ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the question of multiculturalism and its implications for art production and curation and aims to distinguish the multicultural from the transcultural. It describes the methodological implications of prevailing positions that celebrate the assimilation of cultural diversity in contemporary art as a novel feature, held to belong to the present alone. The transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century that coincided with the revitalization of art history as a scientific discipline was marked by similar moves to make art history inclusive of regions beyond the West. Art history as a form of world-making – of grappling with the past and of glimpsing the contours of emerging possibilities as embodied in art production – is dependent on the criticality of a transcultural approach to rethink its epistemic foundations. For the art historian Ernst Grosse, ethnology was an intrinsically comparative science as it investigated the world’s various ‘peoples’ or ‘nations’ in the totality of their environmental and socio-cultural settings.
