The Global Contemporary, Art Worlds after 1989

Exhibition, ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, September 17, 2011 – February 5, 2012 

The geography of the visual arts changed with the end of the Cold War. Contemporary art was no longer defined, exhibited, interpreted, and acquired according to a blueprint drawn up in New York, London, Paris, or Berlin. The art world distributed itself into art worlds. With the emergence of new art scenes in Asia and the Middle East and the explosion of biennials, the visual arts have become globalized as surely as the world economy has. This book offers a new map of contemporary art’s new worlds and documents the globalization of the visual arts and the rise of the contemporary over the last twenty years.

The Global Contemporary and the Rise of the New Art Worlds, ed. by Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg, Peter Weibel. – Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2013. – 496 p.
ISBN: 978-0-262-51834-5

With essays by Hans Belting, Jacob Birken, Andrea Buddensieg, John Clark, Manthia Diawara, Liu Ding, Thomas Fillitz, Patrick D. Flores, Sara Giannini, Thomas Hauschild, Oskar Ho Hing Kay, Carol Yinghua Lu, Antonia Marten, Jean-Hubert Martin, Clare McAndrew, Birgit Mersmann, Gerardo Mosquera, Piotr Piotrowski, Raqs Media Collective, Terry Smith, David Spalding, Jim Supangkat, Sabine B. Vogel, and Peter Weibel.