The Culture Game Olu Oguibe Table of Contents		$24.95 paper ISBN: 0-8166-4131-5 ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4131-4 $75.00 cloth ISBN: 0-8166-4130-7 ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4130-7
An acclaimed artist and cultural provocateur reveals the hidden biases of the contemporary art world. In self-congratulatory tones of tolerance and open-mindedness, the Western gatekeepers of the contemporary art world—gallery owners and museum curators, patrons and promoters—take great pains to demonstrate their inclusive vision of world culture. They highlight the Latin American show mounted “a few years ago” or the African works featured in a recent exhibition of non-Western artists. Non-Western artists soon discover that this veneer of liberalism masks an array of unwritten, unspoken, and unseemly codes and quotas dictating the acquisition and exhibition of their works and the success of their careers. In past decades, cultural institutions and the critical establishment in the West resisted difference; today, they are obsessed with exoticism. Both attitudes reflect firmly entrenched prejudices that prescribe the rules of what Nigerian-born artist, curator, and scholar Olu Oguibe terms the “culture game.” In the celebrated, controversial essays gathered here, Oguibe exposes the disparities and inconsistencies of the reception and treatment afforded Western and non-Western artists; the obstacles that these contradictions create for non-Western and minority artists, especially those who live and practice in the Western metropolis; and the nature and peculiar concerns of contemporary non-Western art as it deals with the ramifications and residues of the colonial encounter as well as its own historical and cultural past. Ranging from the impact of the West’s appetite for difference on global cultural relations and the existence of a digital Third World to the African redefinition of modernity, Oguibe’s uncompromising and unapologetic criticism provides a uniquely global vision of contemporary art and culture. Olu Oguibe is a visual artist, writer, scholar, and curator. He is associate professor of art and art history at the University of Connecticut. 364 pages | 42 halftones | 7 x 10 | 2003 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments Prologue Part I: Terrain of Difficulty 1. In "The Heart of Darkness" 2. Art, Identity, Boundaries: Postmodernism and Contemporary African Art 3. Play Me the "Other": Colonialist Determinism and the Postcolonial Predicament Part II: Nation, History, Image 4. Nationalism, Modernity, Modernism 5. "Footprints of a Mountaineer": Uzo Egonu and Black Redefinition of Modernism 6. Photography and the Substance of the Image 7. Medium, Memory, Image 8. Represent'n: The Young Generation in African American Art 9. The Burden of Painting Part III: Brave "New World" 10. Forsaken Geographies: Cyberspace and the New World "Other" 11. On Digital "Third Worlds": An Interview 12. Connectivity and the Fate of the Unconnected Notes Previous Publications Index

 

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