Introduction

The introduction states that the volume does not simply approach contemporary art from a non-Western standpoint. Instead, the editor proposes to critically engage with art’s contemporaneity from the perspective of what the social sciences call “modernization” – the worldwide social transformations spreading and intensifying in the aftermath of WWII. And now, after three decades of intense study of what is often regarded as the failed “socialist modernization” carried forward by the USSR (and of how, for example, artists in the Eastern Bloc or other non-aligned countries heroically resisted or even sabotaged this historical process) this volume proposes a critical re-examination of the impact of global “capitalist modernization” on art.