Despite common parlance, globalisation is not a synonym for contemporary neoliberal capitalism; it is rather an historical process of cultural drift and metamorphosis.
It concerns the ways in which lots of small local networks connect to form an international matrix. It’s not possible to opt out of this process now any more than it ever was; we are social animals. To be ‘local’ is to participate in the process of globalisation. Art practice is as globalised now as it always was. Globalisation is the same process that helped spread the ‘gothic style’ and net art alike, the only real difference being the increasing speed and geographic reach of communication. Artists in demand have always travelled, the more visible and successful ones playing pawns in a political game by working for the highest bidder. As they circulate they initiate new networks of knowledge, triggering global transformation.
The density of a place is no mark of its cultural capital (think of how small the population of Florence was during the Quattrocento), no guarantee of parochialism or cosmopolitanism. Where geography once played a strategic role, ports being cauldrons of activity, today attitude is all. Nevertheless, the appropriate civic conditions have and will continue to play a crucial role in the production of some of the world’s greatest artistic feats, allowing artists in turn to establish cultural imaginaries that contribute to a sense of community. To some extent, this has always involved artists playing the local-card-as-global-card. The local argot becomes something that everyone wants (eg the Corinthian column). This process is complex, slow, often cyclical, it doesn’t obey a single form of logic and has no telos (think of the inspired title of Alex Frost’s Tramway exhibition: ‘Format Wars’.) The lingua franca starts life autopoietically as an argot, through internal interactions, self-organising and self-defining of their boundaries. It’s impossible to invent such rich cultural phenomenon out of thin air.
Unfortunately, too many expos attempt to make this impossible task possible. Predicated on the most received of received ideas (a corollary of disregarding scepticism) expos are among the most superficial examples of social engineering. They are a curatorial Esperanto, New Towns on wheels, a symptom of the destructive effects that neoliberalism has had on civic pride and local democracy. Intentionally speaking, they are largely benign in so far as they attempt to suspend these conditions by role playing, offering up a space in which we might imagine that a creative community still exists. In doing so, however, they tend to accelerate the process they rally against since they operate only at the level of representation (what if?) This is due to a lack of consequential engagement with or investment in the relations of production, consumption and distribution; a lack born of a fundamental indifference towards the relative significance of site, sustainability, movement, and audience.
If world-cities are no longer the ‘centre’, which given their global financial importance is highly dubious, then which (former) peripheries are emerging? Do they emerge where expos appear? Not necessarily. The presence of an expo does not denote a healthy local art scene; on the contrary, where there is even the glimmer of a local art world an expo will be sure to drain it dry by annexing venues and absorbing resources. Private finance is uneven. The art market may be bigger than ever but it’s not conducted everywhere; it remains tied to major art fairs and financial centres. If artists have to chase the umbilical cord of gold, as they always have, they aren’t going to spend much time contributing to the culture of the so-called peripheries. Without such a local critical mass an expo is little more than a marketing tool driven by the logic of franchising and outsourcing that underlies the (allegedly) culturally-motivated economic growth that grants world-city status.
Expos won’t help to nurture local gene pools of creativity since they are invariably about buying in the added value of ‘international’ talent – a euphemism that means a consensually globally networked McArt that is ‘foreign’ – to bring in visitors to view what can be seen just as readily elsewhere. This rationale closely compares with how football clubs operate; an economy that requires lucrative sponsorship deals and mass audiences. This isn’t a sustainable cultural policy and is economic suicide. If a city or state can’t establish its own infrastructure (whether as an economy or as a culture) on its own terms (local representation/laws require taxation, culture is a process of vernacular mobilisation that produces and is produced by the social system) then it doesn’t have any basis upon which to exchange culturally with anyone anywhere. Such a place would not be a non-place; it would be a ghost town. This doesn’t matter to those who benefit from this system since they are able to buy mobility, but it does forecast their demise. If you continually outsource your culture where do you go when the world’s local talent has dried up? Where do you find ‘international’ footballers if all footballers play for your home team? What will the producers produce?
Cultural drift today, as since the economic migration spawned by the industrial modernism of the 19th century, flows towards cities. Despite this, the vast majority of people in the world, now predominately urbanites, experience only the most limited geographic, social and economic mobility. This stands in stark contrast to the hyper-geographic diaspora of some artists and curators, a product of their social and economic upward mobility. Any thesis that overstates the significance of mobility is clearly one spoken by those wealthy enough to buy their way out of the limits and responsibilities of citizenship, not to be restricted by the legal peculiarities of any particular state. Such privileged figures are in a powerful position, they have the ability to draw attention to the minutiae of the sites they work in and find correlations between them, facilitating cultural drift and political reform. Curators of expos tend not to do this as the primary objective of expos is to solicit the legitimation of other expos and, ultimately, to recruit their artists and curators.
The audience for such art is not ‘local’ since the very concept of the civic is eliminated in expo networks. Expo audiences are preferable to a genuinely diverse ‘local’ audience since they are easier to convince (optimists don’t need to be converted) being members of a social system that is as closed as the average extended family. This is essentially an attempt at consensus building and canon construction which fails to understand the need for ‘interference’. This is something that tends to happen in the more sensitive feedback loops we find in smaller localised systems that have to respond to the pressures of sceptical audiences not already converted to the cause. Since they filter out such pressures, expos tend to be less representative of the diversity spawned by cultural globalisation. Such juggernauts can’t be flexible and adapt to changes at the ground level, they don’t pick up on vibrations or on the haptic aspects of culture. They offer no means to allow artists or communities to exchange with peers globally on their own terms since they are desperate to establish a linga franca via which all communication must take place. They can’t operate around nuanced concerns (Tunnock’s Tea Cakes in the age of M&Ms) since they are condemned to emulate the mediocre, patronising, homogenous homily of CNN, MTV, the Olympic Games, the World Cup, Bono and Sting. Expos are the stadium rock of our times.
Expocult is mired by a misreading of the process of growth that is Maoist in its revolutionary naivety; leaping from nothing to everything. If art is worth experiencing, it will attract a dedicated audience that is simultaneously ‘local’ and ‘global’ (how could it be otherwise)? It’s not obvious how big this audience has to be to sanction a practice; it’s certainly not a matter of achieving a consensus among audiences. If artists want real diversity they need to work harder, on a smaller scale, with fewer means, to establish global networks that are genuinely (as opposed to metaphorically) rhizomatic. They need to resist the spoils of meta-networks and new canons premised on the possibility of possibility becoming possible. The proliferation of expos is not inherently a bad thing; culture is everywhere, and thus so are the means of distribution. Artists need to reconstruct the field of distribution by taking control back into their own hands. The ‘World Fair’ conception of the expo, which attracts visitors from all over the world, should be condemned to the nineteenth century where it belongs (along with imperialism and modernity). In its place should be a loose network of exchanges between cities, regions and states – temporary confederacies that flow with the movement of ideas and friendships. Redirecting the human and financial resources bestowed upon expos to facilitate what already happens in the host region, to help improve communication, in this way, would be begin to nurture creative responses to globalisation.
