«Today the contemporary artist no longer has to decide between the disjunction of remaining in the local context or taking part in transnational dialogues. Everyone who enters the context of contemporary art forms part of a complex process that flows around the world and which is defined not only by the question of difference but also by the various ways of “being in the world”. Artists, N. Papastergiadis continues, expand the limits of their practice by defining their context and their strategies as a sum of paradoxes:

»“Museums without walls. Cities as laboratories. Living archives. Walking narratives. These slogans are now common in the art world. They reveal a recurring desire: to stretch the parameters of art by incorporating new technologies, sites and perspectives. As they introduce foreign tools, places and subjects they also expand the category of the contemporary.”

»It would also be about an art that affirms its contemporaneity without limits and without history, in maintaining that it can “only” be contemporary because at the local level it does not have its own history of modernity, with all that this implies in pointing towards new audiences, many of which have local traditions that have not been filtered through Enlightenment thinking.

»In the new redistribution of places in which that which counts are the new narratives of mobility and difference, the theories of Arjun Appadurai about “ethnic landscapes” are highly relevant. He writes of the landscape not of stable communities but of people who constitute the changing world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, as well as other groups or individuals in constant movement. In effect, Appadurai makes use of the term ethnoscapes (in place of landscapes) inasmuch as the essential – language, skin colour, district, and family relationships – is globalised. This equates to speaking of an extension of feelings of intimacy and belonging in vast and irregular spaces that converts the question of identity – “once a genie contained in the bottle of some sort of locality” – into a global force, “forever slipping in and through the cracks between states and borders”. As Appadurai argues, in so far as groups migrate, they regroup in new places, reconstruct their histories and reconfigure their ethnic projects, the ethno of ethnography takes on a slippery and non-localised quality, to the point that the new landscapes of group identities – the “ethnic landscapes” or ethnoscapes – cease being familiar anthropological objects by losing their connection to a territory and constituency of certain spatial limits, and the cultural dynamic of what has been called “deterritorialisation” makes sense. This term was originally coined by Deleuze and Guattari who applied it to ethnic groups that went beyond specific territorial borders and identities. According to these philosophers, the traditional classification between subject and object offers no close approximation to thinking and must be substituted by the classification land/territory, with the subsidiary concepts of “lines of flight” (which provoke movement and open the breach in territory making possible a pure DT – “deterritorialisation”) and “assemblage” [agencement] (the minimal unit of reality and elements in movement).

»In this study, we approach globalisation as a new class of contemporary art of the last two decades; a type of art that clearly distances itself from postmodernity and which in turn requires other narratives when writing a new history of art (a history of art under the global turn?), which opts more for cultural identity than for aesthetic feelings and which seeks to emphasise geopolitical and institutional aspects to the detriment of questions of style, innovation, and progress, taking for granted a clear complicity between art and social and cultural fields.

»And while it can seem that globalisation is a new and renovated version of postmodernity, the two incorporate a clear desire for periodisation, a long way from being a simple substitution of postmodernity. The differences between the two are important, as argued by the cultural theorist Imre Szeman, who establishes a series of provocative observations about the role of culture in the era of globalisation understood as a neoliberal political project. Globalisation, unlike postmodernity – considered as an aesthetic category used to describe architectonic styles, artistic movements, and literary strategies, is a reality that has relatively little to do with concepts of aesthetics and culture as understood by postmodernity. There is not a globalising culture in the same way that we can speak of a postmodern culture (nor would there be global architecture, art, or literature); and if postmodernity shares various formal innovations, globalization seems to invert this relationship, putting all the emphasis on restructuring the links between politics and power, and as a resizing of economic production from the national to the transnational in light of the operations of financial capital.»