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In 1989, Jean-Hubert Martin organized "Magiciens de la Terre" at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, a landmark exhibition that became one of the most controversial of its day. Basing the show loosely on the principle of showing 50 artists from the "West" and 50 from the "non-West," Martin created what has been called the first global art event. The choice and installation of art objects at the Pompidou stirred outrage from writers, historians, and artists alike about representations of the "Other," notions Martin intended to criticize.

Twenty years later, the specter of "Magiciens" haunts the international art scene, prompting the formation of Global Art and the Museum (GAM), a project of ZKM, Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, directed by the artist, curator, and theorist Peter Weibel, and curated by art historian Hans Belting. Through a series of conferences that have taken place since 2006, arts professionals from around the world critically examine contemporary visual production and the effects of globalization, mass media, and the wide-ranging technologies developed in recent decades. GAM’s most recent publication, The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets, and Museums, is the second volume of documents published by the project, resulting from conferences that took place in 2007. Containing dozens of essays by writers from nearly every continent (a representative from North America is conspicuously absent), the book presents a diverse and fascinating account of the crisis facing arts institutions as they grapple with complex issues. Among these are the representation of the postcolonial subject, the rapidly changing demographics of their publics, the commodification of art, and the challenges of establishing arts institutions in developing nations.

Notable among the essays is "The Tate Effect" by the critic T. J. Demos, who writes of the contradictions, the ambiguities, and the paradoxes of the most visited modern art museum in the world. Demos cites the role that corporate sponsorship plays in the programming of the Tate Modern’s vast halls; the problematic way it narrates the history of art in its permanent-collection galleries; and the relatively small number of exhibitions of artists from outside Europe and America, despite the Tate’s self-proclaimed identity as an international art venue. In "A Place to Go," Jack Persekian discusses experiences in curating the Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates along the theme of "Belonging." To directly focus on the status of Sharjah itself as a city of migrant workers, Persekian brought conceptual artists from around the globe "to challenge inherited notions of home, territory, and ethnicity in a world constantly shifting."

More than offering a critique of globalization’s effects on museums, the texts in The Global Art World reflect the diverse strategies devised and theorized by arts professionals as they consider the idea of the museum as a site of contestation. The pressure on museums to "go global" prompts questions about how to present contemporary art to local audiences and how to be sensitive to the construction of artistic discourses. As the models of Western institutions increasingly fall short in addressing the needs of the new global art contexts, the dialogue archived in this volume remains an open-ended one.

"The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets, and Museums" originally appeared in the October 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2009 Table of Contents.