor wants to miss out. Likewise, art collectors covet “fresh-to-market” inventory from Africa and Asia, riskier than blue chips like Picasso and Warhol but with greater potential upside.2 When used by art-world speculators, the term “global” thus connotes the unrestricted access and forward-looking knowledge required to beat the market. Cui bono? High-net-worth individuals and the expert brokers who guide them through the thorny field of global contemporary art.

UBS and Art Basel—these are easy targets for humanist scholars like me. And yet, as we mock them, can we help but notice a discomfiting parallel between their language and our own? Visit a biennial, pick up the latest Artforum, or attend the annual conference of the College Art Association, and you will doubtless find a comparable proliferation of the adjectival “global.” In museums, criticism, and scholarship, we increasingly insist that everything can (and likely should) be rethought in “a global context.” It would be alarming to think that phrases like “global modernities” do for our products (exhibitions, magazine reviews, and journal articles) what “global markets” do for theirs. Yet, what criteria could differentiate the two uses? Cui bono and how?

To answer, let’s turn to Larissa Buchholz’s The Global Rules of Art. It begins from the premise that “the global” has not just been out there waiting for us to notice it. Rather, we make it real by our ways of talking and acting.3 As soon as artists and curators, gallerists and collectors begin to think of themselves as participants in a global art world, they do not merely think differently about what their actions mean; they also act differently, keying their efforts—whether profit-seeking or art-making—to different criteria. To speak of “global contemporary art” is thus to transform the very object that the phrase purports to describe. For that reason, we are better off thinking not just about what the term “global” means but also what it does—including what it does for us.

To that end, Buchholz characterizes the art world as a “field of exchange and struggle” (GRA, 161). She adopts this terminology from Pierre Bourdieu, to whom she pays tributes in her titular invocation of The Rules of Art (1992).4 While I’ll try as much as possible to eschew his dense jargon, the “field” framework is irreplaceable and so requires a brief review. Let’s take a toy example: an NFL football field. It is a circumscribed terrain (a hundred-yard rectangle) governed by agreed-upon rules and positions (quarterback, center, etc.). Each team must play offense (driving into the other team’s “territory”) and defense (preventing the other team from advancing into theirs). Winning thus requires tactics and countertactics, which must always remain responsive to the dynamically unfolding situation (after reading the defense, the quarterback might call an audible). Positions exist independently of those who fill them, but exceptional players can redefine what they entail (e.g., Michael Vick transforming the quarterback from a strictly passing position to a hybrid passing/running one). Finally, the field exists within a wider social world (the Denver Broncos are owned by the heirs to the Walmart fortune), but external forms of power and influence must undergo a transformation to matter in the game (the Broncos have not made the playoffs since these owners took over).

The art field likewise has teams (magazines, auction houses, museums), positions (artist, critic, curator), and a relatively circumscribed domain (one cannot buy entry into the Venice Biennale, favorable coverage in Texte zur Kunst, or a university press monograph—at least not directly).5 But whereas success in a football game has only one metric, points, success in the art game has two, profit and prestige, which polarize the field. At the commercial pole, the key players are galleries, auction houses, and fairs. For them, “the dominant stake and form of power is economic capital” (GRA, 11, emphasis mine). At the prestigious pole, the key players are curators, critics, and scholars. To them, “economic rewards are secondary, and this subfield is instead oriented largely around specific symbolic capital” (emphasis mine). That is, a scholar’s paycheck is not directly pegged to the quality of her scholarship as a fund manager’s is to his performance. Her incentive is not monetary profit but professional recognition, assessed using “field-specific aesthetic or intellectual criteria that are relatively independent from, or even opposed to, commercial … considerations.”

Bringing this distinction to questions of “the global,” Buchholz differentiates how this self-description benefits players at both poles of the art field. At the commercial end, profit-seekers exploit wider globalizing conditions—“liberalization of national economies, increasing global wealth polarization, and advances in digitalization” (GRA, 68)—and logics—financialization, consolidation, and econometric analysis. Globalization thus facilitates oligopolistic competition among auction houses and mega-galleries, such that “a small number of centralized, profit-chasing actors [seek] to increase their power within a context of growing global infrastructures and monetary opportunities” (GRA, 104). So far, so good. But how do these economic trends relate to the prestige pole of critics, curators, and scholars? Where do we fit within the logic of globalization?

As large-scale ways of thinking (e.g., postcolonial theory) and acting (multicultural policies) develop in response to globalization, they refract onto the art field such that global reach becomes not just a precondition for but rather a measure of prestige, with “elite institutions and rising curators [embracing] an expanded global vision in curating as forward-looking and innovative and, in this sense, as a new basis for symbolic capital” (GRA, 58). Buchholz cites several examples, including from Artforum and biennials, but my favorite comes from Arfacts.net—a company that purports to quantify artistic recognition, building a database meant to capture the “evaluation[s] of cultural mediators who do not have straightforward commercial orientations” (GRA, 191).6 When deciding what factors to weigh in its econometric algorithm, Artfacts chose not only expected ones like the prestige of the institutions where each artist exhibits but also the “globality” of her exposure (GRA, 292).

As institutions increasingly esteem global reach—e.g., the number of countries represented in biennials and permanent collections—we might think that the greatest beneficiaries would be players outside the Northwest. In fact, however, artists seeking global recognition can only climb the ranks if they move near centers of prestige and consecration.7 Critical success requires access to existing institutions of consecration—museums like MoMA, magazines like Artforum, or MFA programs like Yale—as shown in the flow charts that Buchholz uses to visualize migration patterns (fig. 5.14, GRA, 150). Thus, large percentages of the most prestigious artists from Africa have moved to Europe, from South America to the U.S., with New York and Berlin serving as “global consecration hubs for artists from all world regions” (GRA, 149).8

Here, I find myself siding with the model of globalization that Buchholz calls the “imperial culture” approach, which “associates the globalization of culture with the one-sided expansion and concentration of power by mediating actors and institutions from (Western) core countries. This in turn has led to the worldwide dominance of their media and cultural producers and, ultimately, to cultural homogeneity” (GRA, 7). She criticizes this model for its crude materialism, whereby culture merely reflects underlying inequalities instead of also refracting them. This reduction, she argues, makes it overly pessimistic, wrongly precluding the advancement of players outside the Northwest.

It seems to me, however, that Buchholz’s dual economy gives us few reasons for optimism. Just the opposite, the fields approach enables us to recognize similarly extractive logics in the realm of prestige. For as power players in the Northwest increasingly portray themselves as “global,” their avowed expansiveness makes them even more elite vis-à-vis their peripheral peers. After all, if ambitious African artists and curators can find critical recognition only by moving to New York, then how could the MACAAN in Marrakesh ever hope to compete with the MoMA by the metric of global reach?9 If art history departments are judged by the geographic diversity not of their expertise but of their experts, then how could the University of Nigeria, Nsukka compete with Columbia?10 By enthusiastically embracing geographic diversification against Eurocentric homogeneity, consecrated institutions thus firm up their elite positions by blocking the path for less-resourced competitors, reproducing the very center-periphery disparities that they aim to critique.11 The most prestigious institutions thus see excellent returns on their (symbolic) capital, which reproduces itself in the currency of globality.

For this strategy to work, however, it is not enough to be global. To advance in the field struggle, one must also communicate one’s globality—a requirement crassly attested at the commercial pole by the 129 uses of “global” in the UBS report and, no less ostentatiously, at the prestige pole by the title of this year’s Biennale, “Foreigners Everywhere.” The latter could not simply take pride in exhibiting the highest-ever proportion of artists from outside the Northwest; it had to make this fact the central feature of its marketing campaign, emphasizing the unprecedented number of participating artists “who are foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporic, exiled, or refugees—particularly those who have moved between the Global South and the Global North.”12 Such cases reveal how global vision only counts as such when counterposed to other players’ Eurocentrism, which, of course, is just a different, more polite way of centering European institutions.

This feature of today’s art field contrasts an earlier phase in its globalization. As Buchholz shows, international biennials began to proliferate in the 1990s and 2000s. At that time, if their organizers mentioned “the global” at all, it was only as “a vague background category for looking at ‘local’ cases in relational terms” (GRA, 59). For instance, DAK’ART in Senegal (begun in 1990, made biennial in 2000) was open exclusively to African artists until 2014.13 This limitation enabled participating artists to work within local (Senegalese) and continental (pan-African) discourses without positioning themselves vis-à-vis an all-encompassing framework of “the global.” Now, however, the latter has attained what Buchholz calls “presumptive facticity” (GRA, 57). That is, we no longer question whether a global art world exists but rather take it for granted.

This assumption too contrasts a prior phase in the early 2000s when “the global” was more prone to scare quotes. At that time, influential critics and scholars asked whether the avowed multiculturalism motivating art-institutional globalization in fact did for culture what neoliberal market expansion did for economies. For instance, when James Meyer reviewed an exhibition of “Global Conceptualism” in 1999, he argued that words like “globalization” and “linkages” depended upon “the language of late-capitalist expansion, just as the show itself could be mounted only through the support of multinational corporations. One could hardly fault the curators for jumping onto the global bandwagon, but the show’s lack of reflexivity as to its implicit compliance with these social mechanisms undercut the force of its revisionist agenda.”14 Likewise, Pamela Lee, who asserted in 2003 that “something of a colonial logic underwrites the expansion of the art world’s traditional borders, as if the art world itself were gleefully following globalization’s imperial mandate.”15

Lee noted that the art world of the 2000s “responded to contemporary geopolitics largely through representations of the global and its thematics,” pointing to the then-voguish iconography of passports and airports.16 More or less self-critically, these works criticized the material conditions of art-world elites whose international travel from biennial to biennial allowed them to measure their importance in miles traveled.17 After all, full participation in an increasingly globalized art world requires prerequisite privileges unavailable to many outside the Northwest.18 To visit the Biennale from outside Europe requires disposable income, airport access, and a valid passport. Whereas I, an American citizen, can simply book a ticket to Venice and show my ID at the port of entry, someone from Bolivia, Cote d’Ivoire, or Vietnam must apply for a visa—and may well be rejected on arbitrary grounds. Thus, “the activities constitutive of the art world’s horizon are indivisible from the activities of globalization itself. What we treat as a given to our métier is, in fact, immanent to the processes we usually associate with the emerging transnational order.”19

Buchholz is much less pessimistic and cynical than I am. She points to “the rising diversity among autonomous elite[s]” in hubs like New York as evidence that such places have “become more globalized and decentered from within” (GRA, 151).^⁠20 Thus, “the role that these global art centers played, and the logics they employed, transformed as they moved from the older international order into an expanded field of exchange and struggle” (GRA, 151). But by what criteria? Does the mere presence of non-Northwestern players transform the tactics for advancement in hubs of concentrated symbolic capital? It seems to me rather the inverse: that the prevailing sentiments of Northwestern elites have, for the moment, made it easier for geographically diverse players to access field-shaping institutions. Individual curators, critics, and scholars from outside the Northwest have indeed benefited from this access, but so have the already elite institutions, which accrue the esteem now associated with self-proclaimed globalism.

As these remarks indicate, I am completely seduced by Buchholz’s use of the field-struggle framework—despite the diverging conclusions we draw from it. Yet a qualitative art historian like me might worry that this approach carries the pitfall that we skeptically associate with social-scientific methods writ large. We might fear that as soon as we introduce quantitative analyses of cultural practices, we risk reducing behavior to (in Loïc Wacquant’s words) an “objective structure, grasped from the outside, whose articulations can be materially observed, measured, and mapped out independently of the representations of those who live in it.”21 That is, we observers can apparently ignore what the players say about themselves and their intentions or, worse, dismiss these accounts as smokescreens for the strategic agendas underneath.22

Inversely, however, we do not want to claim that field-specific strategies result from deliberation, as though curators seeking to diversify their exhibitions’ geographic reach were secretly plotting to extract prestige from their subjects. It would be completely absurd and outrageously hypocritical for me to judge curators at prestigious American museums, critics for magazines like Artforum, or scholars at top-tier universities for not moving to institutions outside the Northwest.23 To that end, Bourdieu himself feared that his readers would misunderstand his statically derived results as implying the “rational calculation of clearly understood self-interest”—in other words, a conspiracy.24

Bourdieu expresses this anxiety in Homo Academicus, his study of French academia. While this book is, notably, one of the few major works by him that Buchholz does not cite, it will be essential to my conclusion. For while this volume does not directly concern the art world that is Buchholz’s and my focus, it offers a critical lesson for our analysis. In it, Bourdieu not only theorizes the opposition between mechanistic and conspiratorial explanations but also enacts the resulting understanding. Fusing the genres of social science and memoir, he attempts “to test the outer boundaries of reflexivity in social science and an enterprise in self-knowledge.”25

Buchholz too exposes herself to an autobiographical reading of her project. “My scholarly interest in global issues,” she writes, “is partly the product of growing up in Dresden, a city cut off from the outside world during the Cold War era” (GRA, xv). She recounts how, as a child, she yearned for forbidden globetrotting, a longing she fulfilled after the fall of the Berlin Wall at precisely the moment that “‘globalization’ was becoming a buzzword.” After this introduction, however, the author drops out of the story, ceding the stage to her interviewees and data. In my view, that division between first- and third-personal perspectives precludes the feature that made Bourdieu’s self-diagnosis so astounding: a methodological circularity that always threatened to be self-undermining.

After all, if Bourdieu convinces us to treat academia as a field of struggle in which professors are players and their research is a tactic, then we must also treat his arguments as such. We must ask how he advanced in the academic field by applying his field analysis to the university system. Take his study of the student protests in 1968. Rather than review the various participants’ professed attitudes, Bourdieu identified a few critical conflicts in the overall field and then mapped the players’ stances onto their positions vis-à-vis those conflicts. For instance, the French academy was then producing a record number of degrees, meaning that prestigious credentials no longer guaranteed prestigious careers. To children of privilege—who, as we now say, “did everything right”—this devaluation was intolerable. Conversely, students from underprivileged backgrounds found the prestige associated with their positions as students—no matter what came after—to be its own reward.26 These differences in background accordingly shaped the groups’ views on the ’68 crisis. In the end, Bourdieu found, “there is an almost perfect homology between the space of the stances … and the space of the positions held by their authors.” He therefore concluded that it is not “political stances which determine people’s stances on things academic, but their positions in the academic field which inform the stances that they adopt on political issues.”27

Such arguments might seem mechanistic in precisely the way that we want to reject. The Bourdieusian antidote, however, is reflexivity. The examiner must be willing to examine his own position in that very space. In the appendix to Homo Academicus, the author graphed the results of a factorial analysis showing correspondences among various biographical properties.28 If we stare closely at the minute print of the labeled points on his graph, we find one labeled “Pierre Bourdieu.” That dot is an outlier, marginalized by the sociologist’s unlikely combination of origins and outcomes—the son of a postal worker who grew up in a tiny commune and spoke a dialect of Gascon but who had improbably risen to the topmost rung of Parisian academia. If we were then to ask, based on his analysis, how the person at these coordinates would have responded to ’68, we would predict that he would not have joined the vocal protestors. And indeed, Bourdieu was one of the very few prominent sociologists who did not comment on the crisis in real time—a silence that, he mused wryly, had undoubtedly cost him potential prestige and public recognition.29

Reading this analysis, I shudder with recognition. Today—as museums are forced to slash operating budgets, culture magazines struggle to stay afloat, and universities defund the humanities—a glut of newly credentialed job-seekers are entering the battle royale for positions in these shrinking markets.30 That is, the conditions of the art world’s prestige pole now seem akin to those that Bourdieu saw as the causes of ’68. But if a given academic’s stance on the student protests could be correlated with their relative starting point in the field of struggle, can the same be done today with respect to “the global”? What would analysis of today’s curators, critics, and scholars show as salient predictors of their stances toward this concept?31

I will accordingly conclude by inviting the reader to scrutinize my stance in relation to my position. For in the end, as Bourdieu wrote, “the harshest and most brutally objectifying analyses [must be] written with an acute awareness of the fact that they apply to he who is writing them …. the author of this or that apparently ‘cruel’ sentence bears it along with them.”32 While I won’t go so far as to graph my background, credentials, and present position in the prestige economy (freelance critic, adjunct teacher, etc.), I must ask myself: how do I benefit from invoking and critiquing “the global”? What am I doing by writing this essay? Cui bono?

Larissa Buchholz’s book is an ambitious attempt to make sense of how globalization has affected the contemporary art world since the 1980s. It is a much-needed study with rich historical depth and empirical research—the best sociology book on the art market I have read in years. While The Global Rules of Art raises many fascinating questions, I would like to home in on some of those encapsulated in its main thesis: “The emerging global field—with its dual cultural world economy—is structured around a fundamental divide between art and money.”1

What Buchholz means by this can be summarized as follows. The global contemporary art field has integrated non-Western artists in two distinct and increasingly antagonistic forms. Opposing “accounts that associate globalization with the unmitigated growth of market forces for determining artistic prestige across borders, [her] study instead posits that the contemporary visual arts have become fundamentally structured around a dual cultural world economy” (GRA, 6). On the one hand, a growing number of those from a wide range of countries (especially in Africa and Latin America) have been successfully legitimized through a “non-commercial,” “cultural” circuit of biennales, institutions, and avant-garde galleries—but with moderate financial success on the auction market. On the other hand, those from a much smaller number of steadily developing countries (first and foremost China) have met unprecedented success in the “commercial” market without much previous validation from art experts and globally recognized artistic institutions. This is what she calls the “fundamental divide between art and money.” My intention here is not to discuss Buchholz’s results per se, which I find overall quite convincing, but the way in which they are framed—and, more specifically, the polarity “art vs. money” which lies at the heart of the book’s conceptual apparatus.

Buchholz’s analysis builds on a proposition that Bourdieu famously developed in The Rules of Art but articulated as early as 1977 in an essay entitled “The production of belief: contribution to an economy of symbolic goods.” He wrote: “The opposition between the ‘commercial’ and the ‘non-commercial’ reappears everywhere. It is the generative principle of most of the judgments” in the cultural field.2 Because art is socially conceived as being tarnished by money, he wrote, accumulating symbolic capital means deferring economic capital: “the opposition between ‘genuine’ art and ‘commercial’ art corresponds to the opposition between ordinary entrepreneurs seeking immediate economic profit and cultural entrepreneurs struggling to accumulate specifically cultural capital, albeit at the cost of temporarily renouncing economic profit.”3

Bourdieu’s model, as well as Buchholz’s elaboration on it, assumes a fundamental opposition between “art” and “money,” an opposition which is considered a “structural invariant,” to quote again from Bourdieu, essential to the dynamics of the cultural field. It comes back again and again in The Global Rules of Art under different guises: “autonomous” vs. “heteronomous,” “noncommercial” vs. “commercial,” “symbolic” vs. “economic” value, etcetera.4 However, I believe this assumed polarity between art and money raises questions on both theoretical and practical levels and risks generating misunderstandings. I therefore wonder whether the phenomena described in Buchholz’s book could not be better framed with a different terminology.

Bourdieu’s model was deeply rooted in his understanding of the symbolic revolution in nineteenth-century France: the rise of “art for art’s sake” and the birth of the avant-garde, which, for him, epitomized the conceptual opposition—and temporal cycle—between cultural capital and economic capital. As Buchholz summarizes his position, the avant-garde was “underpinned by a ‘charismatic ideology’ that rejects any compromise with profane worldly forces, including commercial ones. This refusal is necessary for an artist to gain recognition as an exceptional, authentic creator, and the artist expresses it through work that resists easy absorption by an established market” (GRA, 113). Bourdieu’s conception was indebted to 1960s–80s social art history and sociology of art; importantly, it was based on literary representations much more than on actual practices of the nineteenth-century art world. More recent art-historical studies, informed by archival research and the material analysis of artworks rather than writers’ and critics’ discourses, tend to offer a different picture of this period. For example, Paul Durand-Ruel, the self-proclaimed “defender” and “patron” of the Impressionists, was also the dealer of the Academy’s most celebrated and economically successful William Bouguereau. The nineteenth-century “divide between art and money” was a matter of (in part retrospective) discursive construction rather than clearly defined practices of the time.5

The sociologist Viviana Zelizer has insisted on the intricate interpenetration of monetary and cultural practices: while no realm of social, and even intimate life, is immune to economic logics, she argues, market practices are likewise traversed by social, cultural, and affective behaviors.6 The art field is a paradigmatic example of those entanglements: aesthetic appreciation, social reward, and the excitement to make a good deal or to benefit from material advantages are most often impossible to tell apart, even for the actors themselves—be they collectors, dealers, curators, or artists.

As a result, while the “dual cultural world economy” is quite straightforward and convincing in theory, it turns out quite tricky in practice. What distinguishes, for example, an “avant-garde gallery” from a “commercial gallery” (GRA, chapter 3) or a “patron” from a “speculator” (GRA, chapter 7)? Is it their wealth, their business methods, their choice of artists, their (explicit or assumed) motivations, their reputation among their peers—or, most likely, a complex mix of all this?

If we were to consider a list of individual galleries or collectors worldwide and endeavor to position them on an “art vs. money” continuum, there would likely be many disagreements. The reason for this is that, to my mind, the opposition between “non-commercial” and “commercial” is, more than anything else, a polemical, performative tool traditionally used by (some) actors of the field to discredit a competitor or defend an ally. While, in line with the methods of “pragmatic sociology,” adopting this grid could be useful to understand how actors in the field formulate critiques and justifications—at least in Western countries—I am not sure that it is the best model to ground a description of how the field operates in practice, especially at a global scale.

Finally, the “art vs. money” model and its accompanying couples of lexical opposites, such as “non-commercial” vs. “commercial” or “autonomous” vs. “heteronomous”—even nuanced as “relatively” autonomous or heteronomous—risks obscuring some of the complex and interesting ways in which economic and aesthetic concerns intersect. As the author rightly points out, that biennales are not spaces where art is actually bought and sold does not mean that market interests (and more generally economic interests—touristic, for example) are absent. Speaking of biennales as belonging to an “art” (vs. “money”) category is therefore possibly confusing. The problem becomes all the more salient when these categories are applied to works of art. The chapters on Gabriel Orozco and Yue Minjun are very well-informed as far as the development of their career is concerned. However, the terms used by the author to describe each of their artistic practice (the former’s as “anticommercial,” “experimental,” or “conceptual” art and the latter’s as “legible,” “intelligible,” and displaying a “simple aesthetic style”), reflecting the lingua franca of dealers and critics, are very unspecific and debatable. Again, they are loaded with value judgments more than they are descriptive. I would argue that the complex ways in which the aesthetic and material features of works of art are connected to economic issues can hardly be framed in such binary terms. All artists face economic constraints and have to integrate them, one way or another, as creative constraints.

To understand how they do so in different geographic and socio-economic contexts, we need additional methods. We need to reconstruct what the art historian Michael Baxandall presented as the convoluted adjustments between the artists’ choices and their economic horizons.7 Artworks are partly a product of their economic surroundings, but they also actively redefine them in return, contributing to the dynamic reconfiguration of markets. I have suggested here that, in my opinion, the opposition between art and money is more a matter of discourse than practice; it mobilizes polemical rather than descriptive categories, and for these reasons, it can be confusing and counterproductive to analyze art field’s practices in their complexity. Therefore, my question to the author is: do we still need it? Or could we imagine devising a different terminology that could support the main theses of The Global Rules of Art without resorting to this polarity?

On Dirt and Money. Or, Whose Rules?

There’s a square black soap sitting on my desk incised with a curious circular motif that is asking me to tell you how it got here: it’s a remnant of Otobang Nkanga’s installation Carved to Flow (2017), which I encountered several years ago at Documenta (in Athens and Kassel, fig. 1).1 This was a complex, multifaceted, multi-venue installation. It was part sculpture, part performance, part collaborative soapmaking enterprise exploring the notion of a circular economy.2 Yet this single soap crystallizes my experience of the entire installation perhaps because it memorializes the unusual means by which I acquired it. Nkanga titled a photograph of a similar moment—where the soap is suspended in mid-air between two sets of hands, one poised to release it, the other cupped to receive it—08-Black Stone -The Transaction (fig. 2).3

On entering the Neue Galerie gallery in Kassel, I saw multiple waist-high semi-circular structures comprised of black cubes stacked in a checkerboard pattern (fig. 3). Performing salespeople ambled around the gallery, wearing skirts-cum-serving trays arrayed with a range of materials including the black cubes, which, as I learned from chatting with one of them, were cold-process soaps made of olive, laurel, and coconut oils, sage charcoal, indigo, and more. And yes, they were available for sale.4 To buy one, I was directed to the museum desk, where for twenty euros cash, I bought a bar. Even then, it felt very unusual, unprecedented even, to be prompted to transact in cash within the space of the exhibition and to purchase a share of this artwork.5 For spaces like the Neue Galerie define themselves as noncommercial—that is, by their exclusion of all commercial transactions. Mundane and vulgar activities such as shopping, eating, and drinking are confined to the gift shop or restaurant, always pointedly sited outside the exhibition space.

Global?

Even though Nkanga’s work (and several others at Documenta that year) confirm that economics has been central to contemporary artists across the world for decades, art historians have largely avoided serious consideration of the subject. Certainly, the economic shifts accompanying the globalization of markets have not been adequately examined, especially on the continent of Africa (my research focus), where globalized markets and the accompanying embrace of neoliberal policies triggered a cascade of local and regional social, political, and agricultural effects. There is no doubt that the market and economics are crucial to better understanding contemporary art, and so I applaud how Larissa Buchholz’s The Global Rules of Art dives deeply, ambitiously, and rigorously into this realm.

As a sociologist, however, Buchholz’s interest is not in the art market as a purely economic phenomenon but rather in the social norms and “rules” that shape it. In The Global Rules of Art, she expands Pierre Bourdieu’s schema of a cultural “field” from a national to a global scale, arguing that a heightened degree of international travel, exchange, and exhibition opportunities in contemporary art evince the emergence of a “global cultural field” after 1989.6 I found the sociologist’s perspective incredibly valuable, if only for the way it reveals the peculiar “worldness” of the art “field,” which those inhabiting that world often mistake for the world itself. Being reminded of the idiosyncrasy of one’s own beliefs, whether their bizarre contradictions or shocking homogeneity, can be sobering. There were many occasions when I appreciated how Buchholz’s outsider perspective offered a wonderful lens into the oddities of the culture of contemporary art. On the other hand, although Bourdieu’s work in general is an important beacon for many artists and art writers, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (translated into English and published in 1996) developed its argument to explain a very specific socio-historical context, that of the nineteenth-century French avant-garde and its premier novelist, Gustave Flaubert. The question, then, is whether this text—and the uses that Buchholz makes of it—can transcend this particularity and travel beyond the terms of academic sociology to encompass dynamics of art-making and reception outside of northern histories.

The sociological operation of applying and extending Bourdieu’s Rules of Art to a more global art world is fraught on several counts. First, it presumes and then rhetorically constructs a unified global art project, brushing aside the many objections lodged against such assumptions. The question of whether the art world is global or not still depends a great deal on whom you ask and where they stand. From multiple perspectives, critics in Africa, art gallerists in Asia, or academics in Europe will tell you why the art world is not global. Others will explain how it always has been, a relativizing approach that hinges on a change of degree, not of kind, one of magnitude, not of fundamental substance. Buchholz falls in this latter camp, which I think dodges the toughness of the issue. Part of the trickiness, then, in scaling up from a national to a global field lies in attempting to quantify a qualitative change, which places a great deal of pressure on data to answer questions of meaning.

The Global Rules of Art documents two crosscurrents in the globalization of contemporary art: expansion and inequality. While the art market has significantly increased its global footprint, its distribution of power remains extremely asymmetrical. Just a few countries exert real power, with almost all the most influential art galleries and auction houses under European, North American, and Chinese control (GRA, 97–98). It’s the same with the top art fairs, 72% of which are under the domain of the north, 16% in Asia (again, almost all in China), leaving only 13% for the rest of the world (GRA, 76). Moreover, in the case of the top fair, Art Basel, between the 1970s and 2015, this domination did not change at all.7 Such extraordinary institutional stasis confirms how the values that structure Art Basel’s (highly competitive) rules of entry and excellence are far from global but strictly peculiar to, and dominated by, European and North American cultures and economies.8

I want to pause here to note my language in the previous sentences, since the words I have just used to describe these relationships—under the domain of, dominated by—suggest how deeply, even semantically, rules are lodged in sovereignty. (Was this what Arthur Danto picked up on when he characterized Bourdieu’s tone of “irascible authority” to which he was certainly “entitled” when he blurbed the book?) They are indelibly tied to power structures and ownership, to the “ruling elite” or the so-called “1%” as Andrea Fraser, in her own brilliant reading of Bourdieu, noted.9 Or, as Fred Wilson titled a 1991 work questioning the entitled authority of Picasso and the norms of cultural appropriation they authorized, Picasso: Whose Rules?

Likewise, museums, as we know, are not distributed globally and remain heavily concentrated in the U.S. and Europe. While “the territorial scope of noncommercial institutions that exhibited contemporary artists from foreign countries had nearly tripled” between 1980 and 2017, that expansion did not equalize the field (GRA, 45). The U.S. continues to dominate, controlling nearly 30% of these institutions. Outside the north (and China), the majority of countries have five or fewer. Put bluntly, museums are operated in the north, funded by northern corporations, and rarely send their collections to exhibits on the African continent. As northern-dominated institutions, the art market and museums occupy a very specific cultural space, grounded in the particular histories and economies of the north and its institutions. It thus seems unclear to me how such restricted northern institutions might generate truly “global” rules.10

Autonomous and heteronomous zones

For Buchholz, after Bourdieu, the “tension between relatively autonomous and heteronomous subfields or ‘poles’” fundamentally structures the field of global contemporary art (GRA, 18).11 This split—which I understood as zones defined by their distance from or proximity to the tastes, desires, and demands of the market and collectors—lies at the heart of her research schema and underpins both the book’s argument for a “divided” economy and the divergent logics of valuation among different agents (GRA, 19). Moreover, the fact that this understanding is supposedly shared unites the multitude of players into a global contemporary art field. Without question, the split between art and commerce is central to Euro-American histories of modernism—especially French modernism—Bourdieu’s own cultural context. And although shapeshifting incessantly, it has played itself out through embrace or transgression in categories of high and low, avant-garde and kitsch for decades.

Yet the divide between autonomous and heteronomous, like Bourdieu’s other categories, is culturally and geographically specific, born of the late twentieth-century French academy and embedded in the specific course of French history, theory, and society (which is likely why he never applied it to a global realm).12 It pivots on taught values and learned behavior and is grounded as much in Euro-American religion and Kantian philosophy as in economics or art. If this analytical framework is therefore not universal, then surely expanding it from a local context into a global one fails to account for differing views in parts of the world that do not reify a division between the market and the cultural realm, economic and symbolic value, or autonomous and heteronomous zones.13

It is therefore unsurprising that, when we look at art like Nkanga’s, we find little anxiety at transgressing the entrenched, yet naturalized, separation between the realms of money and art central to Euro-American modernism.14 In Carved to Flow, she inserts her own production within the larger capitalist flow of goods and ideas, embedding her “transactions” in the market, not outside of it. Likewise, the work’s title appends a sculptural process (carving) to one associated with cash (flow), further collapsing these immiscible categories. It rendered both art and money under the sign of liquidity—the ease of convertibility of an asset to cash—proposing change and exchange as the defining impulse of contemporary art and economics.15

Such liquidity as literal and symbolic flow formed the work’s subject and defining process, in which a complex circulatory system of tubes transported a mixture of oily, soon-to-be-rendered-soapy ingredients around a production space in a prolonged state of flow until they cooled and then hardened. (This is the classic way of making a cold-process soap as well as a nod to the clichés of global circulation.) A great number of these soaps had been made for sale or exchange (depending on your view), producing what Nkanga poetically named a “stock.”16 With her stock exchange and hard cash sales, roving sales people, and the use of the exhibition opportunity at Documenta with access to international press and markets as a launching pad for the establishment of a permanent non-profit soapmaking enterprise in Akwa Ibom, Nigeria, Nkanga firmly declined the longtime Euro-American division between art and money.17 Turning the white cube gallery into a site for exchange and transaction also brushed aside the authority vested by modernism in the division between autonomous and heteronomous zones, which plays out in the insistent need to separate the purity, cleanliness, and whiteness of the art space from the dirtiness of money and the market. Thoughtfully, one was offered charcoal soap to expunge the stain of this breach. Or perhaps to further augment it?18

Carved to Flow leans into the symbolic associations of dirt with money, a soiling that suggests the kind of paradoxical, if not hypocritical, components subtending the obsessive Euro-American division between art and money, between studio and market.19 Numerous other contemporary African artists have likewise lampooned the sanitizing function of the white cube and highlighted attempts to distance the bleached space of art from the dirty commodities of the market as a core contradiction of Euro-American modernism. In Kader Attia’s iconic video, Sugar and Oil #2 (2007), a perfect block of sugar cubes is doused, stained, then eaten by petroleum, the white cube slumping from solid rectitude into soiled liquid goo.20 If Attia allegorizes these commodities and renders the white cube a site of disorder, Marlene Dumas commodifies herself and pins the mess on her own body, affirming “I paint because I am a dirty woman. (Painting is a messy business.) I paint because I like to be bought and sold.”21 Collapsing subject and object so as to explicitly ally herself with the “dirtiness” projected onto women, the market, and Africa in signal pictures of European modernity, Dumas reclaimed a long history of association between female claims to the public realm, whether economic or political, and their representation as “dirty” when they step out of line or defy their place in the established male order.

Dumas’s statement also points to the false piety of Euro-American avant-garde postures of distance from the market as a privileged, affected disdain that only citizens of the world’s wealthiest countries can afford. Only those who possess actual access to the market have the power to rhetorically renounce it. Hence artists’ strategic embrace of the market, self-conscious distancing from it, or total renunciation all evince a set of choices—or scripts to be followed—which are only available to certain artists in certain areas of the world. This rulebook is scripted for an elite few.

On context

Buchholz attends primarily to global institutional circuits such as biennales and consecrating institutions such as “Top 100” lists and competitions, rather than looking to the internal dynamics within a country or region. These criteria follow from Bourdieu’s contention that a field (in this case, global contemporary art) is relatively independent from broader political economies or technological change. She critiques several art-historical studies that link politics with art for simply assuming that art “reflects” larger political conditions, or as she puts it, for “seeing art’s globalization as merely a passive reflection of wider political-economic or technological developments” (GRA, 14).22

Certainly, she is right to reject such a simplistic model of reflection. Yet art historians have long replaced such functionalist accounts with many more nuanced explorations, which delineate the shifting dynamics and relationships between art and politics, in almost every period and on every continent.23 Indeed, “context” has for decades been so central to art history that a philosopher like George Dickie could argue in the 1990s that it is the explanatory norm.24 Certainly in modern and contemporary art history, the relationship between politics and practice has been worked through in sophisticated ways.

From an art-historical point of view, Buchholz’s focus on global, corporatized institutions erases the local and specific historical and geographic factors that shaped or resisted globalized markets and cultures. It can also authorize de-emphasizing how global events materialized as particular conditions in particular times and places—South Africa’s regime change, which started in 1989, or the sweeping impact of Structural Adjustment programs across Africa in the 1990s—which structured individual artists’ practices and regional discourses.25 Of course, in theory, emphasizing the global does not necessarily erase the local. In practice, however, there is a long history of it doing so. Uncritically endorsing the global—which has always been the positive unmarked term in the pairing and has long been favored by commercial interests—is difficult to square with the widespread understanding of global markets as purveyors of increased inequality.26

Additionally, Buchholz’s approach reduces the complexity of art to a simple commodity (whether an object of economic, social, or symbolic value), thereby rendering the artwork a means and not an end. This produces a petrification of meaning in which the work is rhetorically overdetermined by and beholden to the luxury market and its values and markers of prestige, whether exclusivity and rarity or heritage, craftsmanship, and quality.27 For art historians or artists, such a schema can be strangling. The poetics of the work—its impulses, leaps, and accidents of form and meaning—are all compressed into the rigid schema of a global field’s framework.28 Subjecting art to this kind of quantifying analysis may produce sociological truths, but it feels fundamentally, even inimically, opposed to the most basic understanding of art as that which defies the simple accounting of capitalist rationalism and flouts the commanding narratives of desire concocted by luxury markets.

So what’s shared, really?

Certainly, walking through Documenta or the Venice Biennale, it can appear that many artists share interests and investments, visual languages and textual rhetoric. One sees echoes and resonances, parallels and likenesses. Strong curatorial themes and savvy installation design aim to create a semblance of unity; indeed, large-scale exhibitions especially need to artfully juggle reverberations and apparent contrasts to draw hundreds of works into an overall image of cohesion that also looks accidental and a bit disorderly. Moreover, in such venues, when viewers have limited time, exhibitors, and space, artists are always performing in tongues, strategically situating their work into easily digestible, internationally intelligible grids of meaning. Hence, contemporary artists from the global south flirt relentlessly with Euro-American histories, artists, and ideas to make their work readable to a cosmopolitan Western-leaning audience and, often, to dismiss these northern histories or mark their distance from them. Often, the criticality of the latter is lost amidst the enthusiastic recognition of the former. By reworking canonical modernist images, titling local work “after” those of European classics, or quoting the extremities of Greenbergian formalism, many—perhaps all—of the artists who rose to global prominence in the last three decades have been savvy cosmopolitans.

Buchholz reads the Venice Biennale differently, citing it as an example of the coherence of the global field of contemporary art. She explains, “What unites participants most fundamentally is a shared vision of a cultural practice as a common global phenomenon—and thus a common symbolic battleground—as well as their belief in the value of the stakes involved in that practice” (GRA, 17). Though at the broadest level art has always been a common global practice, it seems implausible to imagine globally shared beliefs and investments in the stakes of art practice. Of course, this depends on what you define as a shared belief. Do the artists exhibiting in Venice share anything at all besides the nominal agreement that Venice is an important venue to show work?29 Beyond that shallow consensus, surely they differ in every way. Even presuming they do share the pragmatic recognition that there are certain transnational circuits that are key for success, how would such a simple instrumentalist belief form the basis for constituting a meaningful community of values? Making an argument for a shared vision that goes deeper than a superficial appearance of consensus demands elucidating a shared sense of ethics, formal goals, aesthetic values, and processes, all of which are not a concern here.

Visiting art fairs, biennales, and exhibitions is a very different experience than visiting an artist’s studio. The former are carefully staged temporary worlds and ephemeral communities to which participants “belong” with a provisional sense of belonging, often united under the sign of spectacle. They are images of unity constructed by galleries, corporate sponsors, and even curatorial statements as part of the infrastructure of the same institutional frameworks that have a deep stake in promoting the robustness and permanence of this fragile bubble-world. Artists, or their work, may fleetingly be part of such configurations, but they return to their studio where their work is grounded in more consistent routines and communities. There is almost nothing unified about global contemporary art. It’s fragmentary and incoherent and made more so by artists’ strategic performance of legibility and sameness. It’s precisely because it’s such a hydra that biennales such as Venice need to be crystallized visions of unity. It is intuitively appealing to believe in them, as it is appealing to believe in a coherent, stable, describable conception of global contemporary art.

If Western art hinges on a foundational split from the market, within contemporary African art, the market does not function as a structuring opposition but as a far more expansive visual sign. Unencumbered by the specific history that created this schism in Europe, with no debt to Kantian aesthetics and its enduring binaries of art and craft, most African artists conceive art and the market in African terms and as a product of African histories. In fact, modernity is often seen precisely as an economic concept and has been articulated in terms of financial security and the very accoutrements of bourgeoise comfort.30 At the same time, especially for women, as Nkanga’s project suggests, the market has also been viewed as a place of potential and a site for seizing economic opportunity.31

Nkanga’s work joins Attia’s Sugar and Oil #2, or Ibrahim Mahamas cocoa sacks, or Pascale Marthine Tayou’s chocolate landscapes in highlighting the physicality and materiality of global commodities often rendered abstract by the market, their locality erased along with the sweat of the labor needed to extract them.32 These artists’ investment in deploying globally traded commodities as art materials points to a final dimension of why African artists generally choose not to share the Euro-American tradition of separating the realms of art and money: such detachment underpins the abstraction and then the complete erasure of the materials, processes, and supply chains that yield finished products (cobalt in iPhones or chocolate or oil). Such disaffiliation has long been a convenient mechanism to erase the sources of northern wealth, which is often the result of draining the global south and, earlier, the trade in enslaved people.

Hence, the carefully patrolled division between the heteronomous and autonomous that structures Euro-American art is not just an inert relationship that happened to emerge. Since T. J. Clark, art historians have rooted this split in a plucky narrative of freedom and independence, starting with the French Revolution, the demise of the official Salon, the need for artists (famously, Courbet) to sell to the public, and the creation an art market.33 But the 1860s were also a high point of colonial activity. The art market and museums flourished in the heyday of colonial plunder and a massive global commodities trade, embedding European modernism and its cultural norms in colonial modernity from its very origins and demanding the need for rules to erase the causal relationships between finished goods and raw materials, between wealth and its distant source.

When Fred Wilson placed slave shackles next to a repoussé silverware urn in Metalwork, 1793-1880 (1992–93) he used simple visual association to draw the line between interdependent but carefully erased material histories. He implied that the existence of one was a direct causal effect of the other: in this case, that the beauty of art was a product of the market in enslaved peoples.34 Similarly, Kara Walker’s Sugar Baby used the industrial and metaphoric process of refinement to suggest how the cultural refinement of the North American elite was enabled only by the material refinement of Caribbean “blood” sugar. The line between the art, beauty, and luxury of what we see in the north and the violence of the capitalist market that produced this wealth has been highlighted and critiqued by artists like Wilson and Walker for decades. Nonetheless, it is always in danger of being sutured back together by the powerful rules of forgetting and erasure that dominate the neoliberal marketplace.

There is a lot at stake, especially for elites in the north, in maintaining the division between art and money, just as there is a continued investment in severing things, or ideas, from their local origins so that they appear natural, inevitable, and scalable, when they are artificial and highly specific to a discipline and its culture. Nkanga’s Carved to Flow proposes the notion of a circular, interconnected economy as an alternative to extractive economies, noting, “There is no singular event. Everything is connected with everything.”35 Other African artists invite us to remember why painting is a “messy business,” why art and the market need to be uncomfortably collapsed together as in a heap of sugar and oil rather than carefully pried apart, their division patrolled and reinforced by French theory. At this point in time, it feels as if Pierre Bourdieu’s categories act with and in service of still-powerful norms of European domination and forgetting. They perpetuate old mythic divisions that, for decades, artists have sought to uncover, expose, and reconnect.

Roots and Branches

Octavio Paz wrote that “All works of art belong to a soil and a moment, but all of them tend to transcend that soil and that moment: They are from here and they are from there.”1 Two opposed aspects of the artwork: its specific national context and its more universal significance. In Mexico, these alternatives have periodically sparked heated debates. In the fifties, for instance, some artists looked beyond our borders and began to make abstract paintings, prompting the muralists to launch furious accusations against them as if they were no less than traitors. As David Alfonso Siqueiros once said, “There is no other way but ours.”2 However, there were some artists eager to breathe a different air and prove that, in fact, there could be hundreds of roads to walk, like the poet Jorge Cuesta, who had a very lucid vision of the time to come when he said, “We have paid special attention to recovering our roots, to directing our efforts towards the roots. I want the branches.”3

Decades later, the debate was reignited when artists such as Gabriel Orozco decided to blur the borders between the national and the universal, treating them not as separate categories but, as Paz said, “happily, in perpetual relationship.” That is, he chose not only to look beyond Mexico but even to leave the territory completely in search of his own aesthetic vocabulary, away from local controversies and preferences but carrying in his suitcase all his experiences as an artist who grew up in Mexico, the son of none other than a muralist.

It is not that his work does not make references to his country of origin. But his “Mexicanness” consisted in not being evident, expressed as an omission of themes and issues easily recognizable as national. His early works expressed this background in very subtle ways, like his inclination to work with no more than what is at hand—something typical of places where everything is scarce and there is no waste. Even a series of works made in the United States, forming part of the Penske Work Project (1998), are proof of this. For this project, Orozco rented a Penske truck and drove around New York City. Afterwards, he would go through the garbage containers and build a sculpture right there on the sidewalk. These pieces were later assembled at Marian Goodman Gallery, forming together a sort of sculpture garden—some looked like flowers, others like grass, still others like birds—although the building material came from pure waste. In addition to the importance of recycling—because in developing countries everything is recycled, and nothing is thrown away—these works convey a feeling for beauty where there is none.

I speak of all this because, as a Mexican art critic, Larissa Buchholz’s account of the process of art-world globalization resonates with many themes that have preoccupied me over the years, especially regarding Orozco, an artist whose work I have written about on numerous occasions. With particular interest, I followed her account of how Orozco, both despite and because of being Mexican, managed climb the lists of the most desired artists across the globe.

In Mexico, Orozco’s career was subjected to constant scrutiny, and although some critics have said that his work is not “essential in order to understand the history of ‘Mexican’ art in the nineties,” the truth is that his absence paradoxically became one of the most inescapable presences of that period.4 A kind of shadow that never ceased to hang over the art scene and to mark, in some way, the path that others would try to follow later on. Some also argued that Orozco strategically decided to employ a sufficiently international aesthetic vocabulary so as to be able to insert his work more easily in the global field. As Buchholz explains, “He was charged for being complicit with metropolitan misrepresentations that would grant him unwarranted special ‘Mexican’ status” (GRA, 177). For me, it was never a matter of a calculated internationalism—or a “cosmopolitan universality,” as Buchholz calls it. Rather, as literary critic Guillermo Sheridan observed in relation to the group “Contemporáneos,” there was a “preference for what was one’s own, rather than for what was ours.”5

Artists from the Global South are always expected to translate into visual terms what it means to come from their particular countries with their poverty and their increasing political tensions. But that is not what is asked of Western artists. It always seemed unfair to me that Orozco was accused of not fulfilling or even betraying certain expectations when he did just what a young artist should do: work non-stop, try this and that, look for his own solutions to existing problems. To be sure, his personal solutions read as in many ways extremely Mexican—as in his inescapable confrontation with the work of the most important Mexican photographer of the twentieth century, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, who also decided to look outwards synthesize elements that were legibly very Mexican with those that were surprisingly surrealist—that is, European.

In some of Orozco’s early photographs, it is possible to find a similar search as the one that distanced Álvarez Bravo from some of his contemporaries, like Henri Cartier-Bresson, since it was not the decisive moment that interested him. Closer to a sculptor, he focused more on finding the secret geometry of simple things, like a big pumpkin visited by a small snail—the subject of a photograph from 1928—very close in spirit to Orozco’s famous Cats and Watermelons from 1992. Instead of seeking to distill the soul of his country into images of its people and their customs, Orozco preferred unimportant things and their almost imperceptible presence. Consider Home Run (1993), for which he provided oranges to those residents of Manhattan’s 54^th street whose windows looked onto the sculpture garden at MoMA, inviting them to place the fruits on their windowsills as a sort of a non-sculptural sculpture. Nothing inside the museum suggested that the piece was taking place on the other side of the Street, so only the most observant visitors and attentive pedestrians would spot the orange spheres peeking through the trees.

Orozco called this “a deterritorialization of style,” an approach that allowed him, sure, to enter the global sphere but also to produce a very original body of work that somehow seemed rooted in his personal conception of Mexico. Compare My Hands Are My Heart (1991), a photograph that shows the artist clutching to his chest a compressed small ball of Mexican clay, which becomes a kind of external heart.

Buchholz follows Orozco’s journey from being a Mexican artist unknown to the world to one of the central figures in the global scene in the 1990s. He functions as an emblem of a time when an artist could reach wide symbolic recognition despite coming from a peripheral country. For many years, Orozco’s work was considered extremely radical—Buchholz talks at length about his decision to exhibit nothing more than four yogurt lids in a completely white and empty gallery room. This work represented a real challenge to market logic since it offered nothing to collect. Orozco’s work dealt, he once said, with “production and distribution and perception in a different way.”6 And because of this, his was the kind of work that seduced anticommercial curators and renegade gallerists like Marian Goodman.

Buchholz’s report on Orozco’s career concludes around 2010. After that time, however, he took an unexpected turn. He seemed willingly to forfeit the legitimacy conferred upon him by museums and experts to position himself fully as a commercial artist. This occurred precisely around the second decade of this century after Orozco’s series The Samurai Tree engendered work increasingly distanced from his earlier insistence on subtle, spontaneous, and, many times, ephemeral gestures—such as his fabulous photograph Aliento sobre piano (1993), a nod to Marcel Duchamp’s aphorism that, “The condensation or moisture on polished surfaces (glass, copper) is infrathin.” Beginning as a conceptual experiment—producing all the possible combinations of the same pattern made of circles but rotating its colors as a chess knight would do—The Samurai Tree opened the door for a return to painting, that is, the very medium that Orozco had earlier repudiated with great determination.

Moreover, his return to painting brought him closer to the borders of the nationalist idiom that he once shunned since his most recent pictorial works—with their large-scale and obviously Mexican subjects—flirt with muralism. In his latest series of paintings, we see Coatlicue, the mother goddess of the ancient Mexicans, turned into a caricature that is crudely superimposed with the most masculine and Western image possible: the Vitruvian Man. This strange collage, however, can be explained only by the increase in Orozco’s prices since he abandoned his post-conceptual origins. His career thus suggests the contingency of the trajectories that Buchholz establishes, in which he exemplifies the global autonomous artist who seeks not profit but legitimacy.

What is “Global” about Contemporary Art?

Some Clarifications on the Global Field Perspective and “Distant Seeing”1

Up until the 1980s, artists from outside North America and Western Europe mostly found themselves at the margins of the international contemporary art field. Given the immense global changes of the past four decades, interdisciplinary scholars now explore whether this discriminatory, quasi-colonial situation has improved in any significant way. Some have hailed the advent of a more egalitarian “global art world” that is eroding old hierarchies and challenging previous norms. But other more skeptical voices, who view globalism largely through the lens of cultural imperialism, have attacked this idea as illusory, seeing globalization as a one-sided process where dominant actors from the “Global North” have merely cemented their chokehold on power at an expanded global scale.2

With The Global Rules of Art, I seek to carve out an alternative middle ground in this debate, one that highlights the art field’s contradictory transformations and avoids painting globalization in such zero-sum terms—as either revolutionary upheaval or outright reproduction, as either increasing diversity or calcifying homogeneity.3 Because a single book cannot address every aspect of contemporary art production or all art worlds around the globe, mine offers a focused history that analyzes the globalization of what I call the “art field.” To that end, before I reply to my interlocutors’ responses, let me first clarify how I see the book’s mission, establishing parameters for what it does and does not seek to do.

At its core, the book advances two inseparable arguments. I first demonstrate how, over the past forty years, a global art field has emerged that incorporates previously more marginalized countries and regions into a minimally integrated global space with shared institutional circuits, discourses, and stakes. While true parity in this new global arrangement remains elusive, extended exchanges and competitive struggles have gradually subverted the legitimacy of the old West-centric “international” order, opening space for the ongoing and contested construction of a more global framework for contemporary art, one better attuned to the contributions of artists, intermediaries, and art histories from almost every continent.

Second, I argue that these transformations have played out very differently in globalizing circuits centered on symbolic versus on financial values in contemporary art. As the art field globalized, it tore between a market-driven “heteronomous” subfield—where mega-galleries, art fairs, and global auction houses chase commercial profits—and an expert-driven “relatively autonomous” subfield—where international biennials and a rising class of global-trotting curators promote increasingly cosmopolitan artistic and intellectual values, featuring more work from postcolonial “peripheral” artists.4

Combining these two arguments, the book advances a multidimensional global framework that challenges any simple dichotomy between the “West” and “non-West” or between the “Global South” and “Global North.” Rather than the “unified global project” Maltz-Leca attributes to it, it shows how the globalization of the art field always includes (but does not resolve) contradictory dynamics. At its heart, The Global Rules of Art underscores the importance of theorizing the institutional diversity of globalizing cultural realms to identify the multiple logics and processes that mark their conflicting historical transformations.

In what follows, I first reflect on the challenges of interdisciplinary exchange between art history and sociology by identifying the epistemological barriers that art-historical doxa confronts when it encounters macro-historical accounts of contemporary art and its institutions. I then clarify what I mean by “global field,” describing how the term allows us to see the “globality” of contemporary art in new ways and to distinguish noncommercial and commercial circuits in global contemporary art. My hope is that this essay will offer insights into how a sociological perspective can provide a particular way of “distant seeing” global contemporary art that complements, rather than contradicts, art historical accounts’ traditional preference for micro-level narratives related to “material” objects,5 artistic production processes, or hagiographic stories. Ultimately, an interdisciplinary perspective can help us move toward a deeper and joint understanding of the complexities of contemporary art and its shifting institutional frameworks within a globalizing world.

Art Historical Doxa and Challenges to “Distant Seeing”

The Global Rules of Art combines large-scale analyses and fine-grained case studies, drawing on a wide range of source materials from more than a decade of research—including data about the arts infrastructures of about 150 countries, multiple institutional histories, abundant critical and art historical writings, multi-sited fieldwork across four continents, and extensive interviews with artists, critics, curators, gallerists, collectors, or auction house agents.6 I draw upon these sources to construct a history of the art field’s globalization that captures nested and interrelated macro-, meso- and micro-historical perspectives. Finally, I show how these approaches can illuminate artistic careers via two fine-grained case studies that trace the global career trajectories of two contemporary artists from formerly “peripheral” countries who managed to break through traditional barriers and gain worldwide critical recognition (Gabriel Orozco) or extraordinary commercial success (Yue Minjun).

By setting these micro-level analyses in dialogue with macro- and meso-level developments in the foregoing chapters, we can see how the intimate details of a single artist’s career inextricably implicate the numerous intermediaries and large-scale patterns that shape global history more broadly (and that tend to be left out of traditional case study approaches). Of course, the “global rules” that the book’s title metaphorically invokes are not intended to be a strict set of prescriptive guidelines that can predict how an artist’s career might unfold on a worldwide scale. Instead, they speak to an approach that incorporates historical dynamics at multiple levels and explains how they interact with each other to produce diverse global patterns.7

In reading the critiques of the book, I was struck with the way several of the art historians tended to stick to single artworks, artists, or mediators. The art historical habitus seems to be trained to be specific, to respect and even celebrate artistic details, but it can thereby overlook the importance of larger institutional and market dynamics that are at work as well. That hyper-focus on micro-level aspects ultimately misreads the book’s attempt to reveal also the global history of broader institutional contexts as a move that reduces the entirety of contemporary art to, as Maltz-Leca says, a “simple commodity,”8 which would fail to grasp an artwork’s unique singularity outside of any circuits of mediation and valuation. The book’s sociological approach, so the critique goes, risks destroying the “poetics of the work” and the “impulses, leaps, and accidents of forms and meaning” of great single artists or their heroic mediators (see Maltz-Leca and Cras).

Efforts to expand such an institutional-contextual perspective to a global scale seems to run afoul of what the discipline considers acceptable (or, perhaps, “decent”) scholarship.9 It appears from the outside, thus, that there may be art historical conventions and implied forms of doxa10 on the subjective level that hold a deep epistemological and methodological suspicion toward more macro-historical accounts of contemporary art in a global context—that is, studies that engage with “global art” as a particular space with a complex history, multiple institutions, and intersecting forces that affect (but do not determine) the global circulation of artworks and the “singular” evaluations of an idiographic kind that art historical experts ascribe to them. Such broader historical dynamics are ridiculed as “oddities” (Maltz-Leca), decried as totalizing, or conveniently outsourced to “globalized markets” (Maltz-Leca, Cras).11

Here, it may be productive to draw an analogy with debates in the field of comparative literature at the turn of the twentieth-first century. When Franco Moretti first presented his ideas of a “world literary system,” he was harshly critiqued as being totalizing and reductionist. But he made a critically important point: the whole of world literature is not merely the sum total of all the masterworks ever written, and thus we can’t understand it solely through an ever-growing corpus of hyper-specialized close readings. “World literature” poses a distinct problem of inquiry, and to tackle its full scope and complexity, we have to complement established approaches with different categories and methodologies. As he wrote:

world literature cannot be literature, bigger: what we are already doing, just more of it. It has to be different. The categories have to be different. “It is not the ‘actual’ interconnection of things,” Max Weber wrote, “but the conceptual interconnection of problems which defines the scope of the various sciences. A new ‘science’ emerges where a new problem is pursued by a new method.” That’s the point: world literature is not an object, it’s a problem, one that asks for a new critical method: and no one has ever found a method by just reading more texts. That’s not how theories come into being; they need a leap, a wager—a hypothesis, to get started.12

Moretti called his new critical method “distant reading,”13 an elegant term that also helped smuggle more quantitative approaches into traditional literary history and analysis.14 Today, distant reading refers to a range of computational methods that examine literary data across larger histories and geographies, a way of exploring world literature also as a complex system of power relations and interferences. Although Moretti faced “heated” and even “violent” reactions at the time,15 his interventions helped open new avenues of research and stimulated the growth of a subfield where world literary studies could converse with branches of the digital humanities and sociology.16

When I participated in a recent humanities conference at NYU, I was amazed at how many literary scholars incorporated “distant reading” approaches into their complex analyses. In that discipline, it seems that it has become much more normal to employ large-scale quantitative methods for exploring the transnational trajectories of books and writers. Such methods are no longer seen as a kind of literary vandalism. It has also become more common for researchers to consider how social institutional contexts within the world republic of letters perpetuate or challenge long-standing postcolonial hierarchies.

It appears that a comparable shift has not yet happened in art history. Certainly, there have been debates about “global art history,” “global modernities,” and other important ideas. New methodological frameworks have also decentered long-reigning Euro-American paradigms. But have these new developments realigned art history’s microscopic doxa so that it can incorporate large-scale perspectives on contemporary art in a global context? Have they, to extend Moretti’s term, created new modes of “distant seeing”?

It seems that the discipline of art history remains staunchly resistant to input from sociology or the digital humanities. Conversely, when quantitative studies do engage with the visual arts, they remain more concerned with their technical calculus and algorithms than with achieving art-historical insights or reaching those audiences. This mismatch has created a chasm that only very few scholars can, or even attempt to, bridge.17 But if art historians insist that the singularity of micro-optics can be the only legitimate way of engaging their object or if, on the other hand, they rely solely on overly broad contextual notions like “global capitalism” or “colonialism,” which are too often poorly defined and overly deterministic,18 then they will miss the intricate global institutional and cultural transformations that have happened in-between these two extremes—that is, precisely the space I want to articulate in the global art field. (It is also the space in which art historians themselves undoubtedly operate as social agents). My hope is that, within the shared intellectual minefield that is “global contemporary art,” we can reach a point where it’s possible to establish a constructive interdisciplinary dialogue that sees these various perspectives and methods as complementary instead of in conflict.

What is “Global” about the Art Field?

The term “art field” designates a “universe of belief, production and circulation” of artifacts and discourses that is inhabited by “specialized agents”19 engaged in various forms of exchange and struggle over its prevailing interpretative stakes20 and resources.21 It represents an intermediate space where larger “external” societal dynamics (economic, political, cultural, etc.) become refracted like a prism through the field’s own “relatively autonomous” logics and structures.22 An “art field,” unlike an “art world,”23 is not merely a community of shared discourses and collaborative networks; it is also a site of major inequalities and competition. In this sense, the term provides a uniquely comprehensive perspective to capture the contextual influences in the arts, placing specialized agents and institutions within a framework of power structures and meanings which are linked to forces that are both “internal” and “external” to the field.

In a fundamental sense, a global art field arises when agents redefine the scope and stakes of their interpretative exchanges and competition in global terms.24 In the contemporary art field, for example, ambitious curators now travel more extensively to engage projects across multiple continents and stay abreast of current developments. Leading galleries attend fairs around the world to forge connections, compete for sales, and promote their artists. And aspiring artists exhibit their work in territorially expanded circuits and among a larger global network of peers. But we should not stop here and reduce globalization merely to a “heightened degree of international travel, exchange, and exhibition opportunities” (Maltz-Leca). Instead, I suggest that we look at globalization in contemporary art as a more profound process of the vertical differentiation of a distinct field layer, a global dimension where the institutions, discourses, and stakes differ from those in “lower” regional or national art fields. This also implies, conversely, that the book’s approach does not “erase” the relevance and diversity of local art worlds, as Maltz-Leca’s response incorrectly claims.25 Instead, I argue that the global field constitutes just another tier within a larger, multi-scalar configuration, whereby fields at different scales coexist relatively independently, although their dynamics also intersect and influence each other. And as the study demonstrates, artists, intermediaries, or collectors can traverse and belong to local, regional, and global games simultaneously.26

But of course, as Maltz-Leca states, “the question of whether the art world is global or not still depends a great deal on whom you ask and where they stand.” The art historian observes, for example, that many artists in Africa don’t care about the global. While this might be a valid observation, it does not follow that those local art worlds remain completely insulated from the influences and imaginations of the “global art scene.” Globalization, then, is indeed not a binary question of “fundamental substance” but rather one of a “matter of degree,” which the book’s multi-scalar perspective wants to bring to the fore—going beyond any romantic (and essentialist) notions of the untouched singularity of local art production, but also behind any simplistic global top-down perspective.

To understand the globality of this emerging field layer, I interweave etic and emic meanings of the “global”—that is, the way the term is used as an analytic category and the meaning it has among people in the field itself. Its etic meaning refers, quite literally, to structures and processes with a worldwide reach, alas, across six continents. This way of understanding the global applies to the historical expansion of several key art infrastructures that I examine in the book’s first part as, for example, the worldwide spread and the relational interdependencies among international art biennials, transnational exhibition institutions, international art fairs, or auction houses. Comprehensive online platforms that track the exhibitions and sales of artists across all continents also fit that etic sense of the “global.” These all were relevant institutions for the global art field’s vertical emergence because they connected cultural agents from various national fields on a more frequent and expanded basis. Thus, they created an institutional infrastructure that facilitated more sustained cultural exchange and competition worldwide in the first place.27

But as Siegel notes, my book doesn’t presume that the sheer expansion of infrastructures was what made the field “global”: “The ‘global’ has not just been out there waiting for us to notice.” Instead, the process was intimately linked to ways people talked about and acted upon “the global”—the term’s emic dimensions. One of the book’s sections, for example, traces the rise and mutations of “global” discourse at Artforum International as an emic lens to understand how critics and other mediators in one of the field’s institutional centers shifted in their understandings of what the global stands for and how this informed shifting curatorial practices and art critical debates over time. More broadly, the book suggests that the new millennium saw an increasing normalization of this emic sense of the “global.” And, as Siegel summarizes the argument, “as soon as artists and curators, gallerists and collectors begin to think of themselves as participants in a global art world, they do not merely think differently about what their actions mean; they also act differently, keying their efforts … to different criteria.” In other words, “the global” came to life through the subjective representations as well as practices of participants, who developed new terminologies, beliefs, and codes that redefined the visions as well as cultural boundaries of contemporary art from international to global terms.

Contrary to the assertion of Maltz-Leca that the book presumes a “unified global art project,” however, this emerging “global vision,” as I call it, should not be mistaken for a new master narrative (GRA, 57). It merely formed a cultural bedrock that set the stage for new modes of interpretation and contestation. Organizers of art biennials around the world, for example, may have come to share a vision of “global,” rather than “international,” contemporary art, but their interpretations of what global contemporary art or a true “global exhibition” should mean remained open to intense debate (GRA, 27–42). The field framework’s unique attention to struggle and competition can accommodate this seeming duality: contemporary art became a battleground for multiple “global” perspectives, but the battle ultimately relied on a shared belief among participants that there is something “global” to fight about in the first place. In fact, the more that people debate what a “proper” global approach looks like, the more the “global” itself becomes entrenched in the field as both a shared frame of reference and an interpretative stake—an open, and thus powerful, signifier in which people continue to project their own situated assumptions and agendas.

Maltz-Leca wonders, however, if this development is sufficient to presume that there is anything “shared, really” at a global level. She states, for example, that visiting “biennales and art fairs is a very different experience than visiting artist studios,” since the latter would be “grounded in more consistent routines and communities.” But when she therefore laments that “There is almost nothing unified about global contemporary art,” since it is merely “fragmentary” and “incoherent,” I must admit that it is precisely this “almost nothing” that interests me the most. How can we capture and name this ephemeral cultural layer through which artworks and agents relate to one another in globalizing art circuits? And how and why has this layer evolved over time?

I disagree with Maltz-Leca’s dismissal of art biennials as mere “bubble worlds” and fleeting “spectacles.” The skewed comparison she draws between biennials and artist studios projects standards of cultural unity that simply are too localist, too microscopic. Her distinction also perpetuates a problematic binary between “true,” authentic local art production and mediation and the “almost nothing” global events that supposedly operate only to satisfy the “corporate” interests of major stakeholders.28 Sweeping normative dismissals like these fail to see how global circuits develop their own kinds of cultures. They also diminish the important role these seemingly shallow “bubble worlds” have played in contemporary art’s globalization.29 As indicated above—and as I detail in the book—the iterative, competitive stagings of “unity” in international art biennials or fairs over time importantly fed into an emic “global vision.” They also created feedback effects on a broader set of permanent art institutions across borders (GRA, 53–65). A global institution that Maltz-Leca dismisses out of hand, then, was actually a key catalyst in transforming the culture of the field from the “international” to the “global.”

Globality, of course, is not the same as equality. That holds true in both the etic and emic sense of the “global.” As the book demonstrates, major power imbalances persist in contemporary art, and the fact that the field’s biggest institutional centers have so far remained in the Northwest shows that globalization did indeed “not equalize the field” (GRA, part I). But persistent concentrations of resources and power should not be read as a sign of an “extraordinary institutional stasis,” as Maltz-Leca suggests. As I document, much more art institutions than ever are participating in contemporary art’s extended circulation. We have moved from a world of stronger dependencies—or even “control” as Maltz-Leca would phrase it—to one undoubtedly marked by more multidirectional, “asymmetric interdependencies.”30

Moreover, a multi-scalar field approach makes clear that we should not look at art museums in the Global North as homogeneous entities situated in homogeneous spaces, “grounded in the particular histories and economies of the north and its institutions” (Maltz-Leca). This overlooks how they are highly heterogeneous (e.g., in type, volume, history, or ownership), and how agents who work within them can have multiple allegiances. It also overlooks (contra Siegel) how certain cities in which they are situated actually transformed into more cosmopolitan global art hubs themselves in the past four decades, such as New York, Paris, Berlin, or London (GRA, 148–51). In shifting environments like these, major permanent institutions were gradually forced to reassess the legitimacy of Eurocentric art paradigms and recognize the importance of other perspectives and voices. Curators of important group exhibitions are nowadays expected to relate to globality. Maybe Maltz-Leca and Siegel already take for granted such partial transformations of cosmopolitanization and globalization also within “Northern” centers, which the book’s intermediate, transformational perspective seeks to bring into view.31 However, by minimizing such changes as mere stasis, they risk reproducing a Northern viewpoint at the very moment they wish to critique it.

I agree wholeheartedly with Siegel that we must continue exploring how major inequalities structure global artistic flows. If anything, the book’s distant seeing perspective on migration flows and global artistic careers reveals we have a long way to go before the global art field is truly equitable (GRA, chapter 5). But Siegel also asks: to what extent has globalization actually created new power inequalities? Are “consecrated institutions” in Northern centers that embrace globalism simply “firm[ing] up their elite positions by blocking the path for less-resourced competitors”? Are the rich simply getting richer? I agree that this dynamic applies to certain institutions, especially in the more oligopolistic structured market tier. As I explicate in the book, for example, when Art Basel and two major Northern auction houses adapted to globalizing competition, they actually asserted and increased their power further.32

But ultimately, among non-market art institutions, globalization has created more, not less, competition. Numerous players outside traditional Euro-American centers really have been able to assert greater influence. Think of the history of the biennials of São Paulo or Gwangju or the growing museum landscape in Asia. And even if cultural agents from the Global South have increasingly flocked to Northwestern centers to make it—which the book maps for certain top artists (GRA, 149ff) and which Siegel sees as a type of brain drain—it doesn’t mean these processes will solely benefit these centers of power in the long-term. There are several examples in the study (and beyond) of immigrant artists, curators, or art historians who have worked from within “Northern” institutions and used their resources to champion artists and perspectives from their countries or regions of origin. Here, again, we can see the critical importance of detailing these multi-scalar ambiguities and incomplete transformations. They are precisely the types of contradictory dynamics that a global field approach, which suggests an intermediate space of expanded exchange and continuing struggle, can capture that other frameworks currently cannot.

“Global Art” between Autonomy and Heteronomy?

Several responses also questioned the book’s attempts to move beyond monolithic models of globalization and better attend to the field’s internal contradictions—namely, those between “art” and “money.” Should we even distinguish between noncommercial and commercial players in the global art game? And if so, are the differences field theory draws between “relatively autonomous” and “heteronomous” positions and subfields the best way to do that?

Siegel and Minera argue that the book’s distinctions along these lines offer valuable new insight into contemporary art’s globalization, but Cras and Maltz-Leca largely reject them out of hand. Their critiques, however, inappropriately assume that my model merely takes Bourdieu’s ideas about these categories, which he developed in his study of nineteenth-century France, and upscales them to a global context, ignoring those passages where I criticize and overcome Bourdieu’s modernist, national framework (GRA, e.g., 19f; 116–21; chapters 5, 6, 7; and 269–73). Here, it is important to understand that any Bourdieusian study relies on a fundamental distinction between general formal theory—an analytical model of relationally defined concepts33—and substantive theory, which involves the empirical application, specification, and revision of that model to account for the particularities of different contexts and cases.34 As Bourdieu makes clear himself, a truly reflexive field analysis requires a conceptual “mode of construction that has to be rethought anew every time.”35 While Leora-Maltz and Cras see the distinction between noncommercial (“relatively autonomous”) and commercial (“heteronomous”) approaches as an outdated remnant of nineteenth-century European constellations, I am interested in what happens in the twenty-first-century global world. And while these readers might frame the ever-important tensions between “art” and “money” as merely an “inert relationship” (Maltz-Leca) or a static “structural invariant” (Cras),36 my study inserts them into the plight of history, describing how these divisions assume new forms, meanings, and relations within global circuits, which Bourdieu’s original theory is too narrow to address.

As the book’s historical account details, drastically different forces characterized the global transformations that shaped a “relatively autonomous” artistic subfield—institutionally spearheaded by biennials, artists, curators, art theorists, and avant-garde galleries—and an increasingly “heteronomous” commercial subfield helmed by art fairs, mega-galleries, auction houses, and a rising financial “art industry.” As the former field globalized, it did not evolve according to Bourdieu’s formalist logic. Instead, new contemporary discursive and cosmopolitan logics took hold. Groundbreaking postcolonial discourses, active debates about global art and contemporaneity, and new norms of cosmopolitan legitimacy were asserted—and all these developments took shape within a broader context of decolonization movements, rising immigration flows, and identity politics (GRA, chapters 2 and 6). In the same period, however, the globalizing art market deepened its connections with liberalized financial markets flush with new global wealth. Corporate market players increased their dominance, and a former avant-garde-led market witnessed the global triumph of a financial logic (i.e., art as an asset). But this too involved a series of transformations Bourdieu’s modernist model did not foresee (GRA, chapters 3 and 7).

Articulating these differences isn’t just about uncovering fundamental divisions in the globalization of contemporary art that alternative models, like “global art world,” typically obscure. More critically, it’s about revealing a historical pattern of increasing polarization that also runs counter to Bourdieu’s own interpretation of globalization in cultural fields.37 In fact, a key dynamic that underpins these new fractures between “art” and “money” at the global level is the radicalization of art investment and speculation games, and the book provides a framework to understand how these have come to operate on multiple continents.38 To a greater degree than ever before, leading artists’ valuations in the commercial markets top tiers have become decoupled from the judgments of critical experts and public art institutions (GRA, chapters 5 and 7). In light of these and other points, any reading that views The Global Rules of Art as simply Bourdieu with a new coat of paint misunderstands its fundamental points.

Theoretically, the book’s distinctions between noncommercial and commercial players in the global field should not be confused with Viviana Zelizer’s much broader problematization of the relationship between “monetary and cultural practices” in social life.39 They should also not be diluted with the truism that everyone in the art world—regardless of their orientation—has to support themselves through material means. This we know. But the question I’m interested in is how they do so and how different practices of cross-border art making and mediation transformed the field. Cras questions to what extent we can distinguish between an “avant-garde gallery” and a “commercial gallery” (GRA, chapter 3) or a “patron” and a “speculator” (GRA, chapter 7). But as I make clear, these actors—and those who fall in between the two extremes they represent—operate very differently on the ground and in ways that go beyond mere “discourse” and polemical “justifications” (GRA, chapters 6 and 7). To give just one particularly revealing example, Marian Goodman and Larry Gagosian have run very different types of galleries!40

Likewise, when the young artist Gabriel Orozco positioned himself against art as a commercial spectacle, he did so not just rhetorically but with concrete (and risky) artistic practices (GRA, 169–78, 186–93). His “relatively autonomous” post-conceptual strategies in the late eighties and nineties do not mean, however, that he didn’t problematize any economic processes or also include industrial objects in his work.41 Nor do they mean that he was completely free of any economic constraints or that he never had a gallery sale (both gross oversimplifications of my framework). To be sure, “all artists face economic constraints” (Cras). My contention, however, is that within globalizing art circuits, not all artists face these constraints in the same ways by succumbing to commercial attention-seeking strategies.

Moreover, the fact that art critics and other mediators themselves mobilized evaluative categories along the noncommercial-commercial spectrum to qualify or disqualify works by Gabriel Orozco and Yue Minjun does not undermine the validity of these categories for the study.42 On the contrary, it underlines their importance as emic axiological operators that influenced certain—but not all—discursive aspects of the artists’ recognition process within the globalizing field.43 And as soon as Orozco was seen to become more commercial in a turn to big-scale paintings during his mid-career phase, it also affected how powerful critics denounced him. Orozco began to diminish his artistic charisma and was criticized for aligning himself with mainstream success (GRA, 183ff), a process that is ongoing and deserves, as Minera’s response rightly suggests, an extended investigation. Such an analysis could also include a discussion of how Gabriel Orozco chose to become an “official” artist for the Mexican state with a representative, large-scale park project that implied drastic budget cuts for the rest of the Mexican cultural scene. 44

Of course, the study’s distinctions are not binary. And in the book, I speak regularly of a “spectrum,” a “polarity,” and a dynamic “tension” between autonomous and heteronomous positions and practices.45 The case studies I include on Yue and Orozco are also explicitly not presented in “binary terms” (Cras) but instead represent “extreme” comparative cases of global artistic trajectories that started out at the relative autonomous or heteronomous poles.46 Focusing on these opposing examples, the book explains, “should not be taken as a denial of any intermediary variations that may exist.”47 Likewise, the study does not deny that avant-garde galleries, for example, need to compromise to stay afloat. Nevertheless, we should recognize and honor how they strive to build up innovative artistic positions against straightforward economic rationales instead of throwing them into the same big “luxury” market pot and abandoning any distinctions (Maltz-Leca; Cras; GRA, 71f, 82f). Moreover, it’s also clear that even the most curatorially ambitious biennials and curators depend on material support from, and often must align themselves with, their sponsors’ less artistically specific agendas (GRA, 33, 321). But these gradations are precisely why the field-theoretical notion of relative autonomy is so fruitful; it allows us to capture these different degrees of autonomy among artistic practices and institutions in the field.48 And it allows us to see how these gradations are not solely based on mere discourse or ad-hoc situational choices, as Cras’s preferred pragmatic sociology would foreground. As the study demonstrates, on a deeper level, different orientations are also profoundly shaped by agents’ socialization49 and the shifting structures of the subfields in which they operate.

There is a lot at stake in keeping up distinctions between “art” and “money,” scholarly and normatively. In a time when the art market has undergone the most rampant commercialization and financialization in its entire history, we urgently need categories that allow us to theorize what is commercial and what is not to resist facile “art industry” talk and identify points for critical intervention. Conversely, if we accept the notion that “art and the market need to be uncomfortably collapsed together” and that painting is merely a “messy business”50 (Maltz-Leca), we run the danger of allowing contemporary art too readily to be absorbed into one big commercial machinery, and thus fatalistically submitting to the inevitability of economic rationality. And we would also “fail to understand how relative autonomy operates within emerging global art circuits and how it has facilitated more artistic cosmopolitanism than the commercial sphere has” (GRA, 269). A framework that considers these divisions enables us to grasp more accurately the multi-faceted historical transformations that have moved the field of contemporary art from its “international” past to its “global” conditions today. What seems like the old story of art versus money is occurring amid very distinct historical and geographical circumstances in the twenty-first century. But, as I highlight in the book’s conclusion, to fully map the global art field’s heterogeneity, it will be necessary to go further and chart other subfields of art production and activism in future studies. That’s why I wrote that the global art field is only “most fundamentally structured” around the poles of art and money, of a cosmopolitan laboratory and an exchange for global wealth (GRA, 273). “And it continues to serve as an unresolved battleground for the people involved” (GRA, 269).