On Art and Contamination: Performing Authenticity in Global Art Practices
W ith the gradual shift of Western artworld interests toward a more international view, and the increasing worldwide p h e n o m e n o n ol art fairs and exhibit ions, man\in the con temporary ail world have begun to consider exactly what it means to exist in a global arts network. Begun in the 1990s and continuing into the twenty-first century, an era ol pos tmodern crit ique ushered in a panoply of voices that were formerly unheard or undervalued. Among other strategies, many of these cultural producers associated with the decenter ing of Continental values and ideals staked their claims in the art world through an engagement with dominan t culture. Generally, artistic responses utilized two major strategies: in the first instance crit ique was lodged in the form of ant ihegemonic intervention; and in the second, a development of specific aesthetic markers that pointed to politicized group belongingness. As one of many socially defined minori ty groups seeking recognition, black artists have utilized both of these tactics to varied and often s tunning ou tcome. In the case of this grouping, an "aesthetics of blackness" within con temporary artistic product ion developed in which the rendering ol black bodies and hair, African motifs, the reappropriat ion of stereotypical imagerv, narratives ol slavery, and black folk and religious iconographies becomes codified as artistic shor thand for authent ic blackness. O u r current interest issues from a discernable move on the part of many black earlyand midcareer artists away from those visual strategies ol the nineties. What does it mean to set forth a unitarv notion ol blackness through a system of signs and signifiers? Or more importantly, what cost is paid in the use of such an approach, that a postcivil rights generation of artists would want to self-consciously stray from them? Especially in relation to the notion of an African diaspora, inherent is a sense that this categorical grouping of people share a cultural link. The reality lies elsewhere, and it is certainly not a given that such disparate, globally strewn subjectivities should necessarily identify with each other, nor share an affinity. What can be said about artists who move away from their previous "marginal" relationship to a Eurocentric "center," and who instead take up a complex model of intercultural aesthetic engagement? What can it mean for these artists to drift from the markers of authenticity so readily associated with blackness, even despite the persistent cultural currency ol these signifiers in the art world? American painter Kehinde Wiley noted