ART PAPERS - WordPress.com

ucts” because they are “highly contagious” 3reproducible exhibition formats—or objects—that operate as microcosms of a much largerglobal sphere. As Pamela M. Lee notes, thisglobal art world space⎯including its network ofbiennials and art fairs⎯drives both “the homogenizingof culture on the one hand and the radicalhybridity on the other.” 4 In other words, thispopular proliferation of art fairs and biennialsboth reflects and furthers globalization.Thinking about the origins of the contemporaryart fair, there is little difference among thereasons non-Western countries are now adoptingthese exhibition formats. As Riyas Komu ofthe Kochi-Muziris Biennale noted in conversationat the 2012 March Meeting in Sharjah, theidea behind such exhibitions is to become partof a global conversation. 5 Take Art Cologne, “theworld’s first modern art fair,” 6 launched in 1967by Hein Stünke and Rudolf Zwirner to reviveWest Germany’s “lacklustre art market” 7 andpromote young German artists internationally.The fair introduced a radical new way of presentingart, and it also made money. At the 1969art fair, Joseph Beuys’ Das Rudel sold for 110,000DM, the first artwork by a West German artist tosell for more than 100,000 DM. 8 Then, in 1972,documenta 5 took place. It was the first largescaleart exhibition that rejected traditional presentationsof art formulated along historical(and canonical) lines. Curated by HaraldSzeemann, it was dubbed a Grossausstellung, orGreat Exhibition, in which artworks were “tiedto a central cross-disciplinary theme and reconfiguredinto startling, often non-chronologicaljuxtaposition.” 9 It set the groundwork for contemporarycuratorial approaches that followed.Art Cologne and documenta 5 introduced radicallydifferent ways of presenting art. As exhibitionmodels, they proposed new approaches to20th-century and, subsequently, 21st-centuryexhibition practice, just as Okwui Enwezor’s2002 documenta 11 inspired the SharjahBiennial’s reconfiguration as an openly social,cultural, and political space. In the case of ArtCologne, other art fairs soon followed. Art Basel(established in 1970) became the most popularart fair in 1973, a success attributed to its internationalfocus. Yet even today the internationalismof art fairs is questionable, particularlywhen staged in the West. Discussing the ratio ofrepresentation at Frieze New York 2012, criticHolland Cotter observed that, like most fairs itssize, Frieze New York was “technically international,with a small handful of participants fromAsia, and one each from Africa and the UnitedArab Emirates,” but mostly, the artists were“European and American big guns ....” 10 Thisissue of representation raises the question ofwhether certain hierarchies are inscribed intothe art fair and biennial formats, given theirWestern origins.Such ideas around social and cultural hierarchiesrecall an older exhibitionary ancestor tothe global art exhibition: the Great Exhibition ofWorks and Industry of All Nations of 1851 organizedin London at the apex of the British Empire’spower. Regarded as the first World’s Fair exhibitionof trade, culture, and commerce, the GreatExhibition was, according to theorist Dan Smith,“the first international exhibition and thelargest public visual spectacle then to be stagedin the modern world” that “helped forgewestern modernity’s formations of display,spectacle, surveillance and commodity.” 11 It wasa formative event, facilitating the establishmentof the Venice Biennale in 1895 and arguablyleading to two of the contemporary forms andfunctions of both the art fair and the biennial,constructed from the legacies of industry, postindustry,modernity, postmodernity (and metamodernity),not to mention colonialism and itsaftereffects.Organized by Prince Albert and other membersof the Royal Society for the encouragementof arts, manufactures, and commerce, the 1851Great Exhibition established a new global paradigm.According to historian Peter Greenhalgh,the aim of the event was “to invite all nationsof the world to take part in ‘the friendly competition’”of an international exhibition and tocreate a potential for market expansionabroad. 12 Staged in the Crystal Palace, 13 the eventcelebrated “progress, invention, and Britishsupremacy in world markets.” 14 More than 6million visitors and 14,000 exhibitors camefrom around the world for 5 months and 15 days,the high turnout facilitated by the advances ofthe Industrial Revolution, including the Great34 ART PAPERS