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With gathering force since the watershed years around 1990, the uneven and combined development characteristic of the fully fledged capitalist world system forms the political, cultural and economic horizon of our present circumstances. Increasing economic globalization has been a powerful force since at least the end of the Second World War (and arguably, for at least a century before that), but the self‐conscious theorization of living in a globalized condition is a feature of more recent years. Pioneering attempts to think through the end of the years of the post‐war settlement, and the inception of a newly ‘neo‐liberal’ world order began in the 1980s and became impossible to ignore after the end of the period of the so‐called Three Worlds around 1990. That is another way of saying that the belief that we inhabit a new kind of condition is a product of the spread of capitalist relations of production over the whole world. There is no longer any ‘Second World’ of even notionally ‘socialist’ states, and there is no ‘Third World’ either, remaining beyond the reach of the global market.

It is now widely, if not universally, accepted that cultural practices and relations – including those that we call ‘art’ – are powerfully influenced by the economic and political horizons within which they take place. This is not a statement of monocausal ‘economic determinism’; it acknowledges a complex, reciprocal process in which ideas, activities, subjective responses and physical things (in a word, the sphere of ‘representations’) are both framed by the invisible social frameworks within which they happen and, in their turn, have a bearing on the colour and temperature of those frameworks, on the shaping of what it means to live in them. There is no one‐way traffic from ‘base’ to ‘superstructure’, and there is no pristine, insulated ‘autonomy’ either; not of ‘art’ from ‘society’, and not of the ‘West’ from the ‘rest’. Neither, we believe, is anything to be gained by insistence on temporal caesuras. We live in a period in which a form of historical amnesia seems almost to be the order of the day; neophilia is structured into the system, often underwritten by an innocent‐sounding rhetoric of ‘embracing change’ and a concomitant relegation of the past as rife with ‘legacy thinking’ inappropriate to a dynamic ‘contemporaneity’. The present anthology proceeds from a different assumption, captured in the epigraph placed at the front of the book. At this historical juncture at least, it seems important to insist on the value of historical connection and continuity, even as we attend to difference and particularity.

Finally, a word on ‘globalization’ itself. The term is something of a politico‐philosophical football. In the early phase of the transition from the Cold War period of ‘Three Worlds’ to the present overtly ‘globalized’ situation, it frequently came to be used by its advocates as a synonym for the triumph of capitalism. Conversely, its use has been criticized by many who seek to challenge the sway of neoliberal capitalism for camouflaging the systemic disparities out of which the global system is constructed. Justin Rosenberg has made a useful distinction between ‘globalization theory’ on the one hand, and a ‘theory of globalization’ on the other, respectively pertaining to the first and the second of those positions. Where ‘globalization’ is employed in this book, it is the second usage we have in mind.

The facts of globalization, whether we applaud them or deplore them, whether we see them as paths to prosperity and freedom or the alibis of discrimination and inequality, cannot be wished away. Art in Theory: The West in the World sets out to address three considerations which are distinct, but which permeate the whole enterprise. First, it sets out to represent a richer sense than is normal in the literature of art of the impact of those diverse ‘facts’ of economic, political and social globalization on ‘contemporary’ art. Second, it seeks to trace the changes resulting from globalization (understood in this sense as a long‐term historical and not merely contemporary factor) across a much longer time‐span than is usual in discussions of artistic globalization, impacting significantly on much earlier art. Third, it tries to throw light – an oblique light – on a time (not so very long ago), when most of those who thought about, wrote about and indeed made ‘modern’ art, paid little or no attention to what we have now learned to call ‘the majority world’; or at least, when they did do so, conceived that world as quintessentially un‐modern. The present anthology is a symptom of the fact that that world has ended. The coeval nature of all cultures, north and south, east and west, within an overarching but structurally unequal capitalist modernity, is the intellectual, indeed moral and political ground, on which it stands.