Kaufmann Thomas DaCosta (Hrsg.): Circulations in the Global History of Art

The project of global art history calls for balanced treatment of artifacts and a unified approach. This volume emphasizes questions of transcultural encounters and exchanges as circulations. It presents a strategy that highlights the processes and connections among cultures, and also responds to the dynamics at work in the current globalized art world. The editors' introduction provides an account of the historical background to this approach to global art history, stresses the inseparable bond of theory and practice, and suggests a revaluation of materialist historicism as an underlying premise. Individual contributions to the book provide an overview of current reflection and research on issues of circulation in relation to global art history and the globalization of art past and present. They offer a variety of methods and approaches to the treatment of different periods, regions, and objects, surveying both questions of historiography and methodology and presenting individual case studies. An 'Afterword' by James Elkins gives a critique of the present project. The book thus deliberately leaves discussion open, inviting future responses to the large questions it poses.'Like people and ideas, art objects travel, and they have been doing so from time immemorial. Surprisingly, art history has largely neglected to systematically examine these artistic circulations and their various consequences. By analysing the traffic of material cultural around the globe, this volume boosts the study of a key dynamic feature of art worldwide, characteristically investigated by a modern-day art history that is increasingly rejuvenating itself by developing a global perspective in both time and space.' Wilfried van Damme, Leiden University, The Netherlands, co-editor of World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches 'Do globalisation studies in art history have a future? Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann in his fine introductory essay on the historiography of globalism proposes that the study of objects on the move, of their circulation across cultures, is the way forward. His essay is enhanced with the strength of multiple voices in the accompanying essays. Their approach allows art history to move forward, away from nationalism and away from the limits of Western art historical questions. The book is rich in new ideas and globalisation becomes a process rather than an ideology. This process is defined in the essay by Catherine Dossin and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel on how a geopolitical understanding may transform modernism and lead us away from Paris and New York.' Jaynie Anderson, Australian Institute of Art History, University of Melbourne, Australia