Open AccessSPHERICAL CONFLUENCE: Global Curatorship after ‘Magiciens de la Terre’
Author(s) -
Joaquín Barriendos
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
art research journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2357-9978
DOI - 10.36025/arj.v2i2.7293
Subject(s) - exhibition , modernity , confluence , premise , ideology , phenomenon , order (exchange) , art history , sociology , art , philosophy , epistemology , political science , computer science , law , politics , finance , economics , programming language
This paper examines the 25th anniversary of Magiciens de la Terre, one of the twentieth century’s most controversial and ambitious exhibitions. The aim of this text is to call into question the assumption that this exhibition inaugurated a sort of new global confluence between so-called Western and Non-Western art. In order to do that, the paper addresses some of the curatorial projects, theories of (alter)modernity and globalist ideologies that gravitate around this exhibition. Our intention is to analyse the consequences of accepting that 1989 is the degree zero of the ‘spherical confluence’ of global art. For our purposes here, the papers defines this phenomenon as the ‘magiciens effect’: the premise that art became truly global in 1989, in Paris, due to Magiciens de la terre, and that the canonical hierarchies of modernity were dissolved in the process giving place to a post-asymmetric geo-aesthetic regime.