ABSTRACT
This chapter contends Circulation's most basic questions: How can this pitfall be avoided; how people think of the history of art in a truly global perspective. The study of transnational circulations and exchanges provides a point of departure for a different global art history. In the introduction, Kaufmann, Joyeux-Prunel, and Dossin, writing together, proposes a similar formulation: their purpose, they say, is 'to write a global history of art for a globalized world' by 'following the transnational circulations of artists, artworks, and styles'. The author appreciates Kaufmann's efforts to frame a 'global art history', one that uses geographical data, not for 'final answers', but to study questions of 'cultural exchange, transfer, and assimilation'. Terminology becomes important as the focus shifts from borders and borderlands to regions. The term 'vernacular', for example, 'becomes more than simply a designation for a lesser' account of the periphery that cannot fully grasp the diffused formal and theoretical language of a center.
