This is the third volume in The Art Seminar, James Elkin's series of conversations on art and visual studies. Is Art History Global? stages an international conversation among art historians and critics on the subject of the practice and responsibility of global thinking within the discipline. Participants range from Keith Moxey of Columbia University to Cao Yiqiang, Ding Ning, Cuautemoc Medina, Oliver Debroise, Renato Gonzalez Mello, and other scholars.

Perspectives on a book that changed ways of thinking and writing about art around the world

With globalization steadily reshaping the cultural landscape, scholars have long called for a full-scale reassessment of art history's largely Eurocentric framework. This collection of case studies and essays, the latest in the Clark Studies in the Visual Arts series, brings together voices from various disciplinary and theoretical backgrounds, each proposing ways to remap, decenter, and reorient what is often assumed to be a unified field. Rather than devise a one-size-fits-all strategy for what has long been a divided and disjointed terrain, these authors and artists reframe the inherent challenges of the global--most notably geographic, political, aesthetic, and linguistic differences--as productive starting points for study. As the book demonstrates, approaching art history from such alternative perspectives rewrites some of the most basic narratives, from the origins of representation to the beginnings of the "modern" to the very history of globalization and its effects. Distributed for the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

The End of Diversity in Art Historical Writing is the most globally informed book on world art history, drawing on research in 76 countries. In addition some chapters have been crowd sourced: posted on the internet for comments, which have been incorporated into the text. It covers the principal accounts of Eurocentrism, center and margins, circulations and atlases of art, decolonial theory, incommensurate cultures, the origins and dissemination of the "October" model, problems of access to resources, models of multiple modernisms, and the emergence of English as the de facto lingua franca of art writing.

The project of global art history calls for balanced treatment of artifacts and a unified approach. This volume emphasizes questions of transcultural encounters and exchanges as circulations. It presents a strategy that highlights the processes and connections among cultures, and also responds to the dynamics at work in the current globalized art world. The editors’ introduction provides an account of the historical background to this approach to global art history, stresses the inseparable bond of theory and practice, and suggests a revaluation of materialist historicism as an underlying premise. Individual contributions to the book provide an overview of current reflection and research on issues of circulation in relation to global art history and the globalization of art past and present. They offer a variety of methods and approaches to the treatment of different periods, regions, and objects, surveying both questions of historiography and methodology and presenting individual case studies. An 'Afterword' by James Elkins gives a critique of the present project. The book thus deliberately leaves discussion open, inviting future responses to the large questions it poses.

A more global, flexible way to teach art history

In The Globalization of Renaissance Art: A Critical Review, Daniel Savoy assembles an interdisciplinary group of scholars to evaluate the global discourse on early modern European art. Over the course of eleven chapters and a roundtable, the contributors assess the discourse’s goal of transcending Eurocentric boundaries, reflecting on the strengths and weaknesses of current terms, methods, theories, and concepts. Although it is clear that the global perspective has exposed the artistic and cultural pluralism of early modern Europe, it is found that more work needs to be done at the epistemological level of art history as a whole. Contributors: Claire Farago, Elizabeth Horodowich, Lauren Jacobi, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Jessica Keating, Stephanie Leitch, Emanuele Lugli, Lia Markey, Sean Roberts, Ananda Cohen-Aponte, and Marie Neil Wolff.