Epilogue

Abstract

This chapter takes up more recent events involving the pandemic. In addition to developing critical knowledge about major transformations in contemporary art, the chapter advances a promising global fields approach that could be used for understanding the multifaceted and contradictory forces affecting the production of culture in our contemporary world. The chapter sees the contemporary art field as a sphere of specialized practice that is relatively independent—albeit at varying degrees and scales—from its external environment. It asks us to resist the temptation of drawing convenient and direct causal links between the art world and broader geopolitics, a mode of thinking that still has currency among some theorists who posit art's “renationalization,” for example. Rather, a global art field approach suggests that we look once again at how broader changes have become refracted through the field's own power structures, main tensions, as well as discourses, and the various players who respond to historical events in diverse ways. Put bluntly, in our historical moment, the chapter notes that we should not expect that COVID-19 will have the same consequences for everyone and for the dynamics of “global art.”