Over the past quarter century, artists have made powerful interventions in debates around globalisation, addressing various dimensions of cross-border exchange, from mass migration to the dynamics of translation, and devising new ways of conceptualising them. Marcus Verhagen's Flows and Counterflows: Globalisation in Contemporary Art tells the story of those interventions, dwelling in particular on projects that draw out both the dangers and the tangible or imaginable benefits of global exchange.
“Marcus Verhagen is one the finest art critics writing today, and in these essays he maps the shifting terrain of the global art world with subtle, sceptical intelligence.”
Malcolm Bull, Professor of Art and the History of Ideas, Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford
“Flows and Counterflows offers an incisive and highly original account of contemporary art's mutating relationship to the processes of globalisation. In its historical timeliness and critical urgency, it will no doubt become a seminal volume in this field.”
Anthony Downey, Professor of Visual Culture in North Africa and the Middle East, Birmingham City University
“Verhagen's complete survey of globalisation—covering how art addresses global markers such as tourism and border control; how the art system itself has been reshaped; and how artists resist by building informal networks—is so packed with well-explained contemporary artworks that the result, in practice, is an indispensable history of art for our times.”
Gilda Williams, Goldsmiths MFA Curating, University of London
Marcus Verhagen has taught at universities in both Britain and the United States. Working occasionally on the 19th century but primarily on contemporary art, he has contributed to a number of catalogues and anthologies, as well as to periodicals such as
Representations,
New Left Review,
Third Text and
Afterall. He has written numerous articles and reviews for art magazines—for, among others,
Art Monthly,
Art Review, and
Frieze. Much of his recent work revolves around globalization; he has, for instance, written articles on migration, translation and tourism as crucial concerns in contemporary art.
