Confronting Globalization

This article reviews Pamela M. Lee's Forgetting the Art World (2012) and TJ Demos's Return to the Postcolony (2013). Reviewer examines the texts' shared concern with self-reflexive art practices that in different ways work to expose their own conditions of existence with respect to globalization. Both authors, according to the review, engage with art as a privileged medium that is capable of materializing knowledge about globalization and that thereby holds some potential to shape, mediate, or confront its trajectory. After appraising both the originality and limitations of Lee's and Demos's approaches, reviewer concludes with an outline of the core issues and challenges that globalization poses for art-historical methods.