A Renewed Cosmopolitanism: Specifying Artists, Art-writers and Curators

Mark Cheetham

Origin: Static Issue 08
Content: Text

Contemporary artists, curators, and art-writers are often described through the overly-general language of the “cosmopolitan.” As different as diasporic artists and travellers to international art fairs are, they share the art world’s preoccupations with crossing borders, with the seemingly effortless global movement and exchange of individual works, artists, ideas, and curators. But are we cosmopolites in meaningful ways? The idea of being a citizen of the world has changed profoundly over its long history and is today being recast by a range of artists and thinkers into a term applicable to contemporary global realities. Looking at new theories about the nature of the cosmopolitan today in the work of several scholars and at its visualization in the practice of Yinka Shonibare, I claim that in their revised specificity, cosmopolitan ideals can mediate the local and international effectively.

Download PDF

Contributor:

Mark A. Cheetham’s recent publications include Editing the Image: Strategies in the Production and Reception of the Visual (co-editor with E. Legge and C. Soussloff, University of Toronto Press, 2008), Abstract Art Against Autonomy: Infection, Resistance, and Cure since the 60s (Cambridge UP, 2006), and Kant, Art, and Art History: Moments of Discipline (Cambridge UP, 2001). He is a Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Toronto.