Global Public Art as a Phatic Interaction of Multiculturalism

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

From the break of the millennium, the massification of visual practices, in particular global public art, formed under the influence of multicultural processes, has been interpreted in academic circles and by the media as the success of the paradigm of contemporary art, which finally abandoned the traditional experience of aesthetic judgment, focusing instead on a phatic function of transnational interactions dependent on the market ideology of capital. Meanwhile, the formal simplification of art expression is not a new event, despite the fact that this process of mass designisation is taking place in the context of global digitalization and dissemination of public relations marketing strategies in a multicultural context. Similar inversions of spiritual culture-creating into the completely materialist optics of the creative worldview — if we consider the description of “global-local” art acts in endearing articles by engaged art critics — have occurred before, which is reflected in Foster’s important critical work Design and Crime. However, such critical assessments are silenced by the cultural industry, although the current crisis of theory and practice has entered a state of prolonged hysteresis, producing a massified phatic product and, in such a way, increasing the entropy of socio-cultural relations of nations, and at the same time exposing the inviability of global public art.