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During the Cold War the exchange of artistic ideas and products united Europe's avant-garde in a most remarkable way. Despite the Iron Curtain and national and political borders there existed a constant flow of artists, artworks, artistic ideas and practices. The geographic borders of these exchanges have yet to be clearly defined. How were networks, centers, peripheries, scales, and distances constructed? How did (neo)avant-garde tendencies relate with officially sanctioned socialist realism? By discussing artworks, studying the writings on art, observing artistic evolution and artists' strategies, as well as the influence of political authorities, art dealers and art critics, the essays in Art beyond Borders compose a transnational history of arts in the Soviet satellite countries in the post war period.

"This book explores how contemporary art can alter the ways in which we visualise and conceptualise the world and the social relations that shape it. Drawing from the writings of philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, it spotlights the concept of 'world-forming' and the political significance of art-making and viewing. The central theme of 'world-forming' focuses attention on the processes of globalisation. The book explores how artists can facilitate shared creative spaces within and beyond the apparatuses of global capitalism. The book traces a philosophical progression from ontology to the political through a series of participatory practices. It forwards Jean-Luc Nancy's idea of 'world-forming' in order to show how contemporary art sustains critical and creative engagement with social practices. The overall objective of the book is to show, through participatory practices, how contemporary art can facilitate social change. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, philosophy, and politics"--

"This book addresses the art historical category of "contemporary art" from a transregional perspective, but unlike other volumes of its kind, it focuses in on non-Western instantiations of "the contemporary." The book concerns itself with the historical conditions in which a radically new mode of artistic production, distribution, and consumption - called "contemporary art" - emerged in some countries of Eastern Europe, the post-Soviet republics of the USSR, India, Latin America, and the Middle East, following both local and broader sociopolitical processes of modernization and neoliberalization. Its main argument is that one cannot fully engage with the idea of the "global contemporary" without also paying careful attention to the particular, local, and/or national symptoms of the contemporary condition. Part One is methodological and theoretical in scope, while Part Two is historical and documentary. For the latter, a number of case studies address the emergence of the category "contemporary art" in the context of Lebanon, Egypt, India, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Armenia, and Moldova. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, globalism, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies"--

"This book focuses on the expanding contemporary art scene in Syria, particularly Damascus, during the first decade of the twenty-first century. The decade was characterized by a high degree of experimentation as young artists began to work with artistic media that were new in Syria, such as video, installation and performance art. They were rethinking the role of artists in society and looking for ways to reach audiences in more direct manners and address socio-cultural and socio-political issues. The book will be of interest for scholars of global and Middle Eastern art studies, and also for scholars interested in the recent social and cultural history of Syria and the wider Middle East"--

This book provides an in-depth and thematic analysis of socially engaged art in Mainland China, exploring its critical responses to and creative interventions in China's top-down, pro-urban, and profit-oriented socioeconomic transformations. It focuses on the socially conscious practices of eight art professionals who assume the role of artist, critic, curator, educator, cultural entrepreneur, and social activist, among others, as they strive to expose the injustice and inequality many Chinese people have suffered, raise public awareness of pressing social and environmental problems, and invent new ways and infrastructures to support various underprivileged social groups.

This panel, convened from September 4 to October 10, 2009, is the second of a three-part series on issues in contemporary African art. The first panel, which appeared in issue 22/23 of Nka, focused on large-scale exhibitions, which have been instrumental in bringing the work of African artists to global attention, and the third will examine the politics of contemporary African art and the art museum. What concerns the panel here is the scholarship of contemporary African art: the teaching, research, and publishing in the field. The discussion considers such questions as the place of contemporary African art in art history programs and its relationship with contemporary Western art as a subfield within art history, as well as the challenges involved in training graduate students. The panel also walks on such gritty grounds as the relationship between contemporary and traditional or classical African art history.

This paper will examine the expanded role Contemporary art has assumed in rebranding Paris, France's flagship capital, as a cutting edge, technological, innovative and competitive global city. Paris has effectively incorporated contemporary art into the fabric of the whole city with exhibitions such as those originating at the Grand Palais spreading to venues throughout the inner and outer 'quartier'. France has used arts and culture to claim supremacy in the world whether colonial or local for centuries with Paris the ultimate 'brand'. Post WWII Paris however, saw this brand diminished and claims to artistic supremacy replaced by New York. In an effort to regain some relevancy Paris, and by extension France, began the process of re-branding concordant with political, economic and technological advancement through the fervent promotion of contemporary art. Contemporary Paris through contemporary art aspires to a transnational and post-national site of spectacle; a leading locus for art to be consumed. Paris's mass contemporary art consumption era began in 1972 with De Gaulle's efforts to replace military and imperial power with cultural dominance (though the recent concurrent inaugurations of outposts for the French military and the Louvre in Abu Dhabi may suggest a 'rapprochement' of the domains), inaugurating a litany of new contemporary exhibitions, art fairs, monuments and museums. Furthermore, with the redefinition of contemporary French art from an art produced by French artists to art produced in the "territory of France", this universalizing re-branding of contemporary art attempts to validate Paris's claim to global cultural supremacy. I discuss particular events such as the art fair FIAC, La Force de L' Art and Monumenta to illustrate the use of Contemporary art to shape and brand contemporary Paris.

This essay looks at modern Italian art circulating in the United States in the interwar period. Prior to the canonization of recent decades of Italy's artistic scene through MoMA's 1949 show Twentieth-Century Italian Art, the Carnegie International exhibitions of paintings in Pittsburgh were the premier stage in America for Italian artists seeking the spotlight. Moreover, the Italian government actively sought to promote its own positive image as a patron state in world fairs, and through art gallery exhibitions. Drawing mostly on primary sources, this essay explores how the identity of modern Italian art was negotiated in the critical discourses and in the interplay between Italian and American promoters. While in Italy much of the criticism boasted a self-assuring "untranslatable" character of national art through the centuries, and was obsessed by the chauvinistic ambition of regaining cultural primacy, especially against the French, the returns for those various artists and patrons who ventured to conquer the American art scene were meager. Rather than successfully affirming the modern Italian school, they remained largely entangled in a shadow zone, between the glaring prestige of French modernism and the glory of the old masters (paradoxically enough, the only Italian "retrospective" approved by MoMA before 1949). Some Italian modernists, such as Amedeo Modigliani, Giorgio de Chirico, and Massimo Campigli, continued to be perceived as French, while the inherent duality and ambiguity in the critical discourse undergirding the Novecento and the more expressionist younger generation – which struggled to conflate Italianism and modernity, traditionalism and vanguardism – made the marketing of an Italian school more difficult. Therefore, despite some temporary critical success and sales, for example for Felice Carena, Ferruccio Ferrazzi, and Felice Casorati, the language of the Italian Novecento was largely "lost in translation."

Contemporary art is increasingly concerned with swaying the opinions of its viewer. To do so, the art employs various strategies to convey a political message. This book provides readers with the tools to decode and appreciate political art, a crucial and understudied direction in post-war art

'Contemporary history' is inherently relevant to, indeed an integral part of, political and social processes in the present. Yet, despite a high level of politicisation of historical debates, the issue of 'objectivity' or 'value neutrality' cannot be addressed solely in terms of the views of the individual historian, or the wider functions fulfilled by a particular historical interpretation. Attention needs to be shifted to the conceptualisation and 'emplotment' of a historical narrative within a given theoretical paradigm. Professional history entails not (merely) the imposition of creative stories, as post-modernists would have it, nor (only) the digging up of ever more 'facts' about the past, as on the empiricist view. Rather, it is a puzzle-solving discipline requiring appropriate conceptual tools for the investigation of specific, theoretically constructed, questions. This article reviews recent developments in German contemporary history in the light of this framework.