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When Francesco Bonami, director of last summer's Venice Biennale, famously wrote in his exhibition catalogue that "The 'Grand Show' of the 21st century must allow multiplicity, diversity and contradiction to exist inside the structure of an exhibition . . . a world where the conflicts of globalization are met by the romantic dreams of a new modernity," it was reasonable to imagine that he was responding to structural and thematic questions posed by Okwui Enwezor in his Documenta 11 of the preceding year. After all, the Nigerian-born curator, focusing on the issue of globalization, had in a sense defocused his event, dividing it into "platforms"-conferences and lecture series engaging figures from a wide range of disciplines-that took place at different locales around the world over the course of the year leading up to the installation in Kassel. Of course, this very commonality sets up a significant contrast. Enwezor's globalism resonated differently from Bonami's: The same word typically used-as at Venice-to describe an ever-expanding circulation of communications and commerce (with all the attendant conflicts that such connection entails) was in Kassel linked to the acute value of regionality and difference, where the emergence of the local and particular precluded the possibility of any unifying system or thematic but nevertheless comprised a field of what could be called "minor knowledges."
Indeed, few terms are so frequently bandied about in artistic dialogue today as "globalism," and yet few terms are so multifarious in their current usage, or unfold in so many dimensions. For example, the rhetoric of globalization allows for discussion of neocolonialism in an expanded art marketplace while at the same time entertaining the notion that New York has ceded its historical position as the city that "stole the idea of modern art" (perhaps becoming instead the capital of capital), and coinciding with these insights is a still-developing sense that tiers of access to information exist within the worldwide artistic community, dividing those who can from those who cannot afford to crisscross the globe and so speak knowledgeably of a contemporary art-world suprastructure.
Nothing in contemporary art speaks so directly to all of these issues as the large-scale exhibition-from Documenta to the Venice Biennale, as well as any number of other biennials that cropped up around the...