Modernism forged a deep interest in the autonomy of the art object, an ideology supported by formal analysis, art history, and the market’s codification of genius. But of course art is never autonomous, and artists have ambitions: to be cosmopolitan, to be international, to be universal. In this lecture, I argue for a history from the present that invokes an anti-autonomous object related to a subject continuously in formation through the agency of art. This history unfolds through the mass cultural, somewhat abject subject of the world’s fairs, the biennials founded in distinction to those grand expositions, and artist’s strategies in response to these ›world pictures‹. The fairs and biennials systematically structured a set of imperatives to which artists adjusted. The rules of those transformations are articulated here. By introducing a set of nested concepts such as ›blind epistemology‹, ›the aesthetics of experience‹, ›predicated internationalism‹ and a working through of the strategic differences between globalization and globalism, I seek to convert the reified term ›work of art‹ from thing to process: the working of art.

Caroline A. Jones ist Professorin für Kunstgeschichte und Direktorin des Fachbereichs History, Theory, and Criticism am Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT). Ihre Forschungsschwerpunkte liegen im Bereich der modernen und zeitgenössischen Kunst, wobei ihr Fokus vor allem auf den technologischen Bedingungen der künstlerischen Produktion, Distribution und Rezeption liegt. Sie studierte Kunstgeschichte in Harvard und am Institute of Fine Arts in New York, bevor sie 1992 an der Universität Stanford promoviert wurde. Darüber hinaus war sie mehrfach als Ausstellungskuratorin und Dokumentarfilmerin tätig. Ausgewählte Publikationen: Eyesight Alone. Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (2005); Sensorium. Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art (2006; als Herausgeberin); Machine in the Studio. Constructing the Postwar American Artist (1996).