If you are an artist in the United States, now is the time to apply to the National Endowment for the Arts.
My name is Adeodata Brac and I am a filmmaker and performance artist. I created this blog as a way to share my journey with other artists, as well as with those who might be interested in knowing what it takes to bring an international art exhibition to the States.
I have been working with an amazing group of artists to revitalize and revive an event that was held in London back in 2008 called Contemporary Art: Bringing Globalism Home. The event was organized by South African artist Candice Breitz and included artists from all over the world. It was such a successful event that it was decided that it should continue on and become an annual event.
I was asked by Candice Breitz if I would like to help bring this exhibition to America, which is a country where it does not exist yet. I at first had no idea how we were going to do this because there are so many obstacles against bringing art from abroad into America. But when things seem impossible there is no other option but for me to try anyway!
To fund, promote, and achieve the goals of bringing an international art exhibition from Beijing to America is our dream.
We hope to bring awareness to the need for a more global view of art with this project. Globalism is not about promoting a specific country or culture, it’s about representing all cultures on earth.
The Chinese market is one of the fastest growing in the world; the Chinese know what they want and they know how to get it. The world would be a much better place if we could cater to their needs and desires as well as they do now.
The theme of “Bringing Globalism Home” will be exhibited throughout both cities: starting with New York and then traveling on to Houston.”
Bringing an art show back home is an interesting challenge. The American public loves to see foreign arts and crafts, and the funding for this type of event is usually readily available with very little effort. Bringing a show back home however, is a different story.
This blog will be a log of the process from beginning to end – from fundraising, to the logistics of transporting large and fragile works of art across the ocean, to putting it all together at the venue for presentation in NYC.
Toward the end there will be links to videos and photos from the exhibition day which will hopefully bring some of what we felt at the time into your living room.
No matter what the setting, there are three elements to every situation:
The first is the basic facts of a situation – the math. The second is the soft stuff – what’s going on in people’s heads and hearts. And the third is reality, meaning how the other two fit together.
The basic facts are a matter of record. But they are generally insufficient to explain what happened. Other people’s perceptions, emotions and intentions affect everything that happens. These soft elements are harder to pin down, but they are crucial to understanding why things happen. And then there is reality – how all these other factors combine with each other, and with the basic facts, to determine what actually happens.
This blog chronicles all three of these factors as we try to bring an exhibition of international art from London to America. We will document our efforts to raise funds for this exhibition, and the obstacles we encounter along the way – from red tape and petty bureaucrats to artists who choose not to participate in our project, or who insist on making changes that compromise its integrity.
This is the story of a project to bring contemporary art from around the world to America. The point of the project is to create new opportunities for international dialogue about contemporary issues and ideas. But the project is not just about art: it’s also about geopolitics, and about how artists can work together to change the world.
One thing I am trying to do with this project is make people understand what “globalism” means. Globalism is not just an economic system or a set of policies; it’s also a social reality, because it has effects on people’s lives. Globalism brings things into our lives that we can’t control — like political and economic trends — and it takes other things away — like job opportunities and a sense of connection. I want people to understand that we can use globalism as an opportunity rather than a threat, but we have to understand what it means first — especially if we are going to make decisions about the kind of society we want to live in.
Between the end of World War II and now, it seems as if we went through a period in American history where there was a lot of money to be made. And we did. But there are times when the economy takes a downturn. That is what is happening right now. The past few years have not been good years for making money.
Trying to bring an international art show into America right now is like bringing a turkey to Thanksgiving dinner during a depression. It’s not that people don’t want to have art exhibitions, it’s just that they don’t want to spend any money on them. Or at least that is what we thought until we found sponsors for our exhibition.
The sponsor who has agreed to provide the most money for the project is an investor who has recently made about $400 million from investments in India and China. He decided to invest in our project even though his investment group had decided that the art market was down and they needed to stay out of it for the time being. They invested so much money in this project because they believe that with globalization, art will become more important than ever before and this art show could be vital in determining what kind of art will come out of this new era in history.
As we continue to search for
Globalism is an exciting and necessary concept. Unfortunately, it has also become a bit of a buzzword for people who don’t really understand what it means. In the art world, globalism has come to mean simply that an artist is not from the United States. Okay, this may be the most significant and important news in the history of the universe: American artists are not the only artists!
Popular ideas about globalization have been shaped by the world’s financial markets. The banks have globalized, so a lot of people assume that everything else will follow. But actually we live in a far more fragmentary world than that. The world’s most profound cultural boundaries are still national ones. For better or worse, our culture is still local, rooted in our own communities and regional identities.
