Reading 7: How does creative practice sit within globalization?

In a world embracing immense technological acceleration, national boundaries are being eliminated via instantaneous communication channels such as the Internet. Only half a century ago a six-week journey on ship from New Zealand to England would have been considered to be made in ‘good time’. Now the same journey can be made by plane in less than 24 hours. Everything from travel to productivity has accelerated exponentially. In the past where cultures and societies were historically separated by large bodies of land or water, these natural barriers are now overcome by extraordinary means of transportation and communication at unimaginable speed. A highly sophisticated language of technology is usurping cultural communicative differences. We have built a new tower. Our Babel is technology itself.

Creative practices have inevitably succumbed to the challenges and triumphs of rampant globalization. Notions of national identity within the arts are becoming increasingly archaic as the world is opening itself to global art discourse. Unlike any time in previous history, art practitioners no longer have to travel to art capitals in America and Europe to be influenced by the latest art trends. An antipodean artist can simply flip open a laptop and google ‘what’s hot’ in contemporary art?! Biennales, Triennials, Art Fairs (1), etc, etc, serve to centralize the latest developments in Fine Arts as a means of gathering and showcasing a milieu of ‘whose who?’ in global representatives of the art world. The challenge for creative practice is not to become more global, but more particular, more original, and more unique.

1 - Cathrin Schaer, “Foreign Affairs”, Canvas, Weekend Herald, July 25, 2009, pp. 6-10. P 6.

2- Arun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp. 27-47.