“The sure way to achieve universal tolerance is to leave untouched what is peculiar to each man or group, remembering that all that is best in the world is the property of all mankind[1].”   - Goethe


Ever since its inception in the 18th century, the idea of enlightenment and progress has been the guiding star of Western civilization – an idea that seems like an asymptotic line that is never destined to reach its goal[2]. It’s quasi-religious status, which has remained into this postmodern age, is responsible for many magnificent accomplishments of Western science and culture. It is a truism that we are all paying an inordinate price for the grandeur of our civilization, but despite the obviousness of its pitfalls, we are left with few tools with which to tackle this difficulty. One of the tools has been an increasing acknowledgement of the coexistence and validity of different cultural models, based on a variety of qualities of complexity and expression.

The “other”, as viewed from Western perspective, has always had a peculiar status of being considered both extraordinary and inferior. In his landmark work Orientalism, Edward Said points to the origins of the Western way of dealing with foreign cultures and societies, whereby a sort of polarization of an idealized “other” against the devalued “other”, is created [3]. In neither case is the essence of a culture grasped in its full reality. Since then (1978), thanks to the major overhaul of ethnographic and sociological studies, we are in a much better position to view cultures of the world without bias and preconception.

To come back to our topic: the first step towards true cultural pluralism lies in acknowledging the “other” as oneself, and that means a deep study of social and aesthetic aspects of a cultural identity. It will not do to just superficially “make over” a culture in order to make it really a valid aesthetic object of biculturalism or any other sort of cultural amalgam.

The next step, I believe, is the synthesis of elements of particular cultures on their deepest level[4]. The various syntheses produced by African music are a case in point. Blues, Jazz, Gospel, Afro Cuban and others, are all successful amalgams of native African music with European musical heritage. In visual arts, the fusion of Native American sand painting and abstract expressionism in action painting of Jackson Pollock, the use of Byzantine iconography in work of Modigliani or, more recently, the inventive amalgam of Japanese woodprints and Pop art by Masami Teraoka, all represent successful syntheses of diverse cultural blueprints.

What might not be obvious at first sight is that some of these trajectories are geographically defined, the other, historically. Pollock’s action painting involves Native American folk art, which is geographically separate from Western Art, Modigliani’s and Teraoka’s involve arts that are separated temporally. Considered from this perspective, modern and postmodern paradigms appear as two different interpretations of the process of artistic synthesis, instead of two discrete movements.
 


The concept of modernity as progress is easily grasped in science and technology; it is an altogether different situation in the arts. Most thinking artists know that there is nothing like progress in the arts: the irreversible arrow of art history is still a subject taught at schools and academies throughout the Western sphere, but no one in their right mind would say that music or visual art conceived at a newer date is “better” than the one conceived at a later. However, since most powerful cultural institutions belong to Europe, North America or Australia, standards and concepts used in evaluating arts come from these geopolitical entities.

To emphasize another point: the historical narrative of art has so far been equated with the Western narrative, which at this point still does not have serious competition. In consequence, Western cultural institutions perceive art coming from non-Western world primarily as folk art. Such “authentic folk art” is considered valuable and is regularly exhibited in museums throughout the Western world. It is a very different situation with non-Western contemporary art, which is still usually shown under the auspices of the occidental historical narrative. That is to say: for contemporary art to be considered “valid”, it simply has to belong to Western art history- either as a reflection of one of the many –isms or as one of their offspring (such as say, neo-dada etc.).

There are some attempts at this point at creating new paradigms built around different cultural perspectives, notably Shmuel Eisenstadt’s multiple modernities concept, which is conceived as “continual constitution and reconstitution of a multiplicity of cultural programs”[5]. While this concept seems very attractive as a new sociological concept, its application in the arts aesthetic appears much less straightforward.

Let’s take a familiar example: Les Demoiselle d’Avignon, Picasso’s landmark achievement which is often considered the beginning of Modernism in Western art history, is said to have been influenced by the aesthetics of African sculpture[6]. If that is true, it means that African folk art has been instrumental in creating the modernist paradigm of twentieth century paintings. A similar statement can be made about many other contemporary works across diverse media and idioms.

Many modernist masterpieces are bicultural or multicultural by the very nature of their creative processes. Implicitly, the African or other folk art then is already an integral part of the Western concept of modernity. Looked at from this angle, it is not artistically revolutionary to simply “make over” folk music by, say, using electric instruments, lightshow or Internet in order to make it modern. In this case (as in innumerable other instances) the modern technology is used to make a superficial transformation, instead of deep, structural ones.
 


It would appear then that multiculturalism, although a new phenomena in sociology and cultural studies, has been an essential ingredient of Modern art since its inception[7]. Instead of one internationally accepted (Western) style and unified aesthetic, we have a coexistence of various cultural centers: Asian, African etc. What is fundamentally different between the international art of the preceding periods and the present Global art is a different geopolitical power balance. Western Art history had a unified stylistic profile primarily because its origins were in European history, which later included North America and Australia. Rather than being a new or original concept, today’s multicultural art is an acknowledgment of a culturally decentered world.

Does that mean a coexistence of various stylistic orientations? In certain media, such as music, the coexistence of different stylistic orientations has been a given for some time, especially in eclectic cultural milieus, such as the U.S. The visual arts, on the other hand, are much more dependent on the occidental historical narrative. It is a complex question why that is, but certainly one of the main reasons is that the very nature of a medium greatly defines its use: while visual arts have delineated difference between art object and the serially reproduced craft object, music does not. The primary process of objectifying music is serial reproduction and the only “authentic musical object” is still a concert[8]. While a concert, CD or webcast can be bought, it cannot be personally possessed as a tangible physical object, the same way that an art object can.

Perhaps primarily because of this factor the art object still retains its aura of authenticity and uniqueness and is consequently greatly dependent on the Western history of art, in order to have its financial worth assessed. Music, on the other hand, primarily measures its worth by the volume of the sales of its products; its value is therefore not as dependent on its adherence to the modernist paradigm. One need only take a cursory glance on the Internet to see these differences stand out immediately.

If multiple modernities theory gives us a good starting point, there is a lot of work to be done in conceptualizing contemporary culture and art from a philosophical (aesthetic) angle. Certainly a multidisciplinary research spanning a wide spectrum of subjects, from evolutionary biology to multimedia technologies, could bring us closer to a more comprehensive understanding of artistic creativity, while giving us guidelines towards future programs and orientations.
 


Just like “theories of everything” in physics, a longing for global art aesthetics might be an offspring of an essentially monotheistic view of the world. As mentioned in the previous section of this article, the idea of a global art is a conceptual extrapolation of the synthetic processes that have been already in action since the inception of the modernist paradigm. Though partial in actions, these processes point out to amalgamations of diverse cultures and perhaps to further structural transformations of the contemporary arts.

While entertaining this idea, we have to be aware of various historical and structural differences that these cultural profiles entail. For one, we cannot put under the same aesthetic umbrella Art that is as far removed as say, Tuvan throat singing and West African Polyphony. We could however, construct a common aesthetic for certain geopolitical regions or zones of cultural influence. For example, such modal frameworks as Indian raga or its Arabic equivalent maqam can be connected to include subregions of the Balkans on the West and African Sahara, on the South. Similar modal language of the Spanish Cante Flamenco idiom could be considered as an interpolation due to Moorish invasion and Roma immigration to the Iberian Peninsula in the middle ages.

As there are no comparative taxonomies of world cultures to my knowledge as yet, a global language of the arts seems like a faraway dream. On the other hand, many formal concepts and techniques derived from either Western or non-Western art can be used as abstract reference points towards creating universal aesthetic syntaxes. The confluence of various cultural concepts and techniques could be viewed as a world art glossary - perhaps a new Babylonian tower of Global art could be created.

What if, however, the true confluence of cultures means an acknowledgment of principles of artistic creation that are complementary in their opposition? This may mean an acceptance of simultaneity of ideas and axioms: tribal visions of the world going hand in hand with Western ideas of progress and enlightenment. What if the true confluence of cultures means a different view of the function of art, a concept called by Ellen Dissanayke species-centered art – a concept of art that would include, an infrastructure of collectivism and humanness as well as uniqueness and originality of the modern individual? To quote Dissanayke: “Cultures and their institutions, practices and artifacts – different though they be – are means of satisfying fundamental human needs. And what those needs are, as well as broader range of workable satisfactions, is to be discovered by accepting the reality that humanity is the underlying landscape upon which one approaches (but not with which one replaces) the humanities. Both have made us what we are[9].”

© 2011 by Dusan Bogdanovic


[1] Goethe, J. W. and Eckermann, J. P. Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann, Da Capo, New York, pp.265-6.

[2] “The major message of Enlightenment-was that of the sovereignty of reason…transforming it into a totalizing moralistic utopian vision.” Eisenstadt, Shmuel (2000). Multiple Modernities, in Daedalus, 129, 1 (Winter), p8.

[3] “The geographic boundaries accompany the social, ethnic, and cultural ones in expected ways. Yet often the sense in which someone feels himself to be not-foreign is based on a very unrigorous idea of what is “out there,” beyond one’s own territory. All kinds of suppositions, associations, and fictions appear to crowd the unfamiliar space outside one’s own.” Said, Edward (1979). Orientalism, Vintage Books, New York, p54.

[4] “In its Greek root synthesis means ‘an action of putting together.’ While collage (from the French coller, to glue) simply superposes two diverse structures on the surface level, synthesis melds or merges structures on the deepest, elemental level. To use a scientific analogy, we could say that collage occurs on the biological level of organs or tissues, whereas synthesis occurs on the biochemical or subatomic level”. Bogdanovic, Dusan (2006). Ex Ovo, Doberman Editions, Saint-Nicolas, p74.

[5] Eisenstadt, Shmuel (2000). Multiple Modernities, in Daedalus, 129, 1 (Winter), pp1-16.

[6] There is much controversy regarding this subject. For more information, please refer to: Rubin Williams (1994), Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

[7] Certainly, the Romantic movement gave one of the initial impulses towards synthesis between ethnic (nationalist) folk art and Western aesthetics.

[8] This, of course, has been changing and now we have various single and multimedia works that can be considered “authentic objects”. These are nevertheless mostly reproducible through serial replication.

[9] Dissanayke, Ellen (1992). Homo Astheticus, The Free Press, A Division of MacMillan Inc., New York., p8.