ART CITIES OF THE FUTURE

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ARIE AMAYA-AKKERMANS

I S T H E R E A D I F F E R E N C E B E T W E E N encyclopaedic, critical
and historical discourse in the arts today? It would be difficult to
tell. At a time when both ‘contemporary’ and ‘global’ have come to
embody practices rooted in the rootlessness and liquidity of the
modern world, the contemporary finds itself exhausted and its
critical energy nearly depleted. Once a historical movement, the
contemporary is said to have ‘gone too far’; having forgotten its
origins at a turning point between art history, theory and praxis.
It is seemly no longer aware of the presence of the past as their
predecessors knew it. Two solutions have been proposed for this
problem: Either melancholy or diversity.
Antonio Caro, Colombia, 1976/2010
The first one is encompassed in the emergence of institutional Enamel on tin, 70 × 100 cm.
Bogotá, Colombia
discourses such as the motto of the Documenta 12 (2007) ‘Ist die
Moderne unsere Antike?’ (Is Modernity our Antiquity?) And young
market institutions with simultaneous educational and archaeological justifications such as Gigi Scaria
Someone Left a Horse on the Shore, 2007
Frieze Masters and the new Dubai Modern. A gaze towards the ‘Other’ embodies the solution Digital print on archival paper, 109 × 164 cm.
of diversity and inclusion. The ‘Other’ is not simply ‘foreign’ but a distinctly separate order Delhi, India
ofrepresentation. While a number of artists from the ‘other territory’ have established themselves
in the ranks of the so-called international art, such as Mona Hatoum, Doris Salcedo or Anish
Kapoor, an imbalance still remains.

Phaidon’s book ‘Art Cities of the Future: 21st Century Avant-Gardes’ is perhaps one of the first
serious encyclopaedic surveys of the decentralization of the art world that has encouraged
diversity. Taking the city as the basic unit of globalization, the book explores a number of
cities that are home to a vibrant homegrown art scene. From Beirut to Bogota, Istanbul to
Vancouver, Singapore to Lagos, the ten cities featured stand out for having developed autonomous
institutional frameworks for art and from them, having catapulted many young artists into the
ranks of international art.

Before commenting on these institutional frameworks, the question begets itself: What is
a city of the future? A recent report by a prestigious financial consulting firm, concluded
that the distinguishing feature of a ‘city of the future’ is the seamless combination of global
competition and local leadership. Nothing would suggest that this is not the case in the art world;
paraphrasing the Colombian curator José Roca, a scene in these cities developed naturally and
without the pressure of the art market. ‘Glocal’ art, however, does not necessarily point towards
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democratization in the art world, but to a number of overlapping paradoxes.

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Nilbar Güreş Aslı Çavuşoğlu
The Living Room, from the series ‘çırçır’, 2010 Murder in Three Acts, 2012
C-print, 120 × 180 cm. Film and performance
Istanbul, Turkey Istanbul, Turkey
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Expectations are placed on the normativity of representation of ‘foreignness’ that should always
operate within the generic grammar of contemporary art. Accordingly, institutions derive their
authority from the ‘contemporary’, whose authority in turn is self-referential. In Istanbul, for
Jungho Oak
example, grand institutions exist that while well-funded and staffed by cutting-edge professionals, Anyang City Rainbow: Anyang Stream, 2007
play the role of putting Turkey in the art map rather than truly nurturing a scene, for in the words Digital C-print, 70 × 47 cm.
Seoul, South Korea
of different art dealers from the city, there’s no conversation about art and not much of an audience
either. A small group of local artists stand out internationally, but young artists complain about
lack of opportunities and nepotism.

A recent panel hosted in Beirut by leading contemporary artists from the city, addressed the
question of what is an emerging artist, without reaching a consensus and one of the participants
ironically noted: ‘Emerging artist is whoever writes in the applications for residencies that he
is’. Although the city produced a prolific number of international artists, they tend to represent Hodeuk Kim
Wave of Mind, Awakening Moment Between, 2011
abroad extreme narratives either of radical utopianism or cultural pessimism, hardly negotiating Ink on Korean paper and water, dimensions variable
critical alternatives. The gallery scene remains very small and conservative, and young artists Seoul, South Korea

feel the need to emigrate and succeed abroad in order to be exhibited back home later.

The globalization of art, coeval with the emergence of art fairs all over the world and their
accompanying biennials and academic conferences, play right into the hands of gentrification and
the expansion of financial markets embodied in corporate collections and social responsibility.
These phenomena often take place only to the advantage of dealers with international networks,
and the impact on art schools on the margins of the centres of art, remains very slow and limited. A
Turkish critic recently remarked how ‘expensive’ it is to be in the art world – the need for well paid
business jobs to ‘survive in art’, finding money to travel, and securing VIP cards for art fairs and
biennials and be seen in the ‘circles’.

Year in and out, the trends significantly change. The post 9/11 period saw a curatorial craze to
investigate artistic movements in the Middle East, and more recently the consolidation of a few
Latin American artists in the grand halls of London and New York – a chain of events that sent
shock waves to art advisers all too willing to update their portfolios with new ‘stuff’ from Colombia
and Panama. Last year the African art fair in London, coeval with Frieze, made mid-size galleries
take an interest in West African and Nigerian art (a curated pavilion on West African art debuted
at Art Dubai 2013), which happens to coincide with the financial boom of Nigeria and Uganda. Art
galleries, design shops and champagne vending machines are now a sight in the lush districts of
highly impoverished cities.

The centres of the art world (and the art market itself) are not decentralizing or being replaced
anytime soon. The new art cities of the future, under the current realities of the market, will be the
art cities of the future insofar as they will be showrooms for the centres of the art world expanding
its reach towards a global aesthetics. The global often depoliticizes the agonistic character of these
very urban practices reflecting the reality of social and economic conflict, if only by exaggerating
them in such a way that the boundary between an imaginary and a document is blurred. Some of
these cities will remain at the margins, while others already occupy intermediate spaces, but the
major collecting and curating practices remain trends still monopolized from the very centre. Kevin Schmidt
Prospect Point, 2007
LightJet print, 188 × 221 cm.
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Vancouver, Canada
Arie Amaya-Akkermans is a Beirut-based specialist in contemporary art from the Middle East with a
focus on Lebanon and Turkey, as well as an assistant curator at Albareh Art Gallery, Bahrain.
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