Widening Net (or shrinking, depending on how you look at it)

Everybody loves adventure (the cruise enthusiasts just don't know it).

Like anyone with an ounce of curiosity I find hitting up rugged outposts and learning new things totally irresistible. Sadly, though, the price of those adventures is the waning of the undiscovered (see Michael Behar's unbelievable article from Outside magazine, "The Selling of the Last Savage"). It's no secret that the "backwoods" parts of the world are rapidly disappearing -- both in terms of countries and wild wildernessy areas.

Prague is probably the best current example -- once an off the beaten path destination, now one of the most touristed cities in Europe. Cell phone reception is making its way into the wildest areas (soon it'll be underground and in the skies, from what I hear), and feeling like you're lost or even in unfamiliar territory will soon be impossible. As topical evidence, take the surge of interest in the Balkans, the trans-Siberian railway and other less visited outposts. (I actually took a trip through the Balkans in March 2004 but luckily I hit upon it early. This picture is of Sinaia, Romania.)

BUT.
This widening net/shrinking world is actually having a positive side effect I hadn't considered: it's democratizing the art world in a way that any student of the occidental conception of art history will find significant.

An article in today's NY Times highlights the "hot trend" in Chinese contemporary art. So the search for the new and the different -- and this is my interpretation here -- has led us to a point where the east may be leading the way in the contemporary art scene. (I haven't seen the art that was on sale, but the image in the article looks fabulous.)

This is vastly different from the role that any Asian art plays in American textbooks on art history (and is part of a controversy that, thank the lord, is finally coming to the fore. And yes, I wrote my undergraduate thesis about the same topic.) -- namely, Asian art is mummified and simply stops after a certain medieval date along with the art of other "ancient cultures" (Mesoamerican, Aegean, Assyrian...) after which the Occident takes over. Probably because of this, Asian art has commanded high asking prices only for ancient pieces. We may now be seeing a phenomenon whereby the market dictates what goes down in the books, rather than the other way around, which I personally find exciting. And appropriate.

So when you think about how limited our perspective is as its conceived in the canonical art history texts (yes, the texts themselves are canonical as well as the art they describe), the frontiers of contemporary art do indeed seem boundless, as one person said in the NYT article. I think this is true, and it's one of the only heartening things to have come to mind about contemporary art in a really long time. There's something almost completely staid about art in America right now and looking to other countries is what we have to do. (All those death of art people can calm down. (Sorry for obscure art theory references. And sorry for being so goddamn American-centric, but it's not my fault. I can't believe I've never thought of this before, but I really need to see the art history textbooks of other countries.))

There's a big difference in the potential for renewal in art and the potential for renewal in the undiscovered geographical regions of the world, which is that once the geographical regions are discovered, they can't be undiscovered (or forgotten). Art, on the other hand, can always dredge up older styles that have been overlooked, or at least repackage them. Maybe parts of the world can be repackaged (imagine an exotic Phoenix...), but that'd be quite a PR feat.

And of course the mechanism at work in all of this is just the old fetishizing of the new, the undiscovered. Which, while being totally unhealthy and fucked up, is totally irresistible.