Historical Contexts and the Construction of Twenty-first Century Asian Art Worlds

Abstract

Our hearts should go out in sympathy for anyone aspiring to make serious art today. The art game is about the making and marketing of brands. The objects themselves are incidental, and thus, formalist talk about aesthetic values primarily serves to promote unconsciousness, deflecting attention away from the dominant, monetary values organizing the game. Accordingly, art criticism is best focused at the level of the public system. In his recent book, On Bullshit, Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt observes that we are presently immersed in a public world rich in bullshit (Frankfurt 2005). One of the main jobs of scholarship should be to pick up a shovel and help clear away the mess, and nowhere is this more necessary than in the world of fine art. This isn't because of the use of big words or complex sentences, commonly mocked in anti-intellectual segments of popular culture. Jargon and complexity are fine so long as they are not being used to conceal a lack of substance. And even if clearing away bullshit is not going to unearth absolute—eternal and infinite—Truth, we can still hope that there is value in disposing of historically constructed untruth. So where's the shovel? In their introduction to a recent collection of essays titled Asian Material Culture, the editors boldly assert that in these days 'the methodology of material culture can be condensed into a single word: context' (Hulsbosch, Bedford and Chaiklin 2009: 13). One might be tempted to reply, so what? Why is this claim significant? In what sense is this perspective anything new? If you're a hard-core modernist, you've already been-there-donethat—context is yesterday's news. Way back in the late 1970s a group of studio art students at the University of Hawaii (myself included), in loose collaboration with visiting New York conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth and our intellectual mentor Prithwish Neogy (a tireless shoveller himself), staged an art exhibition somewhat naively titled, Let's put it in the Context. In those days, before we had a name to refer to the seismic shift we now call 'postmodern', even undergraduates way out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean were aware that the heroic modernist search for the Essence of Art had passed its expiration date. The old pro