The impact of globalization on the art market and national art cultures

Shatilov Vadim Vadimovich Lecturer in the Department of Theory of Arts and Aesthetics, Lugansk State Academy of Culture and Arts named after Mikhail Matusovsky. 291001, Russia, Lugansk, Red Square, 7 holy-grail@mail.ru

Modern culture is influenced by the process of total globalization, and the world art market acts as a synergetic space in which universally significant and internationally recognized artistic values circulate. Regardless of the geographical region, their capitalization remains consistently high. The space of the art market, as a socio-cultural phenomenon, is dialogical: on the one hand, it is communication between artists and the public, on the other – between national and regional cultures.

The very idea of a dialogue of cultures is not new, Vladimir Bybler and Mikhail Bakhtin addressed it in their works back in the XX century. In the concept of the Bible, culture is defined as "a form of simultaneous existence and communication of people of different (past, present and future) cultures, a form of dialogue and mutual generation of these cultures" ^{[1, p. 38]}. Only "on the edge of cultures, in dialogue with other integral cultures striving to transcend themselves" ^{[1, p. 37]}, culture continues to develop and remain alive. "Communication between cultures," Bibler writes, "is happening at the present time. A specific form of such communication is a work" ^{[1, p. 38]}. The latter, according to Bibler, is "a person's own being detached from man and embodied in the flesh of canvases, sounds, colors, stone." In the communication that takes place through the work, Bibler believes, "the world is being created anew" ^{[1, p. 41]}. According to M. M. Bakhtin, "dialogue is a way of existence of a culture that is only able to know itself when meeting with another culture" ^{[2, p. 41]}.

If we start from the idea of a dialogical cultural model for further reasoning, then the global culture of humanity consists of many local cultures. To the full extent, the internal potential of culture is revealed in the process of dialogue – this form of interaction is the most effective. The modern global art market can be considered one of the forms of such an intercultural dialogue. But the balance of this structure is very fragile, and it is constantly experiencing internal conflicts and structural failures.

Globalization is a systemic process of worldwide economic, political and cultural integration and unification: legislation is standardized, transnational corporations are formed, international mass culture appears, etc. The art market did not escape the process of globalization either, which manifested itself in "the process of integration, erasing borders and differences, removing fragmentation and specialization, collecting the whole from fragments, and a process that does not involve centralization" ^{[3, p. 187]}. Marshall McLuhan gave this process the name "implosion". Geographical distances ceased to be an obstacle to cultural interchange: the world began to shrink rapidly, followed by the art market. The modern art market differs from the classical one precisely in its globality, which manifests itself both at the geographical and ontological levels. But it is worth noting that the globalization of the art market is by no means a phenomenon of the XX century, one of the starting points of this process can be considered the absorption of the Panda market by the Antwerp Trading Exchange, which gathered bankers, merchants and merchants from all over Europe under its roof. So, in 1553, more than 4 tons of paintings and 70,000 yards of tapestries were shipped by sea from Antwerp to Spain and Portugal ^{[4, p. 168]}. In the XVII century, a wide network of agents operated in Italy through the embassy system, supplying (sometimes illegally) works of art to different parts of the world. A new round of globalization, which connected the art markets of the Old and New World, came in the XIX century and was associated with the scientific and technical revolution - the invention of the telegraph and the steam engine, which simplified and accelerated communication between the continents, which was used by the Marchants Paul Durand-Ruel and Ambroise Vollard, finding a consumer in America for works unclaimed in Impressionist Europe ^{[5, p. 328]}. But the current level of globalization of the art market space, of course, would not have been achieved without the widespread use of the Internet.

Nowadays there is no longer a single center of the world art business. The modern art market as a whole resists the idea of centralization, becoming polycentric, this trend is also noticed by the famous curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist: "In the 90s, for the first time, there was confidence that there was a kind of multiplication of centers. After all, before that we had an idea of a certain absolute center – New York, Paris and several other capital cities, from where all the most advanced in art comes from, and which are like the cradle of the avant-garde. And in the 90s we suddenly began to believe in the multiplication of centers, in a kind of polyphony <...> I would prefer to talk about self-organized polyphony, which led to the multiplication of centers" ^{[6, p. 56]}. It is no coincidence that the modern market is called postmodern, because postmodern discourse rejects the dichotomy of the center and the periphery. McLuhan illustrates his idea with an example of railway and electric networks. The first one functions as an inflexible hierarchical model: the closer you are to a major node, the less you are limited by the departure time and the choice of direction. The second one is available to anyone, regardless of the time of day, social status or financial situation. Electricity has become a decentralizing factor of the XX century, and the main decentralizing factor of the XXI century is the spread of the Internet. It is thanks to this supernova means of communication that cultural and information integration is realized.

The classical art market was limited to the European region and existed in the form of relatively disparate local national markets. Attempts at international art-market contacts were mostly unsystematic and exclusive. The modern art market integrates territories that were not so long ago on the periphery of the Western world, for example, such as India, China, the UAE, etc. In 2019, the United States, Great Britain and China together controlled 82% of the total value of the global art market ^{[7, p. 164]}. "In New York, Shanghai or the Arabian desert, the same brands are everywhere. And many of the new art collections are also similar to each other" ^{[8, p. 72]}, – the Polish researcher Piroska Dossi speaks about these trends. Today, artistic values are not limited geographically and regionally, but freely move between American, European, Asian and Arab nodes of the art market network, which unites creators of works of art, intermediaries and consumers.

The transition of the art market to the global level has led not only to a change in its functioning, but also to a change in the types of art consumption. Judith Benamu-Yue notes that the usual ritual of collectors – the Saturday round of galleries - is becoming a thing of the past. As the offer became international, collectors began to move around the world, flocking to the place of a certain art event, the most popular of which are the institutes of art fairs and biennales ^{[9, p. 123]}.

Fairs are a local art market space organized for a certain period and with a clear specialization: antiques, contemporary or national art, etc. Intermediaries, producers of art products and their consumers meet and communicate in this artificially created space.

At the same time, the goals of the organizers of such events are very diverse, and are not limited to just selling. Along the way, participants receive a number of related benefits in the form of advertising, acquiring new connections, demonstrating or raising status, etc. The wider and more heterogeneous the circle of participants in the event, the more representative the sample is, and this makes it possible to judge the situation in art in general by expositions, which is especially important for professionals: critics, experts, art agents and consultants. Participation in such events can be useful for artists themselves: biennales allow you to exchange experiences with foreign colleagues and, possibly, sign a contract with a gallery, and fairs provide an opportunity to assess the preferences of the public and the main trends in the development of artistic culture. The functions of fairs and biennales overlap in many ways, only their proportion changes: both realize not only a commercial function, but also turn into places of popularization and actualization of art ^{[10, p. 172]}.

However, the globality of the modern art market is not limited to geography alone. The post-non-classical art market has transformed into a single synergetic sphere of freedom of communication, exchange and movement of materials and ideas, where creative products, capital, technologies and symbolic values circulate ^{[11, p. 353]}. But it should be mentioned that the degree of this freedom is heterogeneous and is regulated by national legislation on the import and export of cultural property. Many exhibition projects choose the dialogue of cultures on a planetary scale as their main theme. One of the pioneers of this trend was the French curator Jean-Hubert Martin with the exhibition "Magicians of the Earth", which he organized in 1989 at the Georges Pompidou Center and at the Grand Al in La Villette Park.

In his project, Martin exhibited the works of one hundred authors: half of them were representatives of ethnic art from Australia and Asia, Africa and Latin America – these territories were traditionally considered "periphery" within the framework of the Eurocentric concept. The other half of the exposition was traditionally represented by artists from Western Europe and the USA. The curator set himself the task of overcoming the coloniality and antagonism inherent in previous exhibitions of similar content ^[12]. The project was designed to revise the system of traditional criteria and categories of the Eurocentric (and wider – Western) art system, which rejected religious or non-Western contemporary art, characterized by a specific approach to perception and visualization of reality. Previously, such works were at best given the role of crafts and folk crafts. According to Martin himself, art for him was a kind of metalanguage and a way to find answers to universal questions that are equally important for artists anywhere in the world. In order to convey his position to the audience, he resorted to a unique exposition principle: the works were united not according to chronology or geography, but according to the "auratic" principle, which was supposed to demonstrate the universality of the language of art, which overcomes political, cultural, economic and value differences, while creating a common field for the interaction of cultures. The exhibition attracted public attention to the sore points of the modern socio-cultural space, but opinions about the project turned out to be very ambiguous.

Firstly, this exhibition demonstrated a new approach to the problem of cultural globalization and outlined the path of development of postcolonial art criticism, calling for a revision of the criteria for the perception of contemporary art. Martin made traditional cultures full participants in the world art process, destroying the usual hierarchy. According to the author of the project, it was the first truly world exhibition and "exit from the ghetto of Western art" ^{[13, p. 76]}. Thanks to this exhibition, regions such as Africa, India, China and Eastern Europe, which previously seemed to be in a blind spot, suddenly appeared on the geographical map of contemporary art.

Secondly, many critics have drawn attention to the postmodern problem of context: works torn from the natural environment and implanted in the space of the western gallery have turned into simulacra. The audience was able to appreciate only their shell – formal qualities, but their essence, internal logic, meaning and social function were lost.

Thirdly, paradoxically, the exhibition "Magicians of the Earth" was criticized for its coloniality and West-centricity, with which, it would seem, it had to fight. The fact is that the selection of participants and works was carried out by Martin himself, who alone, through the prism of his own tastes, endowed any work with the status of the most authentic art for a particular territory. But can the opinion of a "rich white European man" be considered authoritative in this case?

However, the main result of Martin's project can be considered the awakening of Western collectors' interest in traditional artifacts of non-European cultures. This once again confirms the globalization of the art market and the openness of modern culture. In one of the oldest auction houses, Sotheby's, special departments dedicated to "ethnographic art" have appeared. For example, in the Department of American Indian art or Africa and Oceania, many lots are represented by artifacts of a ritual nature: masks, sculptures, amulets and jewelry. The greatest demand among buyers is not household items, but things endowed with sacred functions that were used for sacrificial rites, initiations and other rituals. But the new owners do not use the acquired artifacts for their intended purpose, that is, they lose their inner meaning, which was embedded in them by the culture that created them. In the native and host cultures, the artifact will have completely different meanings. Being part of the ritual costume of the Dogons, the mask was for the tribesmen a magical object endowed with vitality. But in the space of a private collection or museum, objects of worship become objects of design or training – they undergo a process of profanization.

But here, too, the influence of cultures is dialogical: national art has changed the structure of the modern art market, but it has also changed the specifics of creating traditional artifacts. If previously the "authentic" magic mask was made by the participant of the ceremony for himself, then the huge demand for Dagon objects led to the appearance of craftsmen who make souvenirs for external consumers, without observing traditional rituals, canons and technologies ^[14]. In this case, we are faced with a "profanized" way of creating objects that are devoid of their inner content and are only a formal imitation.

Interactions similar to this situation, where the global correlates with the local, have led to the emergence of a new term – "glocality". Culturologist M. Epstein speaks about this as follows: "glocality becomes the motto of the XXI century, since the globalization of all political and cultural processes is accompanied by their growing localization (regionalization)" ^{[11, p. 356]}. In Japanese, there is a largely similar term – "dochakuka", which literally translates as "living on your own land", i.e. means adapting economic and economic methods of farming to local conditions. In the 1980s, "glocality" became the unspoken motto of Japan's rapidly developing economy, which tried in every way to adapt global perspectives and strategies to local conditions. The concept of "glocality" is still relevant for modern culture as a whole, based on a combination of two seemingly multidirectional phenomena: the processes of globalization and the accelerated development of local cultures. One of the main catalysts of "glocality", that is, the connection of the global with the local, is the spread of the Internet, penetrating into all spheres of people's lives.

The exhibition project of Hans-Ulricht Obrist and Hou Hanru "Cities in Motion" was dedicated to the glocality of modern culture in the late nineties. Obrist talked about dehumanization, which is a consequence of globalization, although the curator himself prefers to replace the latter concept with the term "mondialization". First of all, Obrist talks about the dehumanization of traveling temporary exhibitions, which are reproduced unchanged at each new location, ignoring the specifics of the territory. When working on "Cities in Motion", Obrist sought to adapt the exposition to each specific exhibition space. He urges curators to introduce the principle of variability of the exposition in time and space into the exhibition concept itself, however, this requires the organizers to carefully study both the local situation and mondialization ^{[6, p. 56]}.

Considering the cultural processes on a global scale, we can conclude that the situation of art-market globalization requires a fresh look at the problem of the artist's national identity and once again raises the question of the deformation of the perception of cultural heritage. The appeal of the Western world to traditional cultures in the forms of cultural and art tourism leads to fragmentation and differentiation of the once integral cultural organism. This is largely due to the process of decontextualization that occurs when certain cultural elements are removed from the authentic cultural context for the convenience of international consumption, which leads to a simplified and distorted perception of culture by a new consumer.

"Implosion" blurs the boundaries between national cultures, turning the world into a "global village" described by Marshall McLuhan. In the process of implanting the values of some cultures into the space of others, their development inevitably takes place, and then transformation adapts them to local specifics. But, as already noted earlier, in this process, the values of the implanted culture can lose their content, turning only into an external imitation, functioning according to the immanent laws of the culture that absorbed them. Similar problems also affected street art: being one of the forms of protest against the commercialization of art, it was still implanted by the art market into the commodity circulation system and lost its authenticity ^[15].

In general, both positive and negative consequences of the globalization of the art market can be identified for local art cultures. The positive ones include the following:

- the exchange of creative experience (ideas, styles and techniques) between representatives of different cultures can stimulate creative growth and contribute to the enrichment and development of art both at the micro (individual) and macro level (global or local school level);

- significant expansion of the audience thanks to the Internet and mass communications;

- qualitative improvement of intercultural communication: interaction with different cultures through art can form a tolerant and respectful attitude towards representatives of other cultural groups and reduce the level of internal tension in societies (especially multinational ones).

The negative consequences of the globalization of the art market can be reduced to the following factors:

- "cultural homogeneity" and the loss by local art schools of their originality and authenticity;

- the threat of the disappearance of some traditional national art forms associated with the commercialization of art at the global level, which can encourage authors to focus in their work on satisfying mass taste and maximizing profits, rather than expressing national or cultural identity;

- cultural appropriation, when elements from national cultures are used without due respect for their origin and meaning.

Being part of the modern cultural paradigm, the art market of the XXI century is characterized by decentralization and increasing attention to the problem of cultural identity. A characteristic feature of this phenomenon is its ambivalence, expressed in a combination of two multidirectional trends: on the one hand, it is the globalization of art market activity, and on the other - attention to the problems of the local, which is reflected in the inherent glocality of the art market of our days.