Between the Global, National, and Peripheral: The Case of Art Museums in Poland

Abstract

The issues of cultural production and its institutions usually involve the broader context of analysis that is followed by discussion on globalization in general. This is because the consequences of globalization exerted a profound impact on the art world’s structures. Criticism of modernity, introduced by proponents of postcolonial discourse, revealed the imperial inclinations of European cultural policies. According to these analyses, the history of cultures emerged as the history of exclusions that were the final result of promoting cultural diversity in a strictly Eurocentric way.[1] Therefore, international recognition belonged only to those artists born in the West, with their white, Christian citizenship. However, as the art world was expanding, it directed its attention towards other, more obscure cultural contexts, yet refused to perceive them as equal. This issue has been analyzed in-depth through postcolonial writings as a matter of orientalizing non-European cultures.[2] The aforementioned context would actually help to define globalization as a process that deconstructs the modernistic paradigm and undermines the legitimacy of museums cultivating the myth of primitive cultures. The critical relevance of the process would also reveal itself in terms of museums of modern art that have ignored works by artists from Eastern Europe or South America in the past.