Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination

by Marsha Meskimmon

Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination explores the role of art in conceiving and reconfiguring the political, ethical and social landscape of our time. Understanding art as a vital form of articulation, Meskimmon argues that artworks do more than simply reflect and represent the processes of transnational and transcultural exchange typical of the global economy. Rather, art can change the way we imagine, understand and engage with the world and with others very different than ourselves. In this sense, art participates in a critical dialogue between cosmopolitan imagination, embodied ethics and locational identity. The development of a cosmopolitan imagination is crucial to engendering a global sense of ethical and political responsibility. By materialising concepts and meanings beyond the limits of a narrow individualism, art plays an important role in this development, enabling us to encounter difference, imagine change and make possible the new. This book asks what it means to inhabit a globalized world – how we might literally and figuratively make ourselves cosmopolitans, ‘at home’ everywhere. Contemporary art provides a space for this enquiry. Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination is structured and written through four ‘architectonic figurations’ – foundation, threshold, passage and landing – which simultaneously reference the built environment and the transformative structure of knowledge-systems. It offers a challenging new direction in the current literature on cosmopolitanism, globalisation and art.

160 pages, Paperback

First published July 30, 2010

Reviews

[Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some intriguing work is presented and critiqued here in a well articulated fashion, with the critical theory mixed in seamlessly, if a bit lightly. I was particularly intrigued by the afterword "On affirmative criticality" where Meskimmon makes a convincing plea for ethical responsibility in the aesthetics of subjectification as affirmative 'styles of life' (referencing Deleuze).